Old Town (Overview)

Klee had a whole run of pictures in the 1920s where a town becomes a mosaic. Old Town, from 1928, is one of them. Seen as if from above, an old quarter of tight houses and streets breaks into small squares and rectangles of watercolour, warm reds and browns knocked back with greys, so the roofs and walls dissolve into a patchwork you read as a place before you read it as paint. The subtitle, Overview, is doing real work here. Instead of standing in a street he floats above the whole cluster and lets the grid of blocks stand in for the crowding of an old European city centre, where buildings share walls and lean on one another. He built these town pictures square by square, almost the way the towns themselves were built.