On a Motif from Hammamet

Klee almost never worked in oil. He was a watercolour and drawing man who painted small on paper, so this little oil on cardboard, barely the size of a page, is the unusual thing about it. He made it in 1914 from a motif he had carried home from Hammamet on the Tunisian coast rather than in front of the town itself. Back at the desk, away from the light, the place has hardened into a grid of coloured rectangles, warm reds and ochres stacked against cooler bands, the buildings now closer to signs than to houses. A Basel collector, Richard Doetsch-Benziger, gave the picture to the museum here in 1951.