Polyphony

Klee grew up among musicians and played the violin well enough to have turned professional. In 1932, teaching at the academy in Düsseldorf, he set out to do on a flat surface what a Bach fugue does over time. Polyphony in music means several independent melodies sounding at once, and he built the picture in two layers to match. Underneath sit broad fields of red, orange, yellow and black, laid down like slow bass chords. Over them he stippled hundreds of small coloured dots, each holding its own against the field beneath, the way a countermelody holds against the bass. A few loose linear signs drift across the middle. He worked it in tempera on linen, and it hangs today in the Kunstmuseum Basel.