Rich Harbor (A picture of a journey)

In his last years Klee's pictures filled up with thick black marks that look like a private alphabet, and Rich Harbor, painted in 1938, is written almost entirely in them. The subtitle calls it a picture of a journey. Across a long horizontal panel he lays down bold black signs, hooks, bars, little boat and fish shapes, over patches of colour, so a busy port reads as a row of symbols rather than a view you could stand in. The forms are simpler and heavier than the delicate grids he made a decade earlier, and the black does most of the talking. He gave it a long, narrow shape, almost three times wider than it is tall, so the eye has to travel along the harbour from one end to the other.