Small Picture of Fir Trees

Klee painted this in 1922 on a piece of nettle-cloth, a coarse cheap fabric rather than fine canvas, then mounted it on cardboard. The small size and the humble support already tell you it began as a private experiment. The subject is simple: fir trees, reduced to little stacked triangles set in loose rows across the surface. What interests him is rhythm, the way a repeated shape turns a row of trees into something closer to a pattern or a bar of music, an idea he returned to again and again in these years. The colours are muted and earthy, and the trees seem to march sideways rather than stand in a landscape.