Terraced Garden

By 1920 Klee had spent years as a little-known draughtsman, and then a single show changed that. That summer a Munich dealer, Hans Goltz, hung more than 300 of his works, and almost overnight collectors and critics decided he mattered. Terraced Garden dates from that year. Klee takes an ordinary hillside garden, the kind cut into steps to hold the soil on a slope, and rebuilds it as bands of colour laid one above another, so the whole plot reads at once like a planted slope and like a stack of coloured tiles. Small trees and plant shapes sit in the layers. He was fascinated by how a picture could be built in horizontal registers, the way a plot of land or a piece of music is, and here the garden gives him the excuse.