Town with the Three Domes

In the spring of 1914 Klee spent about two weeks travelling down the coast of Tunisia with two painter friends, August Macke and Louis Moilliet, carrying small watercolour boxes and blocks of paper. The whitewashed towns there, with their low mosque cupolas rising over flat roofs, gave him something he had been circling for years. Here the three domes are barely drawn. They sit as pale rounded shapes among rectangles of rose, ochre and blue, the whole town loosened into a grid of transparent colour that the sun seems to pass straight through. He worked in watercolour partly because it was portable, and partly because it let the light of the paper come up through the paint.