Under a Black Star

This small sheet, barely wider than a hand, was painted in 1918, while Klee was still a soldier. He spent much of the First World War in a Bavarian air unit far behind the front, doing clerical work at a flying school and painting in whatever hours he could steal. These were the years his art finally settled into its own language, and here you can watch it forming: a shifting field of watercolour cells, letters and small signs, with a single dark star set above them. He built the ground first from plaster and gauze, then let thin colour soak in, so the paper itself seems to glow from behind. By the time the war ended that autumn, work like this had made him, at last, a painter people wanted to buy.