Untitled

This oil carries no title, which suits the year it was made. In 1933 Klee was a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy when the new Nazi government moved against him. He was suspended in the spring, his house in Dessau was searched, and the press attacked his work as un-German. By the end of the year he had packed up and gone back to Bern in Switzerland, the city he came from, effectively into exile. He kept working hard through all of it, turning out a flood of drawings and paintings across 1933. Untitled and unshowy, this is one of the pictures made while the ground was shifting under him, in the months before the move south.