With an umbrella

1939 was the busiest year of Klee's life. In that single year, already gravely ill, he recorded more than 1,200 new works, drawing and painting almost faster than he could number them. Most, like this one, are small and pared down to a few strokes: a figure reduced to a handful of black lines, with the plain sign of an umbrella above it. The shorthand was deliberate. In his last years Klee stripped his pictures back to a kind of picture-writing, thick dark marks that read almost like letters. This is watercolour on paper, made the year the Second World War began, one small sheet among the hundreds he turned out that year.