Leggenda della palude

Klee painted this small, murky picture in 1919, the year Munich, where he was living, lurched through a short-lived revolutionary government and its violent collapse. Out of a brownish, swampy ground he lets shapes half-emerge, letters, a moon, a little architecture, the way things loom up out of a dream. It reads like a fairy tale you can't quite reconstruct. Two decades later that dreamlike quality made it a target. In 1937 the Nazis pulled it from a German museum as so-called degenerate art, though it had only been there on loan from a collector, Sophie Lissitzky-Kuppers, who lost it for good. Her heirs argued over it with the city of Munich into the 21st century. Today the museum keeps the work, but its labels now spell out her name and how it was taken.