别墅R

Klee made this small panel in 1919, the year after he came home from the German army, where he had spent the war painting aircraft and doing clerical work well behind the front. Germany was in upheaval, but the picture he built is a calm toy landscape: a white villa on a red road winding up into hills, a yellow moon overhead, and a large green letter R sitting in the foreground as if it were part of the scenery. The R is usually read as Rosa, after a Villa Rosa he had seen years earlier on a trip through Italy with Goethe's travel diary in hand. Two years later he would join the new Bauhaus school at Weimar to teach. He painted it on a piece of cardboard barely bigger than a sheet of paper.