Collection

In April 1914 Paul Klee and his two artist-friends, August Macke and Louis Moilliet, journeyed to Tunis. After a three-day stay there, they visited Carthage, Hammamet and finally Kairouan. »vor den Toren v. Kairuan«, 1914, 216 [Before the gates of Kairouan] is one of the last watercolours he painted on this trip, creating works which he imbued with a sense of oriental colour, the North African landscape and the quite different light. »The original rendition of nature«, an epithet that Klee added to the title after his arrival, came into being on 16 April, the portentous day he acknowledged in a key experience that he finally was an artist: »I have stopped working. A deep calm runs through me, I sense it and feel very sure, effortlessly. Colour possesses me. I no longer need to pursue it. It will possess me forever, I know. This is the revelation of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter«.

The arrangement of the landscape into fields and the architectural elements of the town form the skeletal structure of the painting. The vertical white strips left and right are left by the elastic bands that were holding the paper to his paint box. The seemingly haphazard vertical partitioning is actually a conscious compositional element introduced by the artist. The vertical blank strips could be buildings in the foreground; they lend the picture a sense of three-dimensionality. The colours appear light and transparent. Two camels, a donkey and some domes help the eye to distinguish the patches of colour in the landscape, the view of the city and the sky. Essentially, the four main colours making up the larger and smaller patches are blue, lilac, ochre and brown, and they are largely still used in a representational manner.

This is no longer the case with the works that emerged immediately after the trip, such as »(im Stil v Kairouan, ins gemässigte übertragen)«, 1914, 210 [(In the Kairouan-style, transposed in a moderate way)]: here, colour is colour and shape is shape. The name of the Tunisian town even becomes the description of a style. In these works, it follows that the artist is no longer conducting pure nature study, but – simply by manipulating the pictorial medium – has moved into abstraction.

See also: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Kindermuseum Creaviva, »Didactic Modules«, 2005.