In its playful combination of signs, symbols and organic forms floating untethered against a ground of luminous colour, <Mit dem H> marks a decisive moment in Paul Klee’s artistic development, and powerfully demonstrates the extent to which he balanced the forces of abstraction and figuration in the 1910s. Enigmatic and allusive, its kaleidoscopic visions illustrate Klee’s abiding fascination with the concepts of memory, simultaneity and creativity, and his experimental approach to exploring these themes.

Executed in 1916 on the cusp of Klee’s first flush of commercial and critical success, the heightened chromatic relationships at work in this crystalline watercolour owe much to a trip to Tunisia undertaken two years earlier with fellow-artists August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Much mythologised as the awakening of his sensitivity to colour and realisation of himself as a painter, the trip had a profound impact; Klee’s diary records his impressions, noting immediately the ‘dark power’ of the sun and ‘colourful claritys ’ of the North African light (Felix Klee (ed.), The Diaries of Paul Klee, Berkeley, 1964, p. 286). Influenced too by Kandinsky’s commitment to colour and the development of an abstract visual language (fig. 1), Klee blended elements of Robert Delaunay’s Orphism (fig. 2) and Cubism’s rigid structures as he made his first, confident moves towards abstraction on this trip. Rapidly intensifying his use of colour and stripping away representational elements, he explored ways of, in his own words, ‘synthesising’ urban and pictorial architecture.

The Tunisian watercolours employ the same dusty diffusion of pinks and bold patches of colour that are used so confidently in <Mit dem H>. Indeed, the rhythm of intersecting rooftops, fields and looming mountains that are more immediately recognisable in the earlier works can be traced here too. For years after this influential trip, Klee would return to these Tunisian motifs and memories, employing an increasingly complex system of signs to encode these recollects ions and sensations (fig. 3). Although the star and moon motifs recur frequently in Klee’s symbology, their prominent inclusion in the present work alongside certain Arabic architectural elements recalls the ancient doors of the Medina, decorated with their studded symbols, and the minarets standing out against the sky. Perhaps the prominent ‘H’ is even a shorthand symbol for Hammamet (a small town northwest of Tunis that Klee visited in April 1914), designed to conjure certain sensations related to this trip.

However, as with so much of Klee’s work, the allusions here are multiple and not designed to be reduced to one simplistic reading. Significantly, in 1916 Klee was absorbed in a series of what he termed ‘watercoloured writings’ in response to Hans Heilmann’s 1905 translation of Wang Seng Yu’s poetry. Tantalisingly, a melancholic moon features prominently in these poems as a surrogate for the poet’s own feelings of alienation, although Klee would no doubt have been equally taken with Heilmann’s preface lamenting ‘the utter failure of the translations to approach the beautiful multivalence of the Chinese character, which is […] drawing and writing at once’ (Annie Bourneuf, Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible, Chicago, 2015, p. 165). In <Mit dem H> Klee was looking for ways to combine elements of a narrative into a single image, translating the essentially temporal element of reading into a spatial one.

By 1916 Klee’s work had begun to reflect an ‘inner distancing from the real world’ as letters and texts increasingly ‘form the graphic framework and become a means of artistic expression’ (Michael Baumgarter & Christine Hopfengart, Paul Klee: Life and Work, Stuttgart, 2012, p. 112). The mysterious spaces populated by an array of celestial bodies and organic forms that would earn Klee an invitation to the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925 and would so influence Miró’s pictorial language (fig. 3) seem, at first glance, completely divorced from the brutal realities of the war raging across Europe. And yet, looking again, the sweeping triangular forms projected from the top edge of the work take on the appearance of searchlights carving through the night sky, perhaps in an oblique reference to the artist’s service on German airbases after his conscription in March 1916. While Klee himself was spared the horrors of the front line – and indeed was able to continue to paint, exhibit and even sell his work without significant interruption during these years – its presence was keenly felt, especially after the deaths of his close friends August Macke and Franz Marc. In <Mit dem H>, the juxtaposition of tightly concentrated and agitated cross-hatchings against the longer, more lyrical lines of the fragile bodies and plant forms creates a powerful visual sense of the destructive forces unleashed in the world – and of the resilience of beauty, creativity and new growth that persists in the face of it all.