Motif from Hammamet

Munich

Paul Klee

Motif from Hammamet

1914

Watercolor and pencil on paper, mounted on cardboard, 20.3 × 15.7 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, Basel

Squares and strips of watercolor stack up into a grid of color, titled after Hammamet in Tunisia. It comes from the same journey as Macke's market scene.

  • The mount is inscribed with the title and date; the signature sits on the sheet itself, lower left.
  • Look for the rows of small dots, which may suggest plants or trees inside the grid.
  • Thin washes sit side by side and overlap, letting the grain of the paper show through.
  • The landscape turns into a grid of colored blocks, close to abstraction yet still tied to a real place by its title.
  • The Basel collector Richard Doetsch-Benziger owned it from at least 1933 and left it to the museum in 1960.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art

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