Paul Klee and the Journey to Tunisia

Paul Klee

Stories

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Paul Klee and the Journey to Tunisia

This is the story of the journey in which Paul Klee travelled to know the Arab culture of the Mediterranean, and ended up discovering color. And when he discovered color, he discovered himself as an artist.

He travelled to Tunisia in 1914 with his friends and painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. The trip lasted just 14 days. Yes, it was a short trip, but it is considered a crucial event in the development of modern art.

As we said, it is the journey in which Paul Klee “discovered” color. Klee was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, since he was part of the beginnings of abstraction, he was a professor at the Bauhaus and one of the most interesting theorists of his time (Characteristics that he shared with Kandinsky).

The light of the place fascinated him. The intense light, the light of the Mediterranean. And under it, Klee found new color harmonies.

He worked with a new technique: he painted with watercolors, with soft, pale colors, painted squares of color next to each other, sometimes overlapping them in part. His travel companion August Macke, had already been painting with small areas or “patches” of contrasting color, which make up the scene generating luminosity and movement, life.

And in that kind of cubism with colors that generate luminosity and movement, we also find the influence of Robert Delaunay, another of the fathers of total abstraction and founder of Orphism.

This is what Paul Klee wrote in his travel diary, which includes one of his best-known phrases: “I interrupt work. A sense of well-being penetrates me, I feel safe, I do not feel tired. Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

Image: Red and Yellow Houses in Tunis (1914). Paul Klee.

Recommended links:

Paul Klee and the Essence.

Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible.”

The Bauhaus.

Orphism.

Kandinsky and the Abstraction.

Kandinsky at the Bauhaus.

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