A Page from the Book of Towns 1928

Paul Klee made this painting, ‘A Page from the Book of Towns’ in 1928. It is, to me, like a little poem, made with coloured inks and a fine brush. I can just imagine Klee carefully plotting out each little form, one by one, until a whole city appears, or a whole page from an illuminated manuscript. I feel that Klee is thinking about the architecture of language. The buildings are like glyphs, pictograms, maybe even letters of an alphabet. They are arranged in horizontal lines like stanzas on a page. And I love how the townscape is delineated into neat blocks, like the layout of text on a page. And what about that sun, sitting at the top? A perfect disc of bronzey gold, like a full stop, or a punctuation mark, indicating the end of a sentence? So many possibilities, so much room for our own imagination. And that, for me, is the magic of Klee.