Blue Night
This conversation is connected to Blue Night.
Klee painted Blue Night in 1937, the year 102 of his works were seized from German museums as degenerate art. Angular shapes — triangles, half-circles, arcs — are outlined in thick black lines against overlapping fields of blue, from deep teal to pale lavender to white. It reads as architecture, a cluster of rooftops or tents seen from above, reduced to geometry. Klee had left Germany for his native Switzerland in 1933 after being dismissed from his teaching position at the Düsseldorf Academy. By 1937 he was already ill with the scleroderma that would kill him three years later.