Paul Klee - Untitled(Composition with Fruits), around 1940

Zentrum Paul Klee EN

This large-format drawing on packing paper is one of the last works that Paul Klee produced. Klee’s health deteriorated in early 1940. In May he went for a spa cure in Ascona, from which he did not return. Some of his works remained incomplete, or at least untitled and unnumbered, in his studio. The work posthumously entitled «Composition with Fruits» is one of these. With brush and a mixture of pigment and glue Klee draws a chaotic collection of shapes that look like fruits – apples, cherries – and also leaves, twigs, plants or seeds. At the bottom and both the left and right edges of the picture the shapes are outlined in white chalk. Below this there is a structure of lines in reddish-brown, which holds the whole composition together. And below that we see a further level with a confusion of lines. Klee had been interested in creating a composition by overlaying several different strata since the 1920s. This gives his works a complexity in spite of the simplicity of their choice of motifs, and at the same time Klee was able to combine the representational with the abstract, the linear with the planar, drawing and painting. At the end of his life Klee turned to themes of nature, which he related to his life: origin and birth, growth and change, maturity and death. The fruits and plants depicted here embody these ideas. They are signs of nature’s apparently eternal cycle of evolution and decay. In view of his illness, and perhaps his approaching death, Klee recalls his childhood and his life and already looks forward to the afterlife. In the top middle of the picture Klee writes in pencil: «Should all then be known? oh, I don’t think so!» At the end of his life Klee reached the conclusion that the first and last questions of existence with which he had engaged so often could be left unanswered.