Highway and byways 1929

Paul Klee, who lived from 1879 to 1940, made this painting, Highway and Byways, with oil and ink. It’s got these gentle blues and oranges laid down in horizontal registers. What a beautiful exercise in world-making. You can imagine Klee, armed with tiny brushes and pots of pigment, building this landscape one careful stroke at a time. It feels like a meditation on the way roads stitch through the landscape. I mean, each line a little decision, an iteration, almost like a musical score. You see the colors shift like chords? I think that this piece links to Klee’s earlier, more geometric abstractions, but there's also an openness here—a push-pull between order and chaos that I totally identify with. It is not unlike Agnes Martin’s grids. These artists leave the door open to our interpretations. A painting is never truly finished, is it?