Harbour with sailing ships 1937

Curator: We're now looking at Paul Klee's "Harbour with sailing ships," created in 1937 and held at the Centre Pompidou here in Paris. The work combines watercolor and what appears to be colored pencil. Editor: It strikes me as remarkably quiet, almost dreamlike. The soft washes of color, primarily purples and blues, give it a serene, ethereal quality. I notice right away the texture created by the watercolors on what appears to be perhaps a coarser paper. Curator: Precisely. Klee often used materials that would add texture and depth to his work. Notice how the sailboat forms are simplified, almost abstracted. Those triangles and lines aren’t simply boats; they become archetypal representations of maritime activity. He's reaching back to an ancient iconography. Editor: It makes me wonder about his choice to use watercolor and colored pencil here. Watercolor, especially, feels very immediate, tied to the moment, a transportable medium well suited to sketches made perhaps *en plein air*. What kind of paper do you think it is? You can almost see the individual fibers. Curator: He's conjuring a very deep and ancient yearning for the sea through those boat shapes. Consider the triangular sail – it is also reminiscent of certain early alphabets and hieroglyphs. In Klee, geometry becomes language. It is not just about ships. He wants to convey their symbolic weight through history and memory. Editor: Yes, and the way the lines, seemingly drawn with colored pencil, sit on the surface of the washes makes me curious. Are they integrated with the painting process, or added afterwards? Is Klee making use of industrial pigments, perhaps easily sourced at the time, or deliberately invoking older handmade materials to signal a tie to craft? Curator: His visual vocabulary, always distinctive, is pushing towards symbolic form and even rudimentary writing. You get a sense that the sea and harbor are merely starting points for something deeply internalized and personal in 1937, when world events weighed so heavily. The harbor isn’t simply a location but a state of mind, maybe even escape. Editor: Ultimately, the materials here tell a layered story. Klee merges accessibility with the evocation of deep symbolism, and his approach to materials and abstraction, even with such basic materials as watercolor, are anything but simple. Thanks. Curator: A harbor as a starting point, then. Food for thought, indeed.