Rich Harbor 1938

Paul Klee’s "Rich Harbor" presents a lively scene, teeming with pictographic forms that stir deep within our collective memory. Here, rudimentary shapes like triangles, circles, and rectangles jostle amidst symbols resembling trees and human figures, evoking the ancient world of hieroglyphs. Consider the spade symbol: rooted in the earth, it is reminiscent of fertility rites and agrarian societies, yet it also prefigures the suits of our playing cards, emblems of chance and fate. These images touch upon universal human experiences. We see an echo of childhood drawings; of attempts to capture the world in the simplest terms. Klee taps into something primal, a shared repository of symbols that transcend time. In this harbor scene, a sense of both beginning and end is suggested through the juxtaposition of shapes, the psychological weight of form, and the subconscious expression of the image's emotional power.