Paul Klee’s strata and the transition to complexity
It does not take much intuition or imagination to relate Paul Klee’s “Monument in Fertile Country” (1929), to an aerial photograph. As the painting comes from a period right after the artist’s trip to Egypt in the winter of 1928 – 1929, it does not take much research either to find a location bearing from above a striking resemblance to Klee’s painting: almost any area around the Nile displays the same interplay between dark fertile plots and bright, blank blocks of desert lands. Yet the “Monument” is only an example of a more general idea with which the artist experimented at that time and, though simple, is purely mathematical at its core. Beyond the immediately obvious, what is clearly different in the two pictures after only a little inspection is that Klee’s “Monument” is not a nearly random arrangement of colored stripes and blocks but rather a careful composition of mathematical nature. And just as the same abstract mathematical law can often be applied in a variety of different situations, Klee extends the same abstract idea in a series of similar paintings beyond the aerial view explanation, providing new imaginative ways of interpreting the colored blocks pattern.
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