Paul Klee’s Tunisian Epiphany: The Journey Behind ‘Red and White Domes’
For Paul Klee, 1914 was a watershed. Up to this point the Swiss‑German artist, who had trained as a violinist before studying painting in Munich, was known for his witty pen‑and‑ink drawings and symbolist experiments with Der Blaue Reiter. Although he had dabbled in watercolours, his palette remained muted and he often kept recognisable motifs anchored in line. His son Felix had been born in 1907 and Klee's pre‑war work often celebrated child‑like fantasy more than pure abstraction.
In April 1914 Klee joined his friends August Macke and Louis Moilliet on a two‑week study trip to Tunisia. The three had planned the journey for a year and set off from Marseilles loaded with watercolours, pens and sketchbooks, describing it as a Studienreise — a working holiday — rather than time off. Macke and Moilliet were fellow members of Der Blaue Reiter and, like Klee, were searching for new sources of light and colour; they hoped that the Mediterranean sun would inspire them. The trip was cut short by the looming war, but their intense itinerary took them through Tunis, the coastal suburb of Ezzahra, Hammamet and the holy city of Kairouan.
Klee painted whenever possible, filling more than forty watercolours and dozens of drawings. The experience was decisive. In his diary, he recorded the moment of transformation with characteristic directness:
Colour possesses me. I do not have to pursue it; it will possess me always… I am a painter.
The work produced in Tunisia marks a decisive break with Klee's earlier style. He began to organise architecture and landscape into translucent grids of interlocking colour, using washes to dissolve form into glowing modules. Red and White Domes (Rote und weisse Kuppeln) is a canonical example: the domed roofs that inspired him are reduced to a few arch outlines floating above a mosaic of crimson, ochre and violet blocks. The painting demonstrates how Klee transformed the light of North Africa into a new pictorial language, one that would underpin his later Bauhaus teaching.
In subsequent decades Klee continued to mine his Tunisian sketchbooks, producing works such as Temple Gardens (1920) and Hammamet with Mosque that echo his experiences under the Tunisian sun. For collectors today the appeal of Red and White Domes lies not only in its jewel‑like beauty but in its back‑story: it represents the moment Klee realised that colour could be autonomous, and in that realisation modern painting found a new direction.
Shop this poster: Paul Klee — Red and White Domes, 1914 — from £24.99