Paul Klee

It’s hard to believe, but Paul Klee marked this large-format painting on the reverse with the words "sketch for Rusting ships". By a total of five other paintings alongside Rusting ships from around 1938 Klee wrote in his oeuvre catalogue "to be seen as a sketch". They are all works which Klee painted with coloured paste on paper or newsprint which was then stuck to jute. In Rusting ships the newsprint is still visible in places. Klee probably still lacked confidence with this new technique, and didn’t know how long it would last, so for safety’s sake he described the works as sketches.

Here Klee depicts a harbour scene with a handful of steamships. They are not filigree sailing boats of the kind that he painted regularly ten years before, usually drawing them with a few delicate lines. At that time it was the boats that he saw on his travels to Egypt, Sicily, Elba, Corsica or the island of Porquerolles on the French Mediterranean coast. In this picture, in fact, they are the ships that he observed in Genoa harbour, for example, and which he described as "gigantic ships". In his diary he recorded as early as 1901:

"Then there is the magnificent sight of the greatest variety of ships, from giants to small petrol steamers, coming and going, it’s indescribable."

Where he drew the sailing boats in rhythmical lines and planes with the sound of music in his ears, the rusting ships are massive volumes. They are edged with thick black brushstrokes. Details such as portholes and funnels are only developed in abbreviated form. The ships are marked with numbers and letters. The number "112" might perhaps be a reference to the German Wehrmacht’s torpedo boat Tiger, with the construction number 112, which was completed in 1928. The area of the largest ship intersects with the lines of the harbour. There some stick figures and geometrical line formations describe the hubbub of a harbour, which Klee mentioned several times in his diaries and letters:

"Between railway cars and threatening steam cranes, barrels, boxes, workers, customs officials in uniform, gawkers and other people you walk out onto the sturdily built jetties situated in a central direction on the giant semicircle of the harbour, climbing over ropes and ducking away from the busy arms of the cranes, constantly trying to escape the people who hire boats and who want to take you through the whole harbour complex so that you see the sea and – at present – the American warships, the lighthouses and the great open sea."

In colour terms, he concentrates on the rust of the title and the contrast with the blue of the water.