Klee (P. Klee) - Rhythm 69.5×50.5 cm, 1930 Centre Pompidou Collection

Klee (P. Klee, 1879–1940), a Swiss painter and musician (violinist), created an amiable and dreamlike world in his musically gifted paintings. His early works displayed symbolic colors, but later he altered his humorous brushwork, imbuing it with a keen spiritual color, making it more intense and powerful, more pure and perfect.

Is Rhythm a fantasy of a chessboard or a musical fugue? Within this simple, ochre-based rectangle, irregular squares are contrasted repeatedly on unequal grids within a sensitive (non-color) black, white, and gray structure, much like the rhythm of an improvised musical piece being played over and over.

Klee wrote: "We are not concerned with form, but with its function," and "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible."