Ad Marginem

A red centre and a living edge

A red disc catches the eye first. Around it, the pale green-grey field seems comparatively open. Then the edges of Paul Klee’s Ad marginem begin to demand attention: thin stems, small creature-like shapes, dark marks that resemble letters, an inverted bird-like form and patches of colour that draw the centre towards the border. What at first looks like a picture of a red sun surrounded by nature becomes harder to name. The red form might suggest a sun or planet, but neither identification is written into the museum’s object record. The marginal forms repeatedly slip between drawing, writing and imagined life.^[1][2]

Klee made the work in 1930 and reworked it in 1935–36. That second phase is not a later curator’s speculative date. The Kunstmuseum Basel reports an inscription on the back in Klee’s hand recording the reworking. The two dates make the picture a particularly revealing example of his willingness to return to a work, while leaving a central technical question unanswered: the published record does not say which visible passages he changed in the mid-1930s.^[1]

Explore the details of Ad marginem

Select a numbered area to examine its detail at high resolution.

1 2 3 4 5

1

Red disc and surrounding wash

2

Marks along the upper edge

3

Signs at the left margin

4

Fine lines at the right margin

5

Figures and signs along the base

Contents

1. What is Ad marginem?
2. Why does the title send us to the margin?
3. How the red disc changes the rest of the picture
4. Follow the four edges
5. Are the marks a text we can read?
6. What do Klee’s dates add to the interpretation?
7. From Klee’s studio to Kunstmuseum Basel
8. Looking again

What is Ad marginem?

The Kunstmuseum Basel identifies the picture as Ad marginem, Klee’s work 1930, 210 (E 10), now its inventory G 1960.32. The annual number belongs to Klee’s system of cataloguing his own production; the museum number belongs to Basel’s collection. Its published bibliography identifies the printed Catalogue raisonné Paul Klee, volume 5, entry 5328, pages 506–07. That printed entry has not been directly examined for this page, so the owner museum’s present record is the authority for the details given here.^[1]

Basel describes watercolour and pen on a lacquer ground on cardboard, nailed to a stretcher, with a white ground and paint traces on the reverse; the stretcher is covered with gauze. This is a small, materially complex object, measuring 43.5 × 33 cm according to the current collection record. It is not an oil painting, nor simply a loose watercolour sheet. The prepared ground, rigid cardboard and stretcher affect what the work physically is, even when a reproduction shows only its front. A Berlin museum creditline from 2008 gives 46 × 36 cm. The published sources do not explain whether the older figure measures a different component or reflects another convention, so Basel’s current work dimensions are followed without pretending the difference has been solved.^[1][3]

The museum transcribes Klee’s signature at upper right. It also records two inscriptions on the back: 1930 E. 10. "ad marginem" on the upper stretcher and überarbeitet 1935/36 K at upper right. The German überarbeitet means “reworked.” The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art’s bilingual 2025 exhibition checklist uses “retouched” for the second campaign. That translation should not be mistaken for a conservator’s restoration. It refers to Klee’s own later work on the picture.^[1][4]

The reverse paint traces and the two dates are inviting clues, but they do not reveal a layer-by-layer history. A photograph of the front cannot establish whether the red disc, a particular letter, the soft background or a marginal form was made in 1930 or revised five or six years later. Such a reconstruction would require technical evidence that the accessible collection entry does not provide. The right historical description is therefore unusually precise about the existence of reworking and deliberately limited about its appearance.^[1]

Why does the title send us to the margin?

The Latin ad marginem can be read as “towards the margin” or “to the edge.” The direction matters more than a neat English substitute. The central disc can hold the viewer’s attention, but the title asks that attention to travel outward. At the border, the coloured band and its tiny occupants become the subject of looking rather than decoration around a supposedly finished central scene.^[1][5]

French scholar Florence Rougerie uses the title as the starting point of an essay about writing and painting in Klee. Her argument is that the edge is a meeting place for several kinds of mark: the real boundary of a picture, the internal painted border, letter-like signs within the image and the title outside it. These do different jobs. The title can direct the viewer; a letter drawn in the picture can be seen as both a graphic shape and a possible unit of language; a botanical-looking line can be read without becoming a letter at all. Rougerie studies a wider group of Klee works, so her essay is a way to sharpen questions about this one, not proof that every little mark has a fixed translation.^[5]

The picture does not set one compulsory route. A viewer may start with the red centre and move outward, as the title suggests. Another may follow a dark shape around the rim and return to the disc only after circling the image. Both paths make the composition work differently. The unusually active border also complicates a familiar expectation that a frame is a passive line separating a painting from its surroundings. Here Klee puts a second, soft and uneven border inside the depicted area; the small forms seem to sprout from it, cross it or sit partly within it.^[2][5][6]

German researcher Andrea Dexheimer calls this an inner framing. She observes that the brownish-red edge zone is itself a painted space, irregular in width, and that its boundary towards the pale middle is less definite than the outer edge of the object. Her reading is useful because it attends to an actual formal feature: one can follow the transition from the darkened edge to individual stems and see how a border becomes part of the scene. Her larger philosophical account of boundlessness, freedom and political resistance is an interpretation. The object and its title alone do not document such a programme from Klee.^[6]

How the red disc changes the rest of the picture

The central red shape looks round, warm and concentrated against the cool, thinly varied field. It is not precisely centred in the rectangle. A surrounding glow or wash blurs the point where disc, atmosphere and background separate. The red draws the eye inward, but small reddish accents nearer the edge prevent it from owning the colour entirely. In the high-resolution image, the apparently quiet middle is mottled; looking closely reveals irregular variation rather than a blank, uniformly painted void.^[1][2]

It is understandable to call the form a sun. Christina Thomson, quoted in Basel’s catalogue record from the 2008 Berlin exhibition publication, offers a strong cosmic reading in which the red centre gives life to the peripheral world. Marcel Franciscono, also quoted by Basel, connects the tiny forms with a smouldering red source but is more guarded about whether the image divides a metaphysical world from an earthly one. These are different scholarly accounts of the same visible relationship. Neither turns “sun,” “planet” or a theory of creation into an authenticated title or statement of the artist’s intention.^[1]

The disc is also not the only circular or rounded event. Small red buds, dots and flower-like tops pick up its colour in other places. Dexheimer follows such repeated points through the lower-right and upper margins. Her detailed account can lead a viewer back and forth between a small red accent and the dominant disc; it is less secure when it converts each repetition into a precise system of forces. We can observe a visual rhyme without assigning a fixed physical law to it.^[2][6]

The pale field makes the margin appear lively partly through contrast. A thin branching shape is more conspicuous when it projects into open space than when it lies inside the crowded edge band. Some forms sit like silhouettes on the ground, while others seem to rise out of it. That ambiguity makes it difficult to divide the picture into a flat decorative border and a deep central landscape. The disc can look distant, close, floating or suspended depending on which marginal form the eye has just followed. These are effects of looking, not measurements of depicted distance.^[2][6]

Follow the four edges

At the upper edge, small sprigs and curved lines interrupt the darkened band. One form can be seen as a bird viewed upside down in the museum’s normal orientation. The shape is not an instruction to hang the whole picture the other way up. It makes orientation unstable locally: a bird can appear inverted while other signs remain legible with the work upright. Dexheimer points to that tension, and Claude Cernuschi explores it by deliberately reproducing the image inverted in one figure of his 2012 chapter. His inversion is part of an argument about reading, not a correction of Basel’s orientation.^[1][2][6][7]

At the left edge, marks move between thin plant-like lines, a small body-like form and a lower-case letter. The shapes are connected to the border, yet they also reach into the central field. Dexheimer sees an almost gesturing creature in the lower left. That is a productive description if kept as a visual possibility: outlines here do not give us a named species or a firm narrative action. The detail rewards looking in both directions, from edge towards centre and from red disc back to the dense left side.^[2][6]

At the right edge, angled and branching forms overlap. Some resemble stems with buds; others feel closer to diagrammatic signs. Their thin dark outlines can make them read as separate little things, but the ground colours pass behind and through the group. The edge is therefore not a row of isolated objects like specimens in a case. It is a zone where figures appear, merge and disappear as the eye changes scale.^[2][6]

Along the lower edge, small signs and rounded or insect-like figures gather around a darker pointed interruption rising into the interior. One mark resembles a lower-case u. The pointed feature might appear like a split, a thorn or an opening, but its exact identity is uncertain. The red disc above can make it seem to pull these things upward; a viewer starting at the base may instead see the shapes growing into an open field. The high-resolution detail images below allow each part to be inspected without rotating the main reproduction or changing the painting’s documented orientation.^[1][2][6]

These are deliberately cautious names for the forms. Calling every shape a plant understates the letter-like marks; calling every mark a symbol overstates their legibility. A careful visual inventory can describe an inverted bird-like figure, stems, a rounded red form and scattered letters while keeping open the ways in which Klee makes one category resemble another.^[2][5][6][7]

Are the marks a text we can read?

Art historian Louis Marin gives a particularly close answer. In an essay first published in French in 1988 and read here in its published Italian translation, he describes small signs at the top, left, right and bottom as resembling v, r, l and u. He tests what happens if a viewer imagines turning the picture. A bird-like shape may become easier to recognise, while some letters lose their ordinary orientation. Marin tries possible sound and word relations, but his thought experiment does not establish a complete sentence hidden in the painting. The value of the exercise is that it makes us notice how differently images and letters behave when turned.^[8]

Cernuschi also identifies the marginal letters and compares the image with a map: a map combines terrain, drawn forms and text labels, and a reader may change viewpoint to use it. This is a conceptual analogy, not evidence that Klee copied a particular map. Cernuschi’s deliberately inverted reproduction lets the viewer test the problem rather than merely hear it described. Some natural-looking marks still suggest creatures or plants, but familiar letters no longer hold their reading as securely. The difference makes the act of reading itself visible.^[7]

Rougerie widens the question. In Klee’s pictures, a written sign may look like drawing and a drawn sign may tempt us to pronounce it. The title can seem to promise a key, yet it may instead bring the gap between seeing and reading into focus. This matters here because the letters do not line up like an ordinary sentence, and the peripheral forms provide no agreed reading order. Even the identification of particular letter shapes differs among scholars when they describe crowded passages. It is more accurate to say that Ad marginem stages a possible encounter with language than that it transmits a decoded message.^[5][7][8]

The distinction is not pedantry. Once the forms become a supposed cipher, looking can stop: the painting is treated as a puzzle whose solution replaces its surface. But the surface keeps resisting any final transcription. Soft washes cross behind crisp lines; one small outline begins as a sign and ends as a stalk; the large red form seems simple until its edge dissolves into surrounding colour. The image remains a painting even where it borrows the visual habits of writing.^[2][5][7][8]

What do Klee’s dates add to the interpretation?

Klee first made the work in 1930, towards the end of his Bauhaus teaching years. His later inscription records that he reworked it in 1935–36, after the Nazi seizure of power and his return to Switzerland. These dates provide real historical context, but the accessible object record does not say whether a particular feature responds to exile, illness or a personal experience. It would be especially risky to assign a sombre meaning to a mark assumed to be late when the published evidence cannot place that mark in the later campaign.^[1][9]

The two dates are interesting even without such a story. A picture whose title sends us to a margin was itself reconsidered after several years. Klee kept the 1930 catalogue identity and made a later addition to its material history. The work therefore joins at least two moments of artistic decision; the image we see now should not be treated as a transparent snapshot of a single day in 1930. That does not allow us to divide its present surface into an original “hopeful” layer and a later “melancholy” layer. No such division is documented in the owner’s published record.^[1]

Klee’s teaching, drawing and colour experiments are part of the painting’s historical setting, as is his later return to Bern. The object sources do not connect a particular shape in Ad marginem to Cubism, Surrealism or a documented lecture. The painting’s formal and material evidence is a firmer basis for understanding it than a broad movement label.^[1][9]

From Klee’s studio to Kunstmuseum Basel

Basel publishes a clear provenance sequence. Klee kept the work from 1930 to 1937. Richard Doetsch-Benziger of Basel bought it from the artist in 1937 and owned it until his death in 1958. It remained in his estate until 1960, when the Kunstmuseum Basel received it as his bequest. This is more specific than saying vaguely that the work “later entered Basel,” and it matters that its first documented transfer happened after Klee’s own reworking.^[1]

The museum’s bibliography lists the work in a 1941 Basel memorial exhibition, a 1945–46 London National Gallery exhibition and later Basel and international catalogues. Those listings show that the object had a public history during and after Doetsch-Benziger’s ownership; they do not tell us exactly what each curator said about its date or signs. The 2008 Berlin loan record and 2025 Hyogo checklist provide independently accessible later exhibition anchors. Hyogo’s entry retains the 1935–36 qualification in a bilingual caption, showing that the double date continues to matter in its present public presentation.^[1][3][4]

The image itself has circulated in reproductions, and reproduction can alter the way its margins are read. The correct Basel front view is vertical, with the red disc above the centre and the inverted bird-like figure at the upper edge. One scholarly figure turns it upside down deliberately to ask a question; an accidentally inverted reproduction would make that scholarly experiment look like the painting’s normal state. On this page, the main image follows Basel’s orientation, and the detail images are crops of the same high-resolution source.^[1][2][7]

Looking again

Return to the whole picture after examining its details. The red disc may again seize the centre, but the edge is now harder to treat as mere ornament. A tiny u-like form, a bird that seems to stand the wrong way up and stems that look like signs change how the larger shape feels. The title sends the viewer towards the margin; the coloured disc draws the viewer back. Neither direction finally wins. That sustained movement between an almost empty middle and a richly inhabited border is one of the work’s most distinctive achievements.^{[1][2][5][6][7][8]}

For related reading, see Klee’s Bauhaus years and the materials and techniques guide. Insula dulcamara provides a later encounter between ambiguous signs and a pictorial field, while Twittering Machine offers another example of small creature-like forms whose apparent clarity is unsettled by looking closely.

Explore selected works from Klee’s much larger oeuvre. Titles without a link have an authenticated catalogue identity but no reviewed article yet.

Artworks directory

217 artworks

Search artworks Medium All media Drawing Painting Reset

Name	Date	Medium
A Gate	1939	Painting and mixed media
A Woman for Gods	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Ab Ovo	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Above Mountain Summit	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Abstract Trio	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Acrobats	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Actor's Mask	1924	Painting and mixed media
Ad Marginem	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Ad Parnassum	1932	Painting and mixed media
Adventurer Ship	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Affected Place	1922	Drawing and mixed media
After a Sketch from Zurich	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
After Drawing	1919	Print
After The Floods	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
All Souls' Picture	1921	Print
Ancient Harmony	1925	Painting and mixed media
Angel Applicant	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Angel Serves the Desired	1920	Print
Angel, Still Female	1939	Painting and mixed media
Angelus Novus	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Animal Terror	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arab Song	1932	Painting and mixed media
Archangel	1938	Painting and mixed media
Architecture	1923	Painting and mixed media
Architecture of the Plain	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Around the Fish	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arrival of the Air Steamer	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Asiatic God	1924	Painting and mixed media
Astrological Fantasy Portrait	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Athlete's Head	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Aufgehender Stern	1931	Painting and mixed media
Autumn Flower	1922	Painting and mixed media
Bad Band	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Baroque Centaur	1939	Painting and mixed media
Before the Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Before the Snow	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Besessenes Madchen	1924	Watercolour and mixed media
Bird Garden	1924	Print
Bird Wandering Off	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Blossoms in the Night	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Blue-Bird-Pumpkin	1939	Painting and mixed media
Boats in the Flood	1937	Painting and mixed media
Botanical Theatre	1934	Drawing and mixed media
Boy in Fancy Dress	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Broken Key	1938	Print
Brother and Sister	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
But the Red Roof	1935	Painting and mixed media
C - C = Fisch	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Cacti	1912	Painting and mixed media
Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees)	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Captive Pierrot	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Castle and Sun	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cat and Bird	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cathedrals	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Chalice of the Heart	1937	Painting and mixed media
Characters in Yellow	1937	Painting and mixed media
Chosen Site	1927	Mixed media
Christmas Picture	1923	Drawing and mixed media
City of Towers	1916	Painting and mixed media
Clarification	1932	Painting and mixed media
Collection of Figurines	1926	Painting and mixed media
Colorful Architecture	1917	Painting and mixed media
Comedians' Handbill	1938	Print
Comic Opera Singer	1927	Painting and mixed media
Composition	1939	Painting and mixed media
Composition with Figures	1915	Drawing and mixed media
Composition with the Yellow Half-Moon and the Y	1918	Watercolour and mixed media
Conch–Still Life II	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Cosmic Composition	1919	Painting and mixed media
Crystal Gradation	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Dance of the Grieving Child	1922	Painting and mixed media
Dancing Girl	1940	Painting and mixed media
Das Licht und Etliches	1931	Mixed media
Death and Fire	1940	Painting and mixed media
Death for the Idea	1915	Print
Demon as Pirate	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Diana	1931	Painting and mixed media
Diavolo Player	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Die Kapelle	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Die Vase	1938	Painting and mixed media
Doctor	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Dredger and Sailboat	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Ein Tor	1939	Painting and mixed media
Ein Weib fur Gotter	1938	Mixed media
Embrace	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Episode before an Arab Town	1923	Print
Equals Infinity	1932	Painting and mixed media
Eros	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Error on Green	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Evening Figure	1935	Drawing and mixed media
Falling Bird	1919	Print
Fermata	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Clown	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Full Moon	1933	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire in the Evening	1929	Painting and mixed media
Fish in the Harbour	1916	Watercolour and mixed media
Fish Magic	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Flock of Birds	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Flora on Sand	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Flower Myth	1918	Print
Flower Stand with Watering Can and Bucket	1910	Watercolour and mixed media
Flowering Tree (Abstraction with Reference to a Flowering Tree)	1925	Painting and mixed media
Flowers in Pots	1923	Print
Flowers in Stone	1939	Painting and mixed media
Forest Witch	1938	Painting and mixed media
Fright of a Girl	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Fruits on Red	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Full Moon	1919	Mixed media
Föhn Wind in Franz Marc's Garden	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Garden in St Germain, The European Quarter near Tunis	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version)	1925	Print
Ghost of a Genius	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Girl in Mourning	1939	Painting and mixed media
Glance of a Landscape	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Gluht Nach	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Golden Fish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Goldfish Wife	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Green Plant, Blood, Louse	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Hafenbild	1918	Mixed media
Hammamet with Mosque	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Harbour with Sailing Ships	1937	Painting and mixed media
Hauptweg und Nebenwege	1929	Painting and mixed media
Heavenly and Earthly Time	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Heroic Fiddling	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Roses	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Strokes of the Bow	—	Mixed media
Highway and Byways	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Houses near the Gravel Pit	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Howling Dog	1928	Painting and mixed media
In the Current Six Thresholds	1929	Painting and mixed media
In the Style of Kairouan	1914	Drawing and mixed media
Individualized Altimetry of Stripes	1930	Painting and mixed media
Insula Dulcamara	1938	Print
Interior with the Clock	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Irma Rossa the Animal Tamer	1918	Drawing and mixed media
Journey in Corsica	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Landscape with Bluebirds	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Legend of the Nile	1937	Painting and mixed media
Lemon Harvest	1937	Watercolour and mixed media
Likeness in the Bower	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Limits of Reason	1927	Painting and mixed media
Little Hope	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Magdalena before the Conversion	1938	Drawing and mixed media
Mask of Fear	1932	Painting and mixed media
May Picture	1925	Painting and mixed media
Monument in a Cemetery	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Monuments at G	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Municipal Jewel	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Mural from the Temple of Longing Thither	1922	Print
Nach der Uberschwemmung	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
New Harmony	1936	Painting and mixed media
New House in the Suburbs	—	Mixed media
Old Steamboat	1922	Drawing and mixed media
On the Edge	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Once Emerged from the Gray of Night	1918	Drawing and mixed media
One Who Understands	1934	Painting and mixed media
Oriental Pleasure Garden	1925	Painting and mixed media
Park of Idols	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Passing by Red Pillars	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Persian Nightingales	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Popular Wall Painting	1922	Painting and mixed media
Prestidigitator	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Rainy Day	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Red and White Domes	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Red Balloon	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Refuge	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Rhythmic Rythmical	1930	Painting and mixed media
Saint of the Inner Light	1921	Print
Scaffolding of a New Building	1930	Painting and mixed media
Scholar in Dealing with Stars	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Seated Woman	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Senecio	1922	Painting and mixed media
Separation in the Evening	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Sinbad the Sailor	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Skeptically Smiling	—	Mixed media
Small House in the Garden City	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Small Portrait of a Girl in Yellow	1925	Painting and mixed media
Southern Gardens	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Static-Dynamic Gradation	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Still Life	1927	Painting and mixed media
Still Life with Gladioli	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Strange Garden	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Stricken City	1936	Painting and mixed media
Strong Dream	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Struck from the List	1933	Drawing and mixed media
Structural I	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Sumpflegende	1919	Painting and mixed media
Temple Gardens	1920	Drawing and mixed media
The Arrow before the Target	1921	Drawing and mixed media
The Barbed Noose with the Mice	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
The Flora of the Heath	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Goldfish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Hour Before One Night	1940	Painting and mixed media
The Man in Love	1923	Print
The Mask with the Flag	1925	Mixed media
The Pathos of Fertility	1921	Print
The Rhine at Duisburg	1937	Painting and mixed media
The Way to the Citadel	1937	Painting and mixed media
Three Houses and a Bridge	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Tightrope Walker	1923	Print
Tomb in Three Parts	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
Tomcat's Turf	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Tower in Orange and Green	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms I	1920	Watercolour and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms II	1920	Painting and mixed media
Tropical Dawn with the Owl	1921	Mixed media
Tropische Dammerung	1921	Painting and mixed media
Twittering Machine	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Variations (Progressive Motif)	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor	1923	Print
Viaducts Break Ranks	1937	Drawing and mixed media
Villa R	1919	Painting and mixed media
Village Carnival	1926	Painting and mixed media
Vor dem Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Wald-Hexen	1938	Painting and mixed media
Young Forest	1925	Drawing and mixed media

Related artworks

Explore eight other Klee works, beginning with works close in date to this one.

Error on Green

1930

Fire in the Evening

1929

Highway and Byways

1929

Ad Parnassum

1932

Castle and Sun

1928

Cat and Bird

1928

Mask of Fear

1932

Still Life with Gladioli

1932

References

1. Kunstmuseum Basel, Ad marginem, collection item 1210, current German full record: Klee number, medium and dimensions, artist inscriptions, complete published provenance, bibliography, and quotations from Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (1991), pp. 190–91, and Christina Thomson in Das Universum Klee (2008), p. 88. The original Franciscono and Thomson publications are not independently quoted here, View source.
2. Rawpixel, exact-match Ad marginem image, item 3590286, item-level CC0 high-resolution source; visual observations checked against the project’s unenhanced 4450 × 5904 px, native 300 dpi master. The local splash and five detail images derive directly from that source. A reproduction is not a conservation study, View source.
3. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2008 Das Universum Klee creditline, institutional loan caption with the older 46 × 36 cm dimensions. It does not explain the difference from Basel’s present 43.5 × 33 cm figure, View source.
4. Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, bilingual 2025 exhibition checklist, entry 068: owner, technical caption, 1930 and 1935–36 “retouched” dates. The record likely uses lender data and is not an independent technical examination, View source.
5. Florence Rougerie, “Ad Marginem, écriture et peinture chez Paul Klee – Aux marges du tableau: titres, légendes, signature”, Textimage (2007), French essay, especially PDF pp. 1–5, for the title, margin and relation of drawing to writing. Later comparisons in the essay concern other Klee works and are not silently applied to this object, View source.
6. Andrea Dexheimer, Ad marginem – Die Linie bei Paul Klee & Henri Michaux: Un dispositif contre la pensée totalitaire, doctoral thesis defended 2020, Tübingen repository copy 2022, §2.4, printed pp. 188–214. German close analysis of the internal border, peripheral forms, colour and viewpoint. Its philosophical extrapolations are attributed, not treated as documents of Klee’s intent, View source.
7. Claude Cernuschi, “Paul Klee and Language”, in Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision, From Nature to Art (2012), especially discussion of fig. 8 and deliberately inverted fig. 17. Full online chapter read for letters, map analogy and variable viewing orientation, View source.
8. Louis Marin, “Aux marges de la peinture: voir la voix,” L’Écrit du temps 17 (winter 1988), pp. 61–72; repr. De la représentation (1994), pp. 329–41. The work-specific argument was read in its published Italian translation, “Ai margini della pittura: vedere la voce”, printed pp. 175–83. The original French edition has not been directly examined here, View source.
9. Bauhaus-Archiv, “Unterricht”, German institutional context for Klee’s teaching, and Zentrum Paul Klee, biographical chronology, institutional dates. These establish general chronology, not the motive or visible extent of the painting’s reworking.