The Way to the Citadel

Arrows across a painted city

Small red arrows interrupt a closely fitted field of blue, green, rose and ochre compartments. Some shapes look like walls or entrances; others read simply as coloured planes. The title The Way to the Citadel promises a route to a fortified place, but the painting does not offer the clear road or labelled destination of a map. Paul Klee gives a viewer directions while making the space through which to follow them difficult to settle.^[1][2]

Klee made this work in 1937. It is now in The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, where it was acquired in 1940. Its artist's work-list number is 1937,137. The original German title appears in a specialist source as Der Weg zur Stadtburg (Städtebild); a separate Klee index lists the shorter Der Weg zur Stadtburg. The English “citadel” is the Phillips Collection's title, while the precise status of the German parenthesis still needs confirmation from Klee's original register. This distinction matters because even the title can lead the viewer to look for a particular building before the image has established one.^[1][2][3]

Explore the details of The Way to the Citadel

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

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1

Upper city blocks and roofs

2

Central doorway-like form

3

Arrows through the middle

4

Lower-left directional marks

5

Lower-right faceted buildings

Contents

1. The object, its support and its names
2. A city made from connected compartments
3. The red arrows and the absent destination
4. A 1937 painting among Klee's other constructed places
5. A Phillips painting and a room for Klee
6. Looking through the city again

The object, its support and its names

The Phillips Collection records the painting as oil on fabric mounted on cardboard, 26 3/8 × 22 3/8 inches, or approximately 67 × 56.8 cm. Its object number is 1001. The support is a fabric surface attached to a firmer board; the present museum record does not identify gouache as a second paint medium. The work is relatively large for a Klee painting and upright, a format that lets the enclosed shapes rise in loosely architectural tiers.^[1]

An older Phillips educational publication calls the support canvas mounted on cardboard. That may be a more specific description of the same fabric, or it may reflect a change in cataloguing language. The accessible records do not explain the difference. For a current short caption, the owning museum's “fabric” wording is the soundest choice. Neither the older caption nor the current record supports the previous version of this site's claim that the cloth is mounted “onto canvas.” It is also unsafe to infer particular tools or layers from a small digital reproduction.^[1][2]

The annual number 1937,137 appears in the Phillips Discovery Pack. It is part of Klee's work-list system, separate from the museum's accession number 1001. The German title is less completely documented online than those numbers. Sotheby's reproduced the Phillips painting when comparing it with another 1937 city picture, and called it Der Weg zur Stadtburg (Städtebild). The parenthetic word means a city picture or townscape, but the available page does not show whether Klee himself wrote it in his title or whether it is a later catalogue qualification. A private multilingual index drops the parenthesis. Until the handlist or catalogue raisonné entry is checked, it is best to present the German wording as a documented title form rather than claim to have transcribed the artist's complete inscription.^[2][3]

The noun Stadtburg contains Stadt, “town” or “city,” as well as Burg, a fortified castle or stronghold. “Citadel” conveys the fortification but sounds like one distinct monument. In the picture, however, the apparent buildings, coloured cells and route markers are entangled. The German title can encourage us to see the stronghold as part of an urban fabric; the English title can make us search for a single destination. Neither translation supplies a location for it on the surface.^[1][3]

A city made from connected compartments

Dark lines border almost every part of the picture. Their thickness and irregular turns give the field a joined construction: one blue-green plane shares an edge with a grey or pink plane, while another sits above an ochre strip. The units are not uniform squares. Some are long verticals, others are wedges, truncated triangles or nearly rectangular blocks. Near the upper portion, broad horizontal and diagonal edges suggest rooflines or the tops of adjoining walls. Lower down, several vertical shapes resemble narrow passages or façades. Klee makes architecture plausible without fixing the scale of any one unit.^[1][2]

The colours help prevent the dark network from becoming a simple diagram. Cool blue and green areas recur in separated places rather than filling one side. Pink, orange and yellow passages punctuate the field; they can look like illuminated openings, but they can just as readily be read as colour contrasts. A tall muted orange compartment toward the upper left, bordered by dark green-grey sides, is especially doorway-like. Farther down, another enclosure has a pale pink cap over an ochre and brown form. Neither has the unambiguous depth, door leaf or address that would turn it into an identified entrance to a castle.^[1]

This is why the picture can oscillate between a crowded city and a flat construction. Follow the outlines and they seem to describe adjacent structures. Attend to the colour and many forms remain self-contained patches against the painting's surface. A wedge can become a roof for one moment, then a slanting colour plane for the next. The image does not maintain a single viewpoint from street level or above. Its changes in implied depth make the viewer's progress through it a matter of looking and revising, rather than following a surveyed plan.^[1][2]

The local reproduction is only 400 × 477 pixels. It is adequate for describing major lines and colour relations but not for identifying paint application, textile weave, small inscriptions or every arrowhead. Its hues may also differ from the painting as seen in the Phillips. The Phillips image and educational card are useful cross-checks, yet neither accessible record is a conservation examination. Claims about spraying, stamping or a precise sequence of painted layers need object-specific technical evidence; general accounts of Klee's experimental practice cannot establish how he made this work.^[1][2]

The red arrows and the absent destination

The arrows are small in relation to the network. They appear chiefly across its middle and lower zones, where red strokes briefly override or interrupt the coloured architecture. Their force is visual before it is symbolic: amid dark borders and muted colour cells, red directional marks stand out. One near the right side appears to point across the field; others appear farther down, so a viewer can attempt to connect them into a path. But the outlines do not open into one continuous, clearly navigable street.^[1][2]

At the scale of the retained splash, even the exact count and bearing of the smallest red strokes are uncertain. Some pointed shapes are painted cells rather than direction signs, and a mark at the edge can be hard to read. What can be said securely is that the picture has multiple red arrows and that their positions invite the eye to move from one part of the city-like field to another. A route inferred from them is a viewer's reconstruction, not a line Klee has drawn continuously from entrance to endpoint.^[1][2]

The Phillips Discovery Pack addresses this uncertainty directly. It asks where the red arrows might lead and whether the citadel can be seen at all. Those questions are especially useful because they leave open two very different experiences of the picture. Perhaps the stronghold is somewhere within the dense construction, overlooked because we expect a familiar silhouette. Perhaps the route continues outside the edges. Or perhaps “the way” describes the act of searching through the image rather than an arrival we can locate. These are readings prompted by the title and visible forms, not documented statements of Klee's intention.^[2]

The absence of a clear endpoint also changes the role of the viewer. A conventional arrow in a sign points to a place whose location the sign maker knows. Here a red mark can make us move, but the painting does not give the stable street grid that would let us verify the instructions. We may begin at the lowest mark and look upward, or start at the uppermost arrow and look for a way down. At either starting point, competing lines and colour boundaries interrupt the journey. The picture balances the assurance of a directional sign against the uncertainty of a built space that refuses to become a usable map.^[1][2]

A 1937 painting among Klee's other constructed places

The picture belongs to a year of renewed artistic activity after a severe illness had sharply reduced Klee's production in 1936. Zentrum Paul Klee's chronology places his departure from Germany under Nazi pressure at the end of 1933, his serious illness in 1935, and the low point in output in 1936. A different museum essay says he was able to resume work more fully in February 1937. This history locates The Way to the Citadel in Klee's Bern years. It does not make its arrows a medical diary or its possible fortress a coded self-portrait.^[4][5]

The same year had an openly political history around Klee's art. Zentrum Paul Klee records that the National Socialists seized 102 of his works from German museums in 1937, with 15 shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Those actions affected his reception and circulation. The Phillips object record, however, does not say that this specific painting was one of the seized works; it was made in 1937 and acquired in Washington in 1940. The historical setting is essential, but the image should not be assigned a particular anti-Nazi allegory without a letter, contemporary testimony or other object-specific evidence.^[1][4]

There is a closer formal comparison available. A Sotheby's specialist essay about Klee's different 1937 painting Beginnende Kühle describes its cityscape as tessellated, connects it with the earlier Stadtburg Kr., and reproduces Der Weg zur Stadtburg (Städtebild) as another 1937 example. This is a documented later comparison of Klee's ways of assembling a city from adjoining units. It does not prove that all three pictures show the same city, were made with the same technique, or encode the same journey. Its value here is narrower: it helps us notice that the fitted coloured forms can imply an urban scene without adopting naturalistic streets or perspective.^[3]

Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Highway and Byways, 1929) offers a contrasting way to organise paths. There, a broad central route rises through many smaller divisions, making “main” and “side” roads visually legible even as the subdivisions complicate them. In The Way to the Citadel, there is no comparably dominant continuous road. Instead, detached arrows suggest directional movement through a field in which every neighbouring compartment could become part of the route. The comparison clarifies a difference in picture-making; it does not imply Klee planned the 1937 painting as a sequel to the earlier one.^[6]

We should likewise resist an automatic Egyptian explanation. Klee's 1928–29 journey informed some of his gridded and architectural pictures. The auction essay relates Egypt particularly to Beginnende Kühle. That account cannot simply be transferred to the Phillips painting, where no inscription, source record or identified motif currently ties this particular city to Cairo. Its title supplies a citadel, but not a named city. A useful comparison remains one that sharpens what can be seen rather than replacing the picture's unresolved geography with a borrowed location.^[3][6]

A Phillips painting and a room for Klee

The Phillips Collection acquired The Way to the Citadel in 1940, Klee's final year. The public object record does not identify the vendor, price or precise transaction route. It does establish that the painting had reached a Washington museum before the better-known 1948 Klee Room opened. The Phillips had already acquired its first Klee, Tree Nursery, in 1930, and organised a solo exhibition in 1938 and a memorial exhibition in 1942. In the museum's own history, this was a sustained programme of collecting and showing his work, not an isolated purchase of one attractive painting.^[1][7]

The Phillips says Duncan Phillips assembled 13 Klee works between 1930 and 1953. The museum describes the Klee Room as a nearly continuous display after 1948 and as an important source of inspiration for mid-century American abstract painters, especially Washington artists Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. That is an account of the collection and room as a whole. It should not be turned into the stronger claim that either artist studied this exact painting or copied its arrows. The museum's 2018 exhibition, Ten Americans: After Paul Klee, itself says the artists' relationships to Klee varied; not all cited him as a direct influence.^[7]

One documented later presentation gives this object a clearer place. For its 2011 anniversary programme, the Phillips recreated the Klee Room and used The Way to the Citadel as an illustrated exhibition image. The museum has also used the painting in teaching. Its family Discovery Pack asks children to consider the arrows and visible or invisible citadel, while a Phillips school account describes students examining its geometry and making their own collages and stamped abstractions. Those students' techniques must not be confused with Klee's. Together the records show a painting still capable of prompting close looking and new work without fixing one official reading.^[2][8][9]

A separate creative response appeared in 2017. Christopher Philpot's University of Maryland poetry collection The Way to the Citadel explicitly takes its title from Klee's painting. Its abstract compares the work's arrows across a coloured grid with poetry that moves by association while holding together through stanza patterns. Philpot's analogy is evidence that a later writer saw the picture as a model for guided but unpredictable movement. It is not retrospective evidence of what Klee intended in 1937.^[10]

Looking through the city again

Begin with a red arrow, then try to continue in its apparent direction without jumping across an enclosed line. Notice how quickly a wall-like border becomes a route-like edge, or a roof-like wedge becomes only a colour patch. Then step back and ask which, if any, compartment seems more like a stronghold than its neighbours. The point is not to solve a puzzle that has a hidden answer key. It is to see how decisively the signs of travel and construction work together even while refusing an ordinary map.^[1][2]

The secure facts are a 1937, 1937,137 Klee painting, presently catalogued as oil on fabric mounted on cardboard, acquired by the Phillips in 1940. The most useful reading begins with the actual coloured network and the small red arrows, while distinguishing visible forms, the museum's questions and later interpretations. We can follow the way into the painting; we cannot yet document where Klee meant us to arrive.^[1][2]

For other paths and constructed spaces, see Highway and Byways, Ad Parnassum, Klee's colour studies and the paintings overview.