Island of Bittersweet
Artwork by Paul Klee • 1938
🖼️ Reproduce this artwork — 📗 Book on Paul Klee on Amazon
About this artwork - painting analysis
Paul Klee signs with Insula dulcamara an emblematic work of his final creative period, marked by illness and renewed expressive urgency. Created in 1938, this painting testifies to the radical evolution of the Swiss-German master toward a simplified, almost hieroglyphic pictorial language, where organic forms engage in dialogue with enigmatic symbols. The Latin title, which evokes the bittersweet – a plant with both toxic and medicinal properties – suggests a duality inherent to this troubled period of European history and the artist's personal life.
The composition unfolds across a background with pastel tonalities where luminous touches of yellow, aquatic blue, tender pink and acidic green intermingle, creating a dreamlike and vibrant atmosphere. Thick black lines draw biomorphic forms that evoke simultaneously schematic faces, primitive creatures and archaic signs. These figures – including a central character with a fixed gaze and a mouth reduced to a simple line – seem to float in an indeterminate space, recalling at once children's art, ancient pictograms and the automatic writing dear to the Surrealists. Red dots and small colorful motifs punctuate the surface, adding a rhythmic dimension to the whole.
The technique employed by Klee combines oil painting and collage on burlap canvas, creating a granular texture that reinforces the raw and immediate character of the work. This apparent formal simplicity masks a profound symbolic complexity, characteristic of his late production where each sign becomes a carrier of multiple meanings. Afflicted with scleroderma since 1935, Klee developed a style marked by thick lines and elementary forms, less by physical constraint than by a will toward expressive condensation.
Housed at the Paul-Klee Centre in Bern, Insula dulcamara illustrates the artist's unique ability to transform adversity into plastic innovation, creating a visual universe where humor, gravity and poetry coexist in a precarious and fascinating balance.
If you appreciate "Island of Bittersweet" and other paintings by Paul Klee, we offer you 10% off the purchase of an art poster from our partner europosters with the promo code GRANDSPEINTRES10.
Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
