Something is being consumed by burning
Artwork by Paul Klee • 1940
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About this artwork - painting analysis
Created at the threshold of 1940, "Something is Consuming Itself in Burning" bears witness to Paul Klee's twilight period, when the Swiss artist was struggling against illness and watching Europe sink into the darkness of war. This textile work strikes through its vertical format and enigmatic message, conveyed by massive black characters that stand out against a background oscillating between incandescent red and burnished orange. The composition is organized into two distinct chromatic registers: the upper half bathes in deep red while the lower section adopts softer orange tones, as if we were witnessing the different phases of combustion.
The technique employed reveals Klee's singularity in his final years: it is a work on textile, probably a fragment of carpet or tapestry, where the graphic signs appear to have been woven or applied onto the support. The hieroglyphic characters evoke simultaneously Oriental writing and the ideograms invented by the artist himself, that personal visual language he developed throughout his career at the Bauhaus and beyond. The irregular contours and grainy texture of the material give the whole an almost archaic quality, reinforced by the frayed edges that frame the composition.
Affiliated with the Expressionist movement and later close to the Bauhaus, Klee explores here the territories of symbolic abstraction during a period of inner exile. The year 1940 would moreover mark the end of his existence, with scleroderma claiming him just months after the creation of this prophetic piece. The title resonates as a poignant metaphor for his own physical condition and the apocalyptic political context of the time.
Housed today in the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection in Berlin, this late work embodies the ultimate synthesis of Klee's plastic vocabulary: mysticism, tragic humor and meditation on impermanence intertwine in a visual language of troubling modernity, continuing to question viewers about the processes of transformation and disappearance.
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Image license: faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain work of art.
