Tunisia

A journey in colour and place

In April 1914 Paul Klee travelled through Tunisia with fellow artists August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Within roughly two weeks he made watercolours and drawings of streets, gardens, buildings and coast. The journey became one of the best-known episodes of his career, largely because of a diary declaration dated 16 April: “Die Farbe hat mich … ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler” — colour has taken hold of him; he and colour are one; he is a painter. The sentence is compelling, but it is neither a description of every picture made there nor proof that Klee first discovered colour on that day. The diary was subsequently edited by its author, and he had been investigating colour before he left Europe.^[1][2][3]

The works make a more interesting story than a single instant of conversion. In one sheet a Tunis café remains populated by quick figures; in another, buildings near St. Germain resolve into a loose grid of colour. At Hammamet, a recognisable mosque and a modern military tower occupy the same skyline, while translucent areas below loosen the view from ordinary perspective. These are distinct responses to places Klee visited, sometimes transformed further by cutting and mounting. Their later reception has also transformed the journey itself.^[2][4][5]

Contents

1. Who travelled, and what did they make?
2. What did Klee mean by “I am a painter”?
3. Looking at the Tunis street café
4. St. Germain: a landscape organised as colour
5. Hammamet: what a watercolour leaves in and out
6. Kairouan, the diary and later return
7. A journey within French colonial Tunisia
8. What changed after Tunisia?

Who travelled, and what did they make?

Klee, Macke and Moilliet crossed from Marseille to Tunis in April 1914. Their route included the capital, St. Germain near Tunis, Hammamet and Kairouan. Moilliet knew Tunisia from an earlier visit, and the three did not arrive with the same experience of the country or make identical kinds of work there. The Zentrum Paul Klee's 2014 exhibition account counts 35 watercolours and 13 drawings by Klee during the stay, alongside 33 watercolours and 79 drawings in three sketchbooks by Macke. Those are the institution's counts for work made on the journey; they do not include all subsequent works inspired by it and should not be treated as an item-by-item catalogue of surviving sheets.^[1][5]

The transfer from Hammamet to Kairouan was itself part of what Klee recorded. Roger Benjamin reconstructs the 15 April journey from the published diary: the three artists walked roughly ten kilometres inland through sand to Bir Bou Regba station, travelled by rail through Kalâa Sghira, and reached Kairouan that afternoon. Benjamin compares Klee's self-conscious account of their European appearance on the road with his less generous descriptions of people they encountered. The itinerary places the celebrated 16 April colour declaration after a concrete day of travel and social encounters; it does not explain that declaration away or make it a direct caption for any one watercolour.^[5]

The comparison matters. This was a shared expedition in which the artists looked, travelled and worked together, yet their pictures need not be read as a single collective style. Macke's photographs also form part of the visual record. Roger Benjamin's detailed study of Hammamet identifies Moilliet's drawing of a beached boat, Macke's scene of harbour activity and three very different Klee watercolours connected with the town. Each selected a different part of its architecture or daily activity. The journey produced collaboration and exchange, not one uniform “Tunisian look.”^[1][5]

Klee's own record is uneven. He assigned annual numbers to works, but a numbered 1914 sheet is not automatically evidence that its present appearance was completed outdoors in Tunisia. Paper could be painted in front of a motif, carried away, mounted, trimmed or revisited. The question of when a work took its present form has to be asked for each object. The Centre Pompidou reports Wolfgang Kersten's view that St. Germain near Tunis (Inland) was painted before the motif, while its own analysis notes white bands made by the rubber bands holding Klee's paper. In that sheet he kept some of those reserves as active vertical elements instead of removing them. This is a documented process for a named work, not a licence to say that every Tunisia watercolour was made or cut in the same way.^[4]

What did Klee mean by “I am a painter”?

The famous diary passage is attached to 16 April 1914, when Klee was in Kairouan. Its textual anchor is entry 926o in Wolfgang Kersten's critical edition of the Tagebücher, page 350. The short German declaration is reproduced by the Berlin State Museums and by the Zentrum Paul Klee. Both its date and its later publication history matter. The Berlin museum explicitly notes that Klee re-edited the diary near the end of 1921; research on the diaries places his larger retrospective revision between 1916 and 1921. We can securely say that the declaration is part of Klee's account of his experience. We cannot simply treat the published text as an untouched notebook entry penned at the very instant of revelation.^[2][3][6]

Nor does the sentence erase what came earlier. A Zentrum Paul Klee guide says plainly that Klee may have exaggerated the suddenness of his “discovery”: he had begun studying colour about four years before the trip. A separate ZPK exhibition draws on a diary note from 1900 about painting as a possible vocation and another from 1918 about mastering it. In 1912, Klee met Robert Delaunay in Paris; he translated Delaunay's essay Sur la lumière into German for publication in Der Sturm in 1913. The Fondation Beyeler's French guide notes that Klee worked some of his own ideas into that translation. Tunisia provided particular subjects and conditions for an inquiry already underway.^[3][4][7]

The first-person claim still has force. It records how Klee wanted to articulate a decisive feeling about colour. But there is a difference between an artist's meaningful self-description and a complete causal explanation of the art. In 1914 he remained a skilled draughtsman, and the Tunis sheets do not abandon drawing: pencil edges, abbreviated figures and bands of line coexist with colour washes. His later Bauhaus colour teaching and many differently organised pictures cannot be reduced to one afternoon in Kairouan.^[2][3][4]

Looking at the Tunis street café

The Berlin State Museums hold Strassenkaffee in Tunis (Street Café in Tunis), dated 1914, a watercolour and pencil sheet mounted on card. Their record gives the present size as 9.5 × 21.5 cm and notes that Klee gave the work to his mother. It also says he cut the sheet down horizontally and at the sides. The narrow, frieze-like format therefore belongs to the work's history: the view we encounter is not necessarily the whole sheet as first painted.^[2]

Across its upper half, awnings, arches and walls differ in weight and hue. Some pencil or brush contours identify architecture; elsewhere colour and paper take over. People at the left café tables are compressed into energetic strokes. A lone figure crosses the open sandy ground. The blue-grey area to the right could suggest a cast shadow or a roof seen from above; the Berlin account leaves that identity open. At the far right, dense blue, orange and yellow blocks still suggest things seen in a city, but their relation to the other buildings is less like conventional depth than a strip of adjacent colour events. The title anchors the place without making each patch a solved object.^[2]

The sheet demonstrates how misleading a simple division between “figurative before Tunisia” and “abstract after Tunisia” would be. Abbreviated figures and coloured squares inhabit the same object. It also makes the process visible: an observed place became a carefully selected, physically shortened image. That is more precise than saying Klee abandoned reality. He changed which relations in a scene carried the picture.^[2]

St. Germain: a landscape organised as colour

The Centre Pompidou's St. Germain b. Tunis. Landeinwärts (St. Germain near Tunis: Inland) is Klee's 1914,217, now AM 81-65-876. The museum describes it as watercolour on paper glued to card, 21.8 × 31.5 cm, and records its 1981 bequest from Nina Kandinsky. A handwritten inscription at the lower edge includes year, number and title. These details identify a specific sheet rather than a generic picture of the journey.^[4]

Here coloured fields meet like an irregular checkerboard. Blues and blue-greens oppose reddish orange and violet; darker divisions stop one plane and let another begin. Angela Lampe's French catalogue account still sees shorthand for a shrub, mound and habitation within the grid. The land has not disappeared. It has been reorganised so that colour, spacing and rhythm carry more of the account than descriptive outlines do. Lampe, following Kersten, treats the painting as work done before the motif. Her observation about the unpainted vertical bands made by holding the sheet in place is especially useful: a practical condition of painting outdoors becomes part of its composition.^[4]

The Delaunay connection clarifies one possible source for this handling of simultaneous contrasts, but it should not turn Klee into a passive follower. He had seen Delaunay's work and translated his theory before the trip; the Tunisian landscape offered new material for Klee's own experiment. Equally, the resulting grid does not prove that the city itself was simply a ready-made abstract picture waiting to be copied. Klee chose, painted, left blank and perhaps adjusted. The work is a sequence of decisions made in relation to a place.^[4][7]

Hammamet: what a watercolour leaves in and out

The splash image above reproduces Hammamet with Its Mosque, Klee's 1914,199, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as 1984.315.4. The Met says Klee visited Hammamet on 14 April 1914 and made the watercolour from outside the city walls. Its current record describes watercolour and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard and gives overall dimensions 23.8 × 22.2 cm. Roger Benjamin's chapter prints smaller dimensions, 20.6 × 19.4 cm, as have older descriptions; these may reflect different measured components, but the accessible records do not explain the discrepancy. This page uses the current owning museum record while preserving the question for object-level study.^[5][8]

The upper part of the painting still gives a recognisable skyline: mosque minaret, another tower and low forms or planting. Below, the view opens into soft pink, red, blue and pale washed areas. Benjamin identifies the second tower as the Poste Optique, a French military communications structure on the fort, and compares historical photographs and postcards to reconstruct the view. The French protectorate is thus visible in the townscape. It is easy to overlook when the scene is discussed only as an encounter with ancient architecture or brilliant light.^[5][8]

A locally authored account by Tunisia's Institut National du Patrimoine places Hammamet at the southern end of Cap Bon and describes its walled medina, fort and Great Mosque near the edge of the street network. That urban history makes the town more specific than a set of forms in Klee's watercolour. It also corrects the Met label's geographical error: Hammamet is south, not northwest, of Tunis. Museum expertise about the object and Tunisian heritage expertise about the place each have a distinct role in this account.^[8][11]

Benjamin also reports a more interventionist choice: Klee cut a painted strip from the original sheet, reversed it and attached it to the mount. The diagonal and rectangular relations below the skyline are therefore not merely the result of looking at a street from one fixed point. His chapter situates Hammamet within a specific town of fishing, trade, religious life, agriculture and colonial administration. The watercolour selects from that complex place. It should neither be taken as an objective topographic document nor emptied of the mosque, military tower and living setting that gave its forms a starting point.^[5]

Another Hammamet watercolour, Hammamet (1914,33), raises a different identification. Klee's diary mentions painting from a small terrace on the way to the Hôtel de la Plage. Benjamin compares an early postcard of that beachfront hotel, which opened in 1899, with the watercolour and proposes that its one small building is the hotel. The painted building is shifted and simplified, so the postcard and diary make a reasoned case rather than a proven exact viewpoint. View toward the Harbor of Hammamet is sparser still, with fragments of beach, vessels, vegetation and architecture reduced to delicate colour and discontinuous contour. These distinct works show that “the Hammamet style” is no more single than “the Tunisian style.” Klee's choices changed from sheet to sheet.^[5]

Kairouan, the diary and later return

Kairouan is the city attached to the 16 April diary declaration, and it supplied material for both 1914 watercolours and subsequent recollection. Two separate 1914 pictures share a form of the title In the Style of Kairouan, Transposed in a Moderate Way. Klee's 1914,210 is now at LACMA; 1914,211 is associated with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Their related titles must not cause their dimensions, ownership or details to be merged. The planned dedicated artwork page in this cluster treats the Bern work, whereas the LACMA record concerns its own distinct sheet.^[9]

Klee did not stop working with Kairouan when he came home. The Fondation Beyeler's French guide discusses Kairuan, vor den Thoren (nach einer Scizze von 1914), 1921,4 — Kairouan, Before the Gates (after a 1914 sketch). The title itself specifies a later work made after an earlier sketch. Its crystalline architecture belongs to 1921, seven years after the journey, even if its motivating observation belongs to 1914. The museum sees Tunisia as continuing to matter into the 1930s. That longer afterlife is a stronger claim than declaring every later grid or garden an undocumented memory of Tunis.^[7]

The diary's vivid language and these later pictures have often been read together as if the 1914 trip already contained a finished theory of Klee's mature art. They are better kept in chronological relation: experience, on-site and near-site works, later editing of a diary, revisiting sketches and still later interpretation by museums and historians. This allows the journey to be important without making it an origin myth that explains everything after it.^[2][3][7]

A journey within French colonial Tunisia

The three travellers entered a French protectorate, established in 1881. The setting is not incidental background. Benjamin's chapter traces Hammamet's resistance to the French invasion, land purchases by settlers, the military communications tower and a local economy involving fishing and exchange across the Mediterranean. Some of that history can be checked against the visual objects Klee drew; other parts come from later memoirs and photographs that Benjamin evaluates. These specifics complicate a travel narrative in which Tunisia appears only as colour, heat or anonymous “Eastern” architecture.^[5]

Klee's published diary also shows the limits of his viewpoint. Benjamin quotes passages in which the travellers describe people they met through racial and sensory prejudices, even while noticing their own European appearance on a country road. A responsible reading does not need to repeat every slur to acknowledge that the visitor's gaze was historically situated. Nor should the page speak as though Tunisian inhabitants existed chiefly to awaken a European artist. His work is art made in encounter with a place inhabited and governed by others, under unequal political conditions.^[5]

The journey's reception raises another question: who gets to describe what Tunisia contributed? Dominique Jarrassé's French-language study argues in its published abstract that the 1914 journey has been mythologised, partly by Klee himself, and asks how later commemorations and claims of a “Mediterranean modernism” can repeat northern European dominance. That abstract establishes the article's question; its full argument still needs reading before more particular conclusions are attributed to it. Placed beside Benjamin's close reconstruction, it is a reason to avoid calling the country merely a source of “exotic” motifs.^[5][10]

What changed after Tunisia?

The 1914 sheets make a convincing case for intensified experiment with coloured planes, watercolour transparency, rhythmic architecture and the relation between observation and transformation. They do not support a single date at which Klee ceased to draw or became abstract. The café, St. Germain and Hammamet works demonstrate three different solutions within the same trip. Some incorporate clear topography and figures; some emphasise the constructed field; some combine both. Their physical histories add another layer to what we see today.^[2][4][5][8]

Klee's “I am a painter” is best read beside those objects rather than above them as a verdict. It captures the excitement of a meeting between prior artistic study and a new set of encounters. Its edited form and later fame explain why the trip became a story of revelation. Looking closely at the works, their material evidence and their setting lets the journey remain significant without asking one sentence to carry an entire career.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

For closer study, see Hammamet with Mosque, In the Style of Kairouan, Klee's materials and techniques and the later Bauhaus years.

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

References

1. Zentrum Paul Klee, Die Tunisreise. Klee, Macke, Moilliet, 2014 exhibition page (German). It supplies the institution's scoped counts of works made on the journey and identifies the three travellers and later inspired works, View source.
2. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Strassenkaffee in Tunis, catalogue record and Dieter Scholz's German object essay, updated 28 August 2026. Source for medium, dimensions, gift to Klee's mother, cutting, scene analysis, diary re-editing and the image's Public Domain Mark 1.0; image asset 2538215, photo credit Jörg P. Anders, View source.
3. Zentrum Paul Klee, Landhäuser am Strand digital guide and Paul Klee. Ich bin Maler exhibition account, both German. The first explicitly cautions against a sudden discovery of colour; the second documents a longer development through dated diary notes.
4. Centre Pompidou, St. Germain b. Tunis. Landeinwärts, object record and Angela Lampe's French analysis from Collection art graphique (2008). Source for 1914,217, medium, dimensions, accession, Kersten's on-site attribution, bands left by rubber bands, visual analysis and Delaunay context, View source.
5. Roger Benjamin, “A Crystalline Hammamet,” chapter 14 of Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia (University of California Press, 2015), pp. 126–139, author-hosted chapter PDF. Full chapter read; English-language specialist analysis of town, colonial infrastructure, 1914 sheets, comparative sources, diary and later intervention. The linked online PDF is image-only; details were checked against its rendered pages. The chapter's own footnotes and wider book remain to inspect directly, View source.
6. Marianne Keller Tschirren, Dreieck, Kreis, Kugel, German dissertation, pp. 62 and 141–42, citing Wolfgang Kersten's text-critical edition of Klee's Tagebücher 1898–1918, entry 926o, p. 350. Source for citation anchor and discussion of the 1916–21 diary revision; the critical edition itself remains to inspect, View source.
7. Fondation Beyeler, Paul Klee. La dimension abstraite, French room guide (2017), pp. 4–5. Discusses pre-1914 Delaunay encounter and translation, 1914 work In the Desert, and Klee's 1921 Kairouan painting after a 1914 sketch. Its rhetoric about a mysterious land is not adopted as the narrator's voice, View source.
8. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hammamet with Its Mosque, current object record: visit on 14 April, medium, overall dimensions, collection number and rights notice. The Met does not offer this image as an Open Access download; the legacy splash is preserved, not replaced from the Met page, View source.
9. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, In the Style of Kairouan, Transposed in a Moderate Way, distinct LACMA object M.2005.70.51; ZPK Mapping Klee and the Fondation Beyeler checklist identify Bern's separate 1914,211. The 2014 Tunis colloquium paper discusses both numbered variants. Printed catalogue entries remain to read directly.
10. Dominique Jarrassé, “Un modernisme méditerranéen? Usages du voyage de Klee en Tunisie”, Artl@s Bulletin 10, no. 2 (2021), French. Only the abstract was accessible for this manuscript; use is limited to its stated research question and broad myth-making premise, View source.
11. Hanen Werteni, Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia, “La ville de Hammamet” (2023), French. Direct local heritage research on position, medina plan, fort, peripheral Great Mosque and the town's continuing built history; source for correction of the Met's “northwest of Tunis” direction, View source.