Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet: The Journey to Tunisia 1914

Watercolors, sketchbooks, journal entries, photographs and other documents of the famous journey taken by Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moillet in 1914 are presented here in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the voyage, a comprehensive tribute honoring the significance to art history of the artists’ journey. When Klee and his fellow painters Macke and Moilliet left for Tunisia in April 1914, a cornucopia of impressions awaited them in Tunis, St. Germain, Hammamet and Kairouan. They departed from the anecdotal Orientalism of the nineteenth century, abstracting their motifs and transforming them into ornamental shapes and crystalline structures. Their surprising, innovative images are today a highlight of early modernism. Klee went the furthest. For him, color became the most important creative tool; he dissolved the object in planes of color, the visual construct became a pattern that he covered in arabesques and symbols.