About this work
The title of *Highroads and Byroads* maps directly onto the painting's structure. Down the center runs a straight, contoured main path — divided into several parts and differentiated by color contrasts that move primarily between blue-orange and red-green — tapering in layers as its horizontal bands ascend the canvas.
To the left and right, smaller side paths run far more irregularly, in twisted and disordered formations that partly dissolve into nothing, partly resolve at the same blue-gray horizon that gives the main road its clear destination.
Klee employs a vibrant palette that ranges from warm tones of orange and yellow to cooler shades of blue and green, and what the eye first encounters is something between a topographical map and a musical score — field after field of color strata stacked with an almost rhythmic precision, then deliberately loosened at the edges into something freer, more felt than plotted.
*Highway and Byways* is an oil on canvas painting, and it belongs to Klee's group of numerous layer and stripe paintings, created in January 1929 after his second trip to Egypt.
He visited Luxor, Karnak, Thebes, Aswan, and Cairo, and the experience left a profound mark. The strip pattern finds its source in the Egyptian grain fields on either side of the Nile, pyramidal forms, and the swirling verticals made by rapids in a river.
The work was painted about six months after his journey — the pictorial ideas left to mature until the meaning of the land could be communicated in a way hitherto unknown.
The technique is equally unusual: oil on a plaster-primed canvas, which Klee used in only a few cases, making *Highroads and Byroads* unreservedly a key work in his output.
Most of the line structure was scratched into a fresh plaster base — the two boundaries of the main path ruled with a sharp stylus, the byways drawn freehand with a coarser instrument, leaving warps and ridges in the primer.
The painting can now be seen in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.
This is a work that earns its place on a wall you look at daily — the kind that gives back more the longer you sit with it. It suits a quiet study, a loft with good natural light, or any room where a contemplative mood is valued over a decorative one. The aerial, bird's-eye perspective creates an illusion of perspective and relief that makes the canvas feel both intimate and expansive — like a view from altitude that somehow still carries the heat of the ground. It speaks to the viewer drawn to order that breathes, to geometry with a pulse, to the idea that
