About this work
The first thing *Insula Dulcamara* gives you is its colour: over a background of pastel tones, pale pink, sky blue, and May green emerge through the surface , light as breath, light as myth. Across this ground, thick lines flow like violin score notation — loose, looping, sure of themselves. The limits of the island cannot be made out, but in the upper reaches, signs mark the rising and setting of the moon over the sea, and a vessel is just barely visible on the horizon.
At the centre, a line resolves into something like a face — its expression hovering somewhere between indifference and discomfort.
Curvilinear forms and symbols sprawl across the textured ground , somewhere between map and dream, between writing and image. Signs of Egyptian influence are also present, echoes of Klee's travels in 1928–29.
*Insula Dulcamara* was initiated in 1938, when Klee was suffering from the wasting disease scleroderma. It is his largest work, and lives today in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
That year, Klee was painting seven large horizontal panels, each sketched in charcoal on newsprint pasted over burlap or linen — a surface at once smooth and differentiated.
The work was initially going to be called *Calypso Island*, recalling the isle in Homer where Odysseus was held against his will and offered immortality — but Klee, a lover of Greco-Roman mythology, discarded the title as too obvious.
The final title instead recalls *Solanum dulcamara*, the bittersweet nightshade plant, historically used in the treatment of dermal problems and as a local analgesic — a quietly personal choice, and a bitter-sweet one. Some scholars have argued that the painting's black markings form a graphical abstraction of the name "Paul Klee" — the composition constituting a kind of signature, and a meditation on life, death, and identity.
This is a painting that rewards the kind of living-with that a work on the wall uniquely allows. It evokes spring on one of the Cyclades, a place Odysseus might have passed; the Homeric age not yet ended, our own long since begun — a transparency of time and space in which the boundary between sea and land dissolves. It belongs in a room with strong natural light that can draw out its pale, tender palette — a reading room,
