Deep Pathos

Blocks of color press against one another in an arrangement of rectangular shapes rendered in red, blue, yellow, green, and black, each surface carrying its own texture and small marks that break up the flat fields. The composition reads as pure abstraction, with no recognizable figure or landscape to anchor it. This piece, titled Deep Pathos, was made in 1915 using gouache and watercolor on paper mounted on cardboard, and it is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having come to the museum through the Berggruen Klee Collection. The artist, Paul Klee (1879–1940), worked within movements including Expressionism and the Bauhaus. Looking closely, the layered rectangles seem to shift and overlap, giving the surface a quiet sense of depth despite its flatness.