Paul Klee – Schwarz, noch am Ort (Black, Still in Place), 1940 | Giclée Print

A narrow strip of canvas, painted a loud chrome yellow and laid on paper. At the top sits a big black disc, dense and dry, like a sun that has gone out; below it a rust-red patch, a scatter of small grey-green flecks like falling seeds, a brown-black tuft, a cloud of olive grey and a few red marks at the foot. The threads of the canvas fray out on all four sides. Klee painted it in tempera in 1940, in the last months of his life in Bern, and called it Schwarz, noch am Ort – black, still in place.

He signed it lower right on the canvas and wrote the title, with the date and the number 1940 z 15, on the paper below. After his death in June 1940 it stayed with his widow Lily Klee until 1946.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the museum's own photograph of the work. It is not an original and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 9.2 × 31 cm — tempera on canvas, mounted on paper

• 40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 10.26 × 31.26 cm.
• 50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — enlarged, 1.52× original. Image 15.60 × 47.52 cm.

Why this size. The museum's photograph holds 456 dpi at original size, so the small sheet shows the picture exactly as large as Klee painted it – a slim strip in a wide white field. The large sheet enlarges it as far as the file carries at 300 dpi, the floor we print to: 1.52 times, pixel for pixel, nothing added. The image measures include the frayed threads, which reach a little beyond the catalogued canvas; we print them as they are.

Not available in the United States. Klee died in 1940, so the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, the European Union and the United Kingdom. In the United States a work first published after 1930 can stay protected for 95 years from publication, and we cannot rule that out for this one. We therefore do not ship this print to US addresses.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre, with a small Museartis wordmark in the lower left margin. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Paul Klee (German, born in Switzerland, 1879–1940), Schwarz, noch am Ort (Black, Still in Place), 1940, tempera on canvas, mounted on paper. Lily Klee, Bern, 1940–1946.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.