The fish that gathers signs around itself

The fish is detailed enough for us to recognise it without hesitation. It is the surroundings that disconcert us. Around it, Paul Klee places marks and shapes that seem to belong to other worlds: celestial signs, a punctuation symbol, an arrow, a flag. Around the Fish therefore does not begin by erasing reality. The painting gives us a familiar object, then makes the relationships surrounding it unusual. It transforms not so much the fish’s identity as the space of questions in which that fish becomes visible.

The work dates from 1926. The Museum of Modern Art indicates that it combines oil paint and tempera on a canvas mounted on cardboard. The entry describes a fish presented with a garnish, but also a constellation of signs floating in a dark background. The term constellation helps us understand the construction without imposing a precise meaning. Each element may seem autonomous; their placement around the centre nevertheless constitutes a relationship. The painting retains a still-life motif while giving it an environment that does not correspond to an ordinary table.

One way of looking is to move through the painting like an inventory. We spot the elements, try to name them and discover that a list does not yet explain their shared presence. Another way is to follow their orientations. The arrow indicates a direction, the flag unfolds its shape, a round sign introduces another kind of stability. The fish then becomes a point of support for different movements. Klee does not need to paint a complete action: the relationships between the elements are enough to set attention circulating.

The arrow deserves a particular pause. MoMA recalls its role in Klee’s teaching at the Bauhaus, where it could serve to indicate a force or an emotion. In this painting it retains an immediate effectiveness: everyone can recognise a direction before knowing the painter’s thought. But directing the gaze does not amount to delivering a fully translated message. The mark can indicate, bring together or confront. Its simplicity becomes the means of an ambiguity, because it acts clearly while we do not know exactly what that action means.

The dark background reinforces the suspended character of the whole. It lets us see the forms without giving us a place whose boundaries would all be identifiable. The fish seems tangible; the signs remain detached from an architecture or landscape. This difference brings several registers into play at once. We can think of an object set down, a sky or a mental space, but these associations must remain proposals for reading. They account for our experience; they do not prove that Klee painted the illustration of a story whose text has simply been lost.

The institutional journey, by contrast, is well documented. The painting is among Klee’s works denigrated in the Nazi exhibitions devoted to so-called degenerate art. MoMA also recalls that the artist, removed from his post in Düsseldorf in 1933, returned to Switzerland. These events give a particular gravity to the reception of this inventive image. They do not alter its date of creation: a work from 1926 was subsequently subjected to a policy of persecution that claimed precisely to decide which forms could legitimately be shown to the public.

In this context, the work’s resistance to a single explanation takes on an additional significance. The museum recalls that such a language had interested the Surrealists long before the Nazi attacks. The same openness can therefore arouse admiration or condemnation depending on the institutions receiving it. This history teaches us to distinguish the artist’s invention from the judgements made about it. The object retains the same elements; it is the discourses, conditions of display and powers capable of acting on its circulation that change profoundly around it.

Returning to the fish allows us to recover a closer scale. Its form awaits us, with signs that never stop accompanying it without joining into a definitive sentence. The painting does not ask us to solve every symbol before feeling its organisation. It offers a centre and several directions, a concrete presence and a dark space where interpretation must remain mobile. By the end of looking, the word around has acquired its full importance: it is in relationships, far more than in identifying the subject, that this still life finds its singular life.