There's an enlargeable photograph of the Scottish National Gallery, at the Wikipedia website (per the link above). To me, the building looks like it was set on fire, and then dressed up with some banners and a manicured lawn, to spruce it up. It looks awful! But the art inside is surely priceless, so who cares what it looks like. Just another place that I have to make sure to visit one day. Anyway, I don't know squat about lithography (a type of printing process), but I can say that Paul Klee's use of it for "The Tightrope Walker" is evidence of his wide use of different media in creating his works. I wonder if the pinkish background (with the spotlights crisscrossing it) was watercolor on the paper, before the dark print was made.
Klee claimed that he enjoyed "taking a line for a walk" and indeed such artwork as "The Tightrope Walker" are among his most playful images (in a body of work known for its whimsy). He liked to create drawings in which a single line wanders around the paper, crossing over itself several times, and then he would shade along one side of the line, down the entire length. Because of curves in the line, sometimes the shading would be on the "inside" of the shape, and sometimes on the "outside". Several of these lines together would create a harmonious "polyphonic" drawing (a musical reference in which different elements combine to create a composition). He also might use just a few meandering lines to create a complicated subject, such as the city skyline seen in the painting "Threatening Snowstorm":
This painting was created with pen and ink and watercolor, in 1927 (and housed as well at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art). Is it not wonderful how Klee recreates the emotion and impact of the blizzard on man's minuscule dwellings, with just a few simple elements?
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