Taking off from Klee's 1938 painting, The Grey Man and the Coast, this chapter explores Klee's notion of the ‘grey point’ (graupunkt) and the way it figures in the thought of Gilles Deleuze. In his Bauhaus lectures of the early 1920s, Klee develops the idea of the grey point as the cosmogenetic moment of painting. The hinge between chaos and order, the mid-point of all colour, including black and white, and the transition between point and line, grey plays a pivotal role in pictorial genesis. The figure of Klee recurs through Deleuze's late writings on art. Deleuze affirms Klee's conception of grey as the ‘chaos-germ’ that unlocks dimensions of sensation and inaugurates new registers of experience.

Grey Man and the Coast.

A line zigzags back and forth in Paul Klee's Grey Man and the Coast (der Graue und die Küste) (1938) (Figure 9.1). Perhaps a series of tongues, or ribs, that juts into a sombre blue expanse where nameless ciphers float and dance. Perhaps a bird’s-eye view of a coastline, or a series of little boats in a sea of teardrops, dots and crescent moons. The scene is watched over by a grey man in the upper-right corner. Disproportionately outsized, this figure is curiously fractured. Both surveyor of the scene and engulfed by its pictorial world, its face is eaten into by a boat or bit of land and only one of its eyes fully visible. One might say that the figure is a point around which the composition revolves, whilst at the same time being absorbed by the composition that it surveys. Both inside and outside, it is at once a point of view and implicated by the centre of view. With no place of its own, it occupies a place common to all others. This grey man might be seen as an emblem of the role of grey in Klee's work, alerting us to the peculiar nature of this colourless colour as an unlocalisable, interstitial element, between hues, between tones, forever on the threshold of things, qualities and states, evading manifestation.