Life-affirming joy.

PAUL KLEE DIED RELATIVELY YOUNG, slowly withering away, and his style changed as the inevitability of death became inescapable. Death and Fire is one of his last works, in which the German word for death, Tod, forms the skull's features (and is repeated several times in the painting). An apocalyptic sun like a great doomed ball sits low on a horizon, held aloft by Death, like a gruesome trophy. The man who approaches is stripped to his essence: Is he humanity moving steadily toward the grave? All this might seem somber, yet the painting is aglow with the most life-affirming color. The death's head is an intensely luminous form, set in a context of gold, green, purple, and, above, the deep red of fire. With great seriousness, Klee announces that death is a purifier, like fire, and a means to fulfillment. This is the most terrible, seen as the most beautiful. This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

By SISTER WENDY BECKETT of Norfolk, England, well-known for her BBC and PBS television art series and her popular art books. Reprinted with permission from: Sister Wendy's Book of Meditations (DK Publishing, 1998; 888-342-5357). Painting: Death and Fire, 1940, Paul Klee, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland.