I've returned to it because of a new topic I've come up with concerning visio-textual art: the purely visual use of textemes in illumagery (i.e., visual art). I claim that the R in Villa R not only is semantically null, but is textually insignificant: it doesn't represent language or in any other way do anything textual�except be textual. Yet I also claim that Villa R makes it as a painting mainly because of the R. How? By being wrong. It will cause most aesthgagers to be disconcerted by its break of expressive decorum�as something literary in a work otherwise illumagistic . This should jar him into increased focus. He will then have a problem with the R's not having any apparent literary meaning, or even symbolic value as a representative of language.

All this will generally happen very quickly, without the aesthgager's being much aware of it. Ditto the final result, his experiencing the R as a counter-irritant of sorts, a counter-irritant to the relative predictability of the painting as a visual design. As something for the painting to resolve into its variety of harmony the way a piece of (non-Schoenbergian) classical music overcomes its dissonances. The increased mental energy he has been jarred into should increase the pleasure the painting's resolution causes.

Quick summary: the R will be sufficiently appropriate as a graphic element (as an intriguing-enough shape, and something that resembles part of a house) not to ruin the painting while at the same time sufficiently inappropriate to prevent the painting from being too bland. It will not be sufficiently textual to make the painting anything other than a pure illumage.

Second Thoughts after actually looking at the painting again, when I reposted it: the R can suggest Language as a doorway or window into a Wonderful House. This would not cancel my theory as to the R's effect given above, just add to it. So, maybe Villa R is what I'd call a textagraph. There are surely other visio-textual works with the equivalent of Klee's R, though, in which it can't persuasively suggest anything as consequential as I now think Klee's R does.

Third thought: the R could also suggest a kind of "R marks the spot," which in turn would suggest a journey all the way from A to this ascendant villa--and or a possible Villa Z! I guess I have to accept Villa R as textagraphic. It's not litragraphic, though: it lacks words.