Works by Paul Klee

As a student in Munich, Paul Klee drew well but thought he would probably never learn to paint; a twelve-day trip to Tunis in 1914 changed that, and colour took hold of his work.

Klee grew up in Bern, the son of a music teacher and a singer, and at eleven was asked to play violin with the Bern Music Association. He turned to art in his teens. Back from Tunis, he made his first purely abstract picture out of coloured rectangles, and the coloured rectangle became his basic unit, one that some scholars liken to a musical note. Senecio, from 1922, is a round head pieced from squares of pink, yellow and white, with red dots for eyes and a single arched brow.

Letters and numbers often find their way in. A tall green R stands by a red road in Villa R of 1919, under a yellow disc and a green crescent. In Persian Nightingales, a watercolour from 1917, the year he became a clerk at a Bavarian flying school, an R and an N flank grey birds, moons and stars.

He mixed oil with watercolour or tempera and painted on cardboard, burlap, newsprint and gauze. Red Balloon of 1922 combines oil paint with gauze, and a fine grain shows through the house blocks and the red balloon above them. From 1921 to 1931 he taught at the Bauhaus, where Wassily Kandinsky joined him, and most of the pictures below come from the 1920s. In The Goldfish of 1925 a glowing yellow fish with red fins hangs in dark blue water, the smaller red and violet fish kept to the edges.

Sources: Wikipedia, Städel Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Alte Nationalgalerie. Portrait: Alexander Eliasberg.