Original lithograph after the painting by Paul Klee.
Published by Teriade in 1939 for Verve Magazine.
Klee (1870 - 1940), a Swiss born, German artist, has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify. He generally worked in isolation from his peers, and interpreted new art trends in his own way. He was inventive in his methods and technique. Klee worked in many different media—oil paint, watercolour, ink, pastel, etching, and others. He often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint. Klee employed spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing, and impasto, and mixed media such as oil with watercolour, watercolour with pen and India ink.
He was a natural draftsman, and through long experimentation developed a mastery of colour and tonality. Many of his works combine these skills. He uses a great variety of colour palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic. His works often have a fragile childlike quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms and grid format compositions as well as letters and numbers, frequently combined with playful figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract. Many of his works and their titles reflect his dry humour and varying moods; some express political convictions. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation.
