“Everything will become Klee.” Paul Klee

With his highly individual yet universal pictorial language, Paul Klee (1879–1940) became known as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. As early as 1901, he was aware of his desire “to become a good artist.” Encompassing all of his creative phases, this volume features more than two hundred works from the artist’s visionary and poetic pictorial worlds that uniquely blend the abstract with the figural.
Klee’s oeuvre is introduced in thematic units: the human life cycle—from birth and childhood to sexual desire, parenthood, and death; his forms of cultural expression in music, theater, and religion; and his environment of plants, animals, and landscapes. The painter’s cosmos proves to be a circular system made up of ideas and images that attempt to grasp and interpret the world as a whole. A detailed essay analyzing Klee’s exploration of works by a select number of important artists of his day makes a crucial contribution to the body of research on Klee.