Klee paul late work cartoon

Paul Klee (1879-1940) has been called many things: a father of abstract art, a Bauhaus master, the progenitor of Surrealism, and a very hard man to pin down. The Swiss-German artist’s paintings are tied to numerous groundbreaking 20th-century movements, from German Expressionism to Dada.

But Klee’s body of work isn’t easily bucketed into a single category, thanks in large part to the system of throbbing forms, mystical hieroglyphs, and otherworldly creatures that he developed to populate his compositions.

In the early 1900s, Klee radically broke with a millennia-old tradition in art: the faithful representation of objects and environments from the real world.

Along with Picasso and other turn-of-the-century, avant-garde artists, he jettisoned recognizable content, contributing to a form of art that would come to be known as “abstraction.”

This interest was galvanized with the onset of World War I and the deaths of his peers; as the traumas of war continued