Paul Klee’s first solo exhibition in the United States opened in 1924 at an upscale gallery on 57th Street in Manhattan, two blocks south of Central Park. Art critic Henry McBride reviewed the show in The New York Sun:
The charm of his color and the delicacy of his lines attract many to him. But what does Klee say? Ah, that is the question. Is it only something whimsical? Or beneath the whimsicality, is it something profound?
Excellent question, Mr. McBride. To answer it, I will start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
Swiss-born Paul Klee began his artistic journey at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. After graduation he crisscrossed Europe, studying the Renaissance Masters, the French Impressionists, and the Cubists.
His time in Paris led him to the studio of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, where he encountered a new style of modern art known as Orphism. While the trio talked about the Delaunays’ blend of color and geometry, they also discussed how complementary colors such as red and green can create the impression of depth on a flat surface.
Upon his return home, Klee landed a job as an illustrator for Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, a compilation of essays put together by modern artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. To his surprise, this entry-level role profoundly altered the trajectory of his career.
Can we enjoy art without decoding it?
Kandinsky believed that art, like music, can be enjoyed without being “read.” The idea resonated deeply with Klee, who could play the violin well enough by age ten to perform with the Bern Orchestra. Before long, he invented a unique style of painting that prioritized symbolic expression over realistic description. “Abstract, with memories,” he called it.
His pictorial vocabulary grew increasingly sophisticated over time. In the catalogue introduction to one of Klee’s art gallery shows, the distinguished Mexican muralist Diego Rivera wrote:
Paul Klee’s new paintings contain all the science of the great masters and all the freshness and genius of children.
This is high praise. For artists like Rivera, Picasso, and Matisse, the raw vitality of non-academic art was so compelling, it made the gilt-framed canvases in museums feel counterfeit.
How to create an abstract masterpiece
Shortly after his 56th birthday, Klee started to show symptoms of scleroderma, a rare and incurable illness that hardens the skin. Despite the constraints, he continued to paint, creating some of the most poignant images of his career.
Klee painted his masterpiece, Insula Dulcamara, two years before he died. The title contains Latin references to dulcis (sweet) and amarus (bitter), which may refer to solanum dulcamara, an herb whose anti-inflammatory properties were rumored to ease scleroderma.
The title may also refer to the artist’s complex feelings about a chronic illness that at least offers the small mercy of advancing slowly.
To make the uncharacteristically large Insula Dulcamara, which is nearly six feet wide, Klee began by glueing newsprint over burlap to serve as a ground. Next, he layered paint smudges of peach, blue, and spring green on the newsprint to convey the warmth and light of a sprawling landscape.
The long, black calligraphic line running across the top of the picture evokes a shoreline. Above the line, the moon rises, a steamship glides by, and the moon sets—time passes by, people pass on.
A ghostly white face holds the composition in balance. Does the P-shaped figure represent Paul Klee? And if so, why is he standing in what appears to be a puddle? Is the ailing artist getting wet feet?
A picture full of hidden meanings
Perhaps Insula Dulcamara is a modern interpretation of Titian’s celebrated painting The Three Ages of Man. Is the squiggly creature on the left an infant crawling on all fours? Is the P-shaped figure an adult looking down a tunnel toward the afterlife, represented by a circle of radiant white light?
Who can say—I could write ten different interpretations of a Klee painting and the artist liked it that way. “If you portray life too literally, you wind up in a wasteland,” he told his students at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design.
Klee initially titled this painting Calypso’s Island after a story in Homer’s Odyssey. In the story, a beautiful nymph named Calypso holds the Greek hero Odysseus captive on an island for seven years. Yet she is unable to satisfy his desire for his wife, even after offering him immortality “with benefits.” In the end, Odysseus escapes from the island and makes his way back home.
Ultimately, Klee rejected the title Calypso’s Island because he thought it was a little too on the nose. “My latest work does point in that direction, though,” the artist confided in Will Grohmann, an art critic. “It says, the time has come.”
Klee was an isolated yet pivotal artist
“Whether they were conscious of it or not, everyone was learning from Paul Klee,” said Clement Greenberg, a highly influential modern art critic.
Greenberg confessed that he didn’t really understand modern art until he came across pictures like Klee’s Twittering Machine—an astonishingly prescient image of mechanical birds whose twitter lures its victims into a pit. For many people, the painting Twittering Machine captures the pitfalls of trying to mechanize human nature.
Paul Klee died in 1940, just months after a special exhibition of his large-scale works, including Insula Dulcamara, opened in Zurich. Art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker recalls opening night:
Monumental images glowed like the characters of a Runic language, revealing a style of drawing that was linear, black, thick—like great wooden beams set on a colored background.
I understood that a new symbolic language had come to its maturity in these large-scale works, and that they were, perhaps, Klee’s most original contribution to the art of the 20th century.
Postscript: If you happen to be in New York…
Explore the special exhibition Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan from March 20 thru July 26, 2026. This is the first American museum exhibition focusing on the artist’s later work, produced during the unsettling final decade of his life. Click the link for details.