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 he saying 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 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 travels eventually led him to the Paris studio of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, where he encountered a new style of modern art known as Orphism. During their time together, the trio talked about the Delaunays’ blend of color and geometry, focusing on 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 (The Blue Rider) Almanac, an influential book of essays edited by modern artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This assignment would fundamentally alter 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 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 was high praise. For artists like Rivera, Matisse, and Picasso, the unfiltered energy of non-academic art was so compelling, it made the gilt-framed canvases in museums seem almost counterfeit. (Explore more about Matisse)
How to create a masterpiece
Shortly after his 56th birthday, Klee began to exhibit the symptoms of scleroderma, a rare and incurable illness that hardens the skin. Despite these physical 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), perhaps referring to solanum dulcamara, an herb whose anti-inflammatory properties were rumored to ease scleroderma.
The title may also reflect the artist’s complicated feelings about a disease that, at the very least, advances slowly.
To make this uncharacteristically large work, which is nearly six feet wide, Klee glued newsprint over burlap to serve as a ground. Over this, he applied smudges of peach, blue, and spring green to evoke the warmth and light of a Mediterranean landscape.
Across the top, a long, black calligraphic line suggests a shoreline. Above it, 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? If so, why is he standing in what appears to be a puddle of water? Is the ailing artist getting wet feet?
An enigmatic composition
Perhaps Insula Dulcamara is a modern interpretation of Titian’s famous painting The Three Ages of Man. Could the squiggly creature on the left be a baby crawling on all fours? Might the P-shaped figure be an adult staring into a tunnel at 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 cautioned 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. But she is unable to quell his longing for his wife, even after offering him immortality “with benefits.” In the end, Odysseus escapes from the island and makes his way back home.
Klee ultimately rejected the title Calypso’s Island for being too on the nose. “My latest work does point in that direction, though,” he told his friend, the art critic Will Grohmann. “It says the time has come.”
An isolated yet pivotal artist
“Everyone was learning from Paul Klee, whether they were conscious of it or not,” remarked the influential modern art critic Clement Greenberg.
Greenberg later confessed 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. To me, the painting Twittering Machine conveys the folly 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 final decade of his life. Click the link for details.