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 launched his creative career at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Upon graduation he crisscrossed Europe, studying the Renaissance Masters, the French Impressionists, and the Cubists.
His travels eventually led to the studio of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, where he encountered a new style of modern art known as Orphism. The trio discussed how this new visual language blended color and geometry, and how complementary hues like red and green can be used to create the impression of depth on a flat surface.
When he returned to Munich, Klee became a contributor to The Blue Rider Almanac—a seminal book of essays and illustrations compiled by leading avant-garde artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This collaboration fundamentally changed the trajectory of his career.
Can you 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. Ultimately, his musical instincts led him to create a new style of painting that prioritized symbolic expression over realistic description. He called it “abstract, with memories.”
Over time, Klee’s pictorial vocabulary grew increasingly sophisticated. In the catalogue introduction to one of his 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 that, by comparison, it made the gilt-framed canvases in museums seem almost counterfeit.
How to read a modern masterpiece
Shortly after his 56th birthday, Klee began to exhibit symptoms of scleroderma—a rare and incurable disease that hardens the skin. Despite severe physical constraints, he continued to paint, creating some of the most poignant images of his career.
His 1938 masterpiece, Insula Dulcamara, was completed just 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 bittersweet emotional state as he confronted his own mortality.
To create this uncharacteristically large work—measuring nearly six feet wide—Klee glued newsprint over burlap to serve as a ground. He then 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, 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 a puddle of water? Is the ailing artist getting wet feet?
A bittersweet island
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 knows? I could write ten different interpretations of this work and Klee liked it that way. “If you portray life too literally, you wind up in a wasteland,” he cautioned his students at the Bauhaus.
He initially titled this painting Calypso’s Island after a story in Homer’s Odyssey. In the epic, a beautiful nymph named Calypso holds the Greek hero Odysseus captive on her 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—with a little help from the gods—Odysseus departs the island and makes his way back to his wife.
Ultimately, Klee rejected the title Calypso’s Island because he felt it was 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
The influential arts writer Clement Greenberg once said, “Everyone was learning from Klee, whether they were conscious of it or not.” 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.
Paul Klee passed away in 1940, just months after a special exhibition of his large-scale works—including Insula Dulcamara—opened in Zurich. Art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker remembered 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 Switzerland…
See Kosmos Klee at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, now through October 3, 2027. The exhibition offers visitors a chronological overview of Klee, presenting around seventy works as well as biographical material and rare items from the archives.