Paul Klee’s first solo show in the United States opened in 1924 at a posh 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?

Good question. To answer it, I’ll start at the very beginning: a very good place to start.

Swiss-born artist Paul Klee began his professional journey at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. After graduation he criss-crossed Europe studying the Renaissance Masters, the French Impressionists, and the Cubists. He spent two week in Robert Delaunay’s studio discussing color theory — particularly how color compliments like red and green can create the illusion of depth on a flat surface.

A gifted draftsman, Klee eventually found work as an illustrator for Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, a volume of essays put together by artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This job altered the trajectory of Klee’s career. 

Could art become more like music?

Kandinsky thought art — like music — could be enjoyed without being “read.” The idea struck a chord with Klee, who could play the violin well enough by age ten to perform with the Bern Orchestra. He began experimenting with a painting style based on symbolic expression rather than realistic description. “Abstract with memories,” he called it.

Over time, his pictorial vocabulary became increasingly sophisticated. In the catalogue introduction to one of Klee’s gallery shows, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera said:

Klee’s new paintings contain all the science of the great masters, and all the freshness and genius of children.

This was high praise. Modern artists like Rivera, Picasso, and Matisse had so much admiration for primitive art, they made the gilt-framed canvases in art museums seem almost counterfeit.

At some point in his mid-50s, Klee began to suffer from the symptoms of scleroderma, an incurable illness that hardens the skin. But he kept on painting, ultimately creating some of the most poignant images of his career.

He painted 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. Or maybe the title refers to his bittersweet feelings about a fatal illness that progresses slowly.

To create this uncharacteristically large work that is nearly six feet wide, Klee first glued newsprint over burlap to serve as a ground. The newsprint peeks through the paint in several places, inviting us to read snatches of editorials and old advertisements.

Over the newsprint, Klee painted cloud-like patches of green, peach, and Mediterranean blue to create an enormous landscape suffused with warmth and light. The black calligraphic line running across the top of the picture resembles a coastline. Above it, the moon rises, a steamship sails past, and the moon sets. Time passes by; people pass on.

A pasty white face holds the composition in balance. It’s hard not to associate the P-shaped figure with Paul Klee. But why is he standing in a puddle of blue paint? Is the ailing artist getting wet feet?

There are many riddles in a Klee painting

I wonder if Insula Dulcamara is a modern interpretation of the three ages of man. Does the squiggly creature at the lower left represent a baby crawling on all fours? Does the P-shaped figure represent an adult preparing to pass through a tunnel, to an afterlife portrayed 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 said.

Klee initially called this painting Calypso’s Island after a chapter in Homer’s Odyssey. According to legend, a sexy nymph named Calypso held the Greek hero Odysseus hostage on an island for seven years, but could not quell his longing for his wife, even by offering him immortality with “benefits.” Odysseus escaped from the island and returned home to his family.

Klee ultimately rejected the title Calypso’s Island because he thought it was too on the nose. “Even so, my most recent works point in that direction,” the artist confided to Will Grohmann, a long-time friend and art critic. “They say 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 influential critic Clement Greenberg, who confessed he didn’t really understand abstract painting until he came across images like Twittering Machine, an astonishingly prescient image of mechanical birds whose twitter draws its victims into a pit.

Paul Klee died in 1940, just months after a special exhibition of his large-scale works opened in Zurich, Switzerland. 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 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 twentieth century.