Paul Klee: A Transcendentalist

Paul Klee - Hammamet with Its Mosque - 1914 - Watercolor and graphite on paper mounted on cardboard - 9 3/8 × 8 3/4 in. (23.8 × 22.2 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image) Swiss Expressionist painter Paul Klee’s (1879-1940) was originally associated with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, and subsequently taught at the Bauhaus, the widely influential German art school of the interwar period. Klee's diverse body of work cannot, however, be categorized according to any single artistic movement, or "school." His paintings, which are at times fantastic, childlike, or otherwise witty, served as an inspiration to many artists of the 20th century, and beyond.

Klee’s artistic legacy has been immense, even if many of his successors have not referenced his work openly as an apparent source or influence. During his lifetime, the Surrealists found Klee's seemingly random juxtaposition of text, abstract signs, and reductive symbols suggestive of the way the mind in dream state recombines disparate objects of everyday and brings forth new insights into how the unconscious wields power even over waking reality.

Klee's reputation grew considerably in the 1950s, by which time, for instance, the Abstract Expressionists (also known as the New York School) could view his work in New York exhibitions. Klee's use of signs and symbols particularly interested these artists, particularly those interested in mythology, the unconscious, and primitivism (as well as the art of the Naifs, Outsider Artists, and children). Klee's use of color as an expressive medium of human emotion also appealed to the Color Field painters. 

Finally, American artists maturing in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ellsworth Kelly owed a debt to Klee for his pioneering color theory during the Bauhaus period. 

When Klee visited Tunisia in 1914, the walls of the city of Kairouan thoroughly impressed him. Standing in front of them, he famously said, "color possesses me..the color and I are one." Shortening his visit, he quickly returned to Europe to paint the works for which he became celebrated. The work featured here is among them.(Excerpted from TheArtStory.)