Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist of extraordinary formal inventiveness whose art combined a childlike, primary vision and the utmost sophistication.

Paul Klee was one of the great masters who established the essence and character of modern art. He was an artist of a creative capacity and an artistic range and depth that had not existed in German countries since Albrecht Dürer's time. Like Dürer, Klee was predominantly a draftsman. Color entered his art late, and the main body of his work was always dominated by the linear component. His fantasy seemed inexhaustible--the demonic bordering on the grotesque, the humorous on the anecdotal--but it was always rooted in his metaphysical, even mystical, attitude to life and art. Klee was also an outstanding writer on formal and esthetic problems and a distinguished teacher. To him we owe some of the most...