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| Paul Klee May Picture 1925 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Red-Green & Violet-Yellow Rhythms 1920 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Tower in Orange & Green 1922 Metropolitan Museum |
In the 1950s and 60s when I was a child and poking into art books at the public library, Paul Klee was the darling of publishers like Skira and Abrams. They produced the best commercial reproductions available at that time. Klee was regarded as the least threatening of "modern" artists and most accessible for the new middlebrow consumer of culture (and that was me!). Consequently, I was exposed to such a wealth of Klee whimsy at such an early age that in later life I never wanted to see another one of his pictures. That is why it surprises me to be attracted to this group from the Heinz Berggruen collection of Paul Klee at the Metropolitan Museum, donated in the 1980s. For one thing, the individual pictures are all unfamiliar (which is not too surprising, considering that Klee made more than 10,000 of them in the course of his career). The artist's darker side also seems more apparent in the Met collection, poised as he was between two European wars of mechanical annihilation.
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| Paul Klee Black Columns in a Landscape 1919 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Falling Bird 1919 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee All Souls' Picture 1921 Metropoolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Yellow Harbor 1921 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee The Chair Animal 1922 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Still Life 1927 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Rough-cut Head 1935 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee Comedians' Handbill 1938 Metropolitan Museum |
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| Paul Klee The Hour Before One Night 1940 Metropolitan Museum |
Barred from teaching by the Nazis and placed on their list of Degenerate Artists, Klee retreated to Switzerland in the early 1930s. He died there in 1940, the same year he painted the stark concluding picture above.