A grinning ancestral spirit looms from radiating dark strokes

A large round dark head with a wide grinning mouth of yellow and orange striped teeth looms at the upper left of a hunched, shaggy figure. The body is built entirely from long, thickly layered strokes of grey, black and tan that fan downward like ragged fur, streaked with dull red down the left side and warming to gold along the lower edge and the right. The strokes radiate outward from the head and thin out toward the corners.

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was one of the most inventive artists of the twentieth century. Swiss-born and trained in Munich, he joined Kandinsky and Marc in the Blaue Reiter circle, found colour on a journey to Tunisia in 1914, and taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931, where his lectures on line, tone and colour became a theory of pictorial form. His small paintings and drawings move between geometry, script, humour and dream. After the Nazi regime dismissed him in 1933 he returned to Bern. His work is held by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.