A Swiss-born painter and graphic artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee, b. Dec. 18, 1879, d. June 29, 1940, is difficult to classify. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children"s art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. His family was very interested in the arts. The jobs that Paul"s parents had were strange for 1879. His mom helped support the family by giving piano lessons. His father did the housework. He cooked, cleaned, and painted. Paul"s grandma taught him how to paint. After much...
of the principal Romantic motifs and ambitions that, by the early twentieth century, had often swollen into grotesquely Wagnerian dimensions, and translate them into a language appropriate to the diminutive scale of a child"s enchanted world."

"Formerly we used to represent things visible on earth," he wrote in 1920, "things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities"