Paul Klee is one of those artists whose work people recognise even when they have never stood in front of it: a Tunisian town turned into a mosaic of colour, the bird-filled night of Persian Nightingales, the mask-like face of Senecio. This article tells the stories behind seven Paul Klee artworks, moving through an opera's fighting scene, a grid that names a spring month and two late works, the second of them from his final year. Behind each one sits a particular place, a title, or a moment in his life.

The route runs chronologically. It begins in April 1914, when a trip through Tunisia changed the way Klee used colour. It continues through his teaching years at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. It ends in Switzerland, where he returned in 1933 and worked to the end of his life. Between those poles his manner kept shifting. The dense colour fields he painted in 1919 and the window-like blocks of 1917 sit on one side. On the other are the floating shapes of 1930 and the light, emblematic figures of 1938. You can find each of the seven as a print in our Paul Klee collection, restored by hand and printed in-house in Barcelona.

How did Klee's Tunisian visit shape the watercolour Hammamet?

In April 1914, Klee travelled to Tunisia in the company of the painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Their route took in Tunis, St Germain, Hammamet and Kairouan, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's record notes that Klee visited Hammamet on 14 April. That visit is the only reason the town appears in his work at all, and you can see its pattern of sunlit blocks in this Tunisian watercolour.

Hammamet is a real town on the Tunisian coast. A title like this one connects a picture to travel, but it doesn't claim to record one particular street: Klee painted the impression the place made on him, its light and colour, not an accurate record of the town. The watercolour builds its picture from a mosaic of geometric blocks, with fine dark lines holding a loose grid together while reds, blues and yellows glow against softer secondary tones, the way a Mediterranean town looks in hard light.

Two Hammamet watercolours from 1914 are documented. The Met's own Hammamet with Its Mosque was painted, its record says, from outside the city walls: the upper part shows the mosque with two towers and gardens, while the lower area dissolves into translucent planes of colour. The Met points to Robert Delaunay there, and to his example of making pure colour the subject of a picture. The Kunstmuseum Basel, for its part, holds another 1914 sheet titled Motiv aus Hammamet, in watercolour and pencil on paper and cardboard.

The change in his colour is something Klee wrote down himself. At the gates of Kairouan he noted in his diary that colour possessed him. These early Hammamet sheets come before the Bauhaus, before the teaching that made Klee famous. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that his training can be said to have lasted until this trip. The colour is already there. The theory doesn't yet have a name.

What does the title Persian Nightingales add to its birds and ornament?

In 1917, in the middle of the First World War, Klee made Persian Nightingales. He served in the German army during those years and kept working. The sheet belongs today to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which describes it as gouache, watercolour and pen and black ink over graphite on laid paper, mounted on cardboard. It's small, roughly the size of a notebook page, full of abstracted birds, stars and ornamental shapes picked out in fine black lines, with touches of blue, pink, red and yellow laid over parchment-like backgrounds.

The title joins a Persian reference to a bird famous for its song. It doesn't name a particular poem or a commission. But the museum's reading is worth knowing. The National Gallery of Art suggests the work most likely alludes to the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, whose recurring motifs include the nightingale and the rose, and that Klee probably met Hafiz through Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, which introduced the poet to German readers. That's the museum's suggestion rather than a documented note in Klee's own hand, yet it explains the pairing of Persian ornament with a singing bird better than anything else.

In the Hafiz tradition the bird and the rose stand together for longing and devotion. Knowing that changes the way you look at the ornament: what first reads as decoration becomes a love song written in pattern instead of words.

Music ran through his life. He was a gifted violinist who had briefly considered making it his career before choosing painting. A singing bird is about as close as an image can get to sound, and the birds and stars in this print are one of the clearest places where his two arts meet. You don't need the Persian context to feel it. The fine black line gives the surface a rhythm the eye follows.

The sheet's later history is easier to follow than its literary source. It passed through the collections of Heinz Berggruen in Paris and Walter Feilchenfeldt in Zurich before being bought by Catherine Gamble Curran of New York in 1973. In 1990 she gave part of the work to the National Gallery of Art and promised the rest as a future gift.

What does Baldgreis tell us about the face in Senecio?

In 1922, during his early years teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Klee painted Senecio. Nothing in the record names a commission or a sitter, which is unusual for a picture that looks so much like a portrait. The face is stylised rather than observed, built from rectangles of orange, pink, yellow and white around steady, asymmetrical eyes. You can put that mask-like face on your own wall as a warm geometric print.

The German alternative title Baldgreis has been read by art historians as a literal translation, or as a humorous hint at someone soon growing old. German bald means 'soon' and has nothing to do with hair. Some writers have rendered the picture's English title as Head of a Man Going Senile. Both names point to old age, so you look at the face as the face of an old man.

The Latin-sounding name has its own botany. Art historians cited in German Wikipedia link Senecio to the plant Senecio vulgaris, groundsel, whose round seed heads they compare to the circular face with its patch-like fields of colour. A triangle and a curved line above one eye give the face the look of a raised eyebrow.

Writers on the picture also see the influence of African masks and puppet theatre in it, and of the square, triangle and circle that Wassily Kandinsky promoted at the Bauhaus. The original belongs today to the Kunstmuseum Basel. It's oil on a chalk ground on gauze on cardboard, painted on a modest scale. Klee made it in Weimar. The museum bought it in 1931, nine years after it was painted, while he was still working.

What makes the fighting scene from The Seafarer an opera scene?

Klee made this work in 1923, again during his Bauhaus years in Weimar. The full title, Kampfscene aus der komisch-phantastischen Oper 'der Seefahrer', asks a lot of a title: it names a fight or battle scene, and it names the kind of story it belongs to, a comic-fantastic opera called The Seafarer. The Kunstmuseum Basel holds the original, catalogued with Klee's own number 123 for 1923.

The title gives the picture its theatrical premise before the eye has settled on it. The sheet shows simplified, rhythmic forms that suggest waves and seafaring life, as if the scene were written in musical notation rather than painted. Deep oceanic blues sit against warm pinks and reds, held together by dark lines. You can see that theatre for yourself in this opera scene.

Music wasn't a side interest for Klee. Born to musical parents, he was gifted on the violin and briefly considered it as a career. An opera reference in his title is therefore not borrowed ornament; it comes from the part of his life where he was fluent. The theatrical idea is his own.

What the title doesn't do is name a real performance. The records don't mention that an opera of this title was staged, that Klee composed it, or that anyone commissioned the sheet as stage design. What is documented is a 1923 work that invites the viewer to imagine the performance. The print of it keeps that openness: you don't need to know the opera to follow the fight.

How does the abstract grid in May Picture suggest spring?

May Picture dates from 1925. That year the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, and Klee was teaching there. The painting is a landscape broken into small squares that seem to run past the edges of the sheet. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds the original, places the work in what it calls Klee's Magic Square series.

That series grew directly out of the 1914 journey to Tunisia. The Met's record makes the link plain: what Klee first saw in North African light became, a decade later, a system of colour fields in which every block holds its own hue while adding up to a whole. The record suggests the squares can be read as odd-shaped stones forming a mosaic. And that's where the strange spring of the title comes in.

May names a season, not a day of execution. The title doesn't say when the picture was painted. It asks you to look at the greens and the soft changes as a season. The loose grid mixes greens, reds, blues and muted greys, each cell outlined in fine black, and the soft transitions keep the whole surface moving. A May walk is a little like that: several temperatures of green at once, and patches of light shifting as the clouds pass.

Look at this Bauhaus-era grid long enough, and the season shows up in the cadence more than in any single colour. The Metropolitan Museum of Art reads the picture as evidence of Klee's lasting interest in colour theory, which fed his teaching at the Bauhaus.

Where is the park in Park Near Lu?

By 1938 Klee had been back in Switzerland for five years. In 1933 the National Socialists had him dismissed from his teaching post at the Düsseldorf Academy, and at the end of that year he left Germany with his wife and returned to his hometown of Bern. Park bei Lu., to give the painting its German title, belongs to the years that followed, and it's held today by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, in oil and coloured paste on paper on jute, with its original frame strips still in place.

The short title looks like shorthand, and the page that presents the work among Bern's cultural sights reads it as a park near Lucerne: the painting, it says, grew from an impression of nature Klee had in a park there. So Lu is the shortened name of the city. The painting is large, big enough for its bare branches to read as hard black bar strokes with bright colour glowing in the spaces between them.

The Swiss tourism page that presents the work says something worth repeating: the branches are bare, as in winter, but the picture isn't a winter picture. Spring and winter, death and blossoming, sit together in one image. Museum and gallery records describe Park bei Lu. as a 1938 painting. You can hang this late geometric landscape and decide for yourself which season wins.

What can Klee's final year tell us about The Hour Before One Night?

Klee dated this work 1940, the year he died on 29 June in Muralto, near Locarno. The 1940 date places the work in his final six months, without telling us the day it was made or which night is meant. The title, die Stunde vor einer Nacht, names an hour and a night and nothing else: no event, no person, no place. The catalogue raisonné renders it in English as The Hour Before a Night, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the sheet, calls it The Hour Before One Night.

The picture itself is built from bold black lines forming a network of angular shapes over a muted grey ground, with flat accents of red and blue. The balance between order and spontaneity is the late Klee: the lines lead the eye while the shapes stay open and unnamed. You can see that tension for yourself in this stark late work.

Its later history is easier to follow than its inner meaning. It was sold in 1952 to Baron Floris Carselius van Pallandt of The Hague, passed by descent into a private collection, and was sold at Christie's in London on 1 December 1981 to Heinz Berggruen. Berggruen gave it to the Met in 1984, where it sits in The Berggruen Klee Collection, although the Met's record lists the sheet as not currently on view. The mount still carries Klee's own marks: his signature at the upper left, and the number '1940 L 17' at the lower left.

Klee's last years were hard. After the rise of Hitler he was dismissed in Düsseldorf, and his house and studio were searched by the Gestapo. He returned to Switzerland in 1933, where he worked through isolation and financial uncertainty, and he kept making art to the end. The date on this sheet is proof of that persistence, not a prediction: the night in the title was never one he explained, and the mystery is part of the picture's hold.

Did you know?

• Klee began keeping a diary in 1898, when he was nineteen, and gave every entry a date and a number.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that his artistic training, begun in Munich in 1898, can be said to have lasted until the 1914 journey to Tunisia.
• In 2014 the Zentrum Paul Klee reunited more than 140 works made during or inspired by the Tunisian trip, for the first time in almost thirty years.
• May Picture belongs to The Berggruen Klee Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift made in 1984.
• Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern.
• Klee died on 29 June 1940, just before Switzerland granted his citizenship, and is buried in Bern.

Questions people ask about Paul Klee

What was Paul Klee's art style? It's hard to place Klee in a single movement. His imagery stayed personal even while his Bauhaus teaching shaped the later work. The method builds pictures from signs, grids and small fields of colour, often with fine black lines doing the structural work. The Magic Square series is the clearest example.

Which museums hold Paul Klee paintings? These seven works are spread across four collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. The Met's record for The Hour Before One Night lists the work as not on view, so check before visiting.

What is Senecio by Paul Klee? It's a 1922 portrait built from flat geometric fields of orange, pink, yellow and white, with the alternative German title Baldgreis hinting at the idea of growing old. The Kunstmuseum Basel bought the original in 1931, nine years after it was painted.

Why did Tunisia change Klee's use of colour? In April 1914 Klee saw North African light and architecture with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, and at the gates of Kairouan he wrote in his diary that colour possessed him. The Metropolitan Museum of Art traces the line from that trip to the translucent colour planes of his Hammamet watercolours, and on to the Magic Square grids of the 1920s.

Did Paul Klee play music? He was born in 1879 to musical parents, and as a gifted violinist he briefly considered music as a career. Music shows up in his titles too: the 1923 Seafarer work names a comic-fantastic opera, and the singing bird in Persian Nightingales brings a musical subject into painting.

Which of these works can I hang at home? All seven are part of the Paul Klee print collection on our site, where each is printed on museum-quality fine art paper in Barcelona and shipped across Europe. The posters named in this article are a good place to start, whether you want the warm geometry of Senecio or the darker late line of The Hour Before One Night.

Posters from our collection

• Hammamet (Paul Klee, 1914)
• Colorful Architecture (Paul Klee, 1917)
• Free forms (Paul Klee, 1930)
• Senecio (Paul Klee, 1922)

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About the author

Moryarty Vintage Posters was founded in 2015 with a simple belief: art shouldn't be only for people with high incomes. We find our posters in museums, libraries, online collections and private collections, restore each one by hand without changing its design or colours, and print in-house in Barcelona on museum-quality fine art paper. You can see our posters in person at five shops, two in Barcelona and three in Lisbon. Every print ships from Barcelona across Europe.

Sources

• Paul Klee, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Paul-Klee
• Paul Klee biography, Zentrum Paul Klee, https://www.zpk.org/en/paul-klee-biography
• Hammamet with Its Mosque, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/483158
• Persische Nachtigallen (Persian Nightingales), National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/fun-and-games/coloring-pages/71551-persische-nachtigallen-persian-nightingales
• Park bei Lu. (Park near Lu.), MySwitzerland, https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-us/experiences/cities-culture/art-culture/art/park-near-lu/
• The Hour Before One Night, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/483183