Paul Klee Materials and Techniques

How Klee made a picture

A Paul Klee work may have more layers than its museum label suggests. A drawing can be made on newspaper, attached to a sheet of card that Klee cut to a particular size, bordered with paint and inscribed with its title. A painting can place gauze over cardboard, chalk beneath oil colour, or paper over jute. Those choices change the marks, the surface and the way the image meets its edge. They also shape what a museum must protect and what a photograph may leave out.^[1][2]

Klee worked across drawing, watercolour, oil, tempera, coloured paste, prints and paintings on glass. He cut and remounted some compositions, worked on both sides of a support, traced lines through a transfer sheet and sprayed paint through or around barriers. These procedures are not a single signature recipe. Each work has its own construction, sometimes altered after it left his studio. Looking at the materials gives us a way to ask better questions about a particular picture, rather than treating technique as an inventory of tricks.^[1][3]

Contents

1. First, what is the picture made on?
2. Watercolour and the work beneath it
3. A line that arrives by transfer
4. Spraying, scraping and building colour
5. Paste paint is a material question
6. The mount is part of the work
7. Cutting, turning and the other side
8. Two material stacks, two very different pictures
9. When later treatment changes the appearance
10. What a reproduction can and cannot tell us

First, what is the picture made on?

The support is the material carrying the image. It may be paper, board, wood, cloth or glass. Klee's selection was unusually broad. The Zentrum Paul Klee lists many papers and cardboards, wood, canvas, jute, silk, cotton and gauze, along with more specific kinds of cloth. Sometimes he glued a textile to a larger, firmer material; sometimes he mounted it over a stretcher. The visible margin of that larger support could serve as a border. A fabric's weave could remain part of the image, either because it was unprimed or because thin colour left its structure apparent.^[1]

The support is only the beginning. A ground is a preparatory layer placed over it. Klee could work on an untreated surface or add chalk, gypsum, paste or other preparations. He varied their thickness and texture, smoothing some and roughening others. He drew into or scraped away material and sometimes introduced sand or textile pieces. The resulting ridges and depressions catch light and interrupt a painted line. A flat reproduction can carry the colours while suppressing this relief.^[1]

Consider Senecio, painted in 1922. Kunstmuseum Basel records oil over a chalk ground on gauze, with the gauze on cardboard. Its face and arcs are usually described through shape and colour. The museum's material description adds another level: the colour sits over a prepared textile, rather than on a neutral sheet or conventional stretched canvas. To say exactly how each part of the weave or ground affects a particular passage would require close technical examination; the verified stack already tells us that the surface is constructed.^[4]

The terminology of a museum record is a starting point, not a promise that the image consists of only one layer. Centre Pompidou lists its 1926 Florentinisches Villen Viertel (Villas florentines) as oil on cardboard. Its own curatorial analysis explains more: a thick preparation of plaster and paste was cut into while fresh, then coloured. Lines in the wet ground leave shallow relief and shadows. What might look in a photograph like lines drawn over paint can be grooves in the material itself. This object shows why the construction beneath a medium label matters to the visible image.^[5]

Watercolour and the work beneath it

Klee did not approach watercolour as a single transparent wash. The Zentrum Paul Klee describes early work in greys, followed by experiments with coloured, translucent layers. It reports that he sometimes applied very dilute paint to paper he had already moistened. Overlapping washes can let one hue show through another, while an underlying line or a paper's texture remains visible. Klee's 1914 Tunisia pictures are often discussed as a turning point in his handling of colour, but the museum's account also traces a longer technical development before and after the journey.^[1]

Hammamet with Its Mosque makes the relation between sheet and mount unusually concrete. A Metropolitan Museum of Art acquisition note identifies watercolour and pencil on two sheets of laid paper mounted to cardboard. The title, year and catalogue number are written on the cardboard below the image. The coloured scene and the inscribed secondary support are thus parts of one assembled object. A crop that shows only the painted area removes evidence of Klee's chosen presentation and the way he recorded the work.^[6]

Watercolour also appears beside media that resist simple categories. The Metropolitan Museum describes Static-Dynamic Gradation as oil and gouache on paper, with a border combining gouache, watercolour and ink, mounted on cardboard. MoMA's Twittering Machine is an oil-transfer drawing with watercolour and ink on paper, while gouache and ink mark the board around it. The words in those records are useful because they stop us from identifying the whole work by its most immediately visible colour. The watercolours page follows Klee's handling of that medium in greater detail.^[7][8]

A line that arrives by transfer

Klee's oil-transfer method lets an earlier drawing pass through a physical process before it appears in a new work. MoMA describes the procedure for Twittering Machine: he placed an original drawing over a transfer sheet carrying oil paint, with another sheet underneath, and traced the drawing with a pointed tool. Pressure deposited the transferred line on the receiving sheet. Where pressure varied or the hand touched the stack, marks and smudges could appear that were not present in an ordinary pen drawing. Klee then added colour and other marks to the result.^[8]

The Yokohama Museum of Art describes a different 1922 oil transfer in its collection, The Attack's Matter, Spirit and Symbol. Its account stresses the uneven, textured line produced by differences in tracing pressure and the friction of paper. This is an important distinction: transfer involved planning and repetition, yet the physical contact introduced variation. It is inaccurate to describe every such work as an untouched mechanical copy, or as a line drawn directly onto the final sheet.^[9]

Transfer can make the order of work difficult to recover from catalogue numbers alone. In their study of Klee drawings, Elizabeth Kaiser Schulte, Margaret Holben Ellis and Antoinette King examined a drawing and a second drawing traced from it. The catalogue sequence suggests the reverse order from the visible physical relationship. They propose that Klee may have formally recorded a sheet only after mounting it. This is their inference from the evidence, not a rule established for every entry in his register.^[3]

Art historian Tamara Trodd interprets Klee's oil transfers, made mainly between 1919 and 1925, in relation to contemporary debates about mechanisation and the artist's hand. Her published abstract draws attention to the tactile, blurred quality of the resulting line. That reading sits alongside the museums' physical descriptions without making every transfer a picture about machines. The drawings page considers how this procedure belongs within Klee's wider work with line.^[10]

Spraying, scraping and building colour

The Zentrum Paul Klee says Klee used sprayed colour occasionally before 1920 and made it a more important means of composition around the middle of that decade. It describes passing watercolour from a brush through a sieve, using grids, perforated plates and stencils to control what reached the support. A sprayed ground could appear cloudy behind drawn forms, while a stencil could hold an edge against diffuse droplets. These are several possible visual results, not a single look shared by all sprayed works.^[1]

An individual museum record helps test the general account. The Metropolitan Museum's In the Manner of a Leather Tapestry (1925) is described as brush and ink with spattered tempera on paper mounted on board. An earlier Met acquisition essay calls its method a spray technique and mentions an atomizer or a mouth-blown device. That differs from the sieve procedure in the Zentrum Paul Klee's overview. The evidence shows a repertoire of ways to disperse paint, but does not establish which device made every droplet in the Met picture.^[11]

Klee could work in the opposite direction too: instead of adding tiny marks over the ground, he could remove or displace wet colour. Philadelphia Museum of Art describes Fish Magic as a coloured underlayer covered by black paint. Klee scratched through the dark surface to disclose the colour beneath. The museum also records a square of muslin glued to the canvas at the centre. The picture's aquatic and celestial forms are therefore joined to a literal patch of cloth and to an image made partly by uncovering, rather than laying colour only on top.^[12]

Across his work, the Zentrum Paul Klee records brush, palette knife, spatula and stamp marks, as well as scraping, smoothing, incision and sanding. A letter to Lily in March 1932, reproduced in its exhibition account, says he was testing new grounds, some with sand. This does not make every granular Klee surface a sand ground. It shows that preparation itself was part of his experimentation and that a precise account of a work needs its own material evidence.^[1]

Paste paint is a material question

The German word Kleisterfarbe is often translated as “paste paint” or “coloured paste.” Paste could bind a ground or be mixed with colour. According to the Zentrum Paul Klee, Klee used paste as a binder for broad grounds from the 1920s and experimented from about 1930 with paste in the paint itself. The museum describes mixtures with watercolour, pastel and oil, then a thick, opaque paste colour in which dry pigment was probably stirred into paste. That probable formulation cannot stand as a known recipe for every work.^[1]

The ratio and method affected the surface. A thick paste could be spread with a knife; a wetter mixture remained workable while Klee moved it with a tool or finger. Paint gathered along some displaced edges. The Zentrum Paul Klee also describes brush application in late work. “Paste paint” on a label consequently tells us something important about the binder but not, by itself, whether a given area was knifed, brushed or redistributed while wet.^[1]

The term tempera needs similar care. Patrizia Zeppetella, Stefan Zumbühl and Nathalie Bäschlin have studied Klee's own catalogue terms against material analyses. Their abstract states that he first used “tempera” in his handwritten oeuvre catalogue in 1905, often left the medium unspecified and used the term in combinations with watercolour, gouache or oil. The catalogue word alone therefore does not prove a single modern recipe, and it should not be silently equated with Kleisterfarbe.^[13]

Bäschlin's directly examined Legende vom Nil (Legend of the Nile), 1937,215, makes the risk of a one-word medium label concrete. Klee called its material “Pastellfarben” and described white cotton on jute on a stretcher. He glued the smaller cotton cloth onto the jute and painted it with both pastel-like sticks and a brushable version of the colour. The weave remains visible between the ochre signs and blue, green and lilac fields. Bäschlin identifies a later, opaque yellow-ochre border applied with a knife in Kleistertempera; that layer is absent from Klee's short catalogue technique line. Here “pastel” does not mean only dry chalk marks on paper.^[21]

Micro-samples showed a lean paint system with protein binder and varying amounts of oil; traces of shellac were found, while possible wax requires more caution. Bäschlin relates the colour's saturation and matte surface to the small amount of binder, and the same weak binding leaves the paint mechanically fragile on its flexible textile support. Her 2014 conservation stabilised losses while preserving the original stretcher and paint surface. These findings belong to this examined work; they cannot be used to assign the same mixture to every late Klee painting or to identify binders from a web image.^[21]

Late work shows why layer-by-layer descriptions matter. The current Zentrum Paul Klee image-request record gives Insula dulcamara (1938) as oil and coloured paste on newsprint on jute on a stretcher, with original frame strips. An older ZPK guide says simply “paper on jute.” The newer caption names the kind of paper more precisely; both describe a monumental surface assembled from different layers rather than oil paint on bare canvas.^[14]

The mount is part of the work

Many Klee works on paper have a primary sheet carrying the image and a secondary support, usually card, to which he attached it. These cards were not merely backing material. The 1986 conservators' study, based on examining numerous objects and asking Felix Klee about his father's practice, records dates, catalogue numbers and titles on them. It also finds painted borders, coloured papers, metallic paint and foil. Their sizes could be chosen to complement the image. Klee sometimes attached a drawing with scattered adhesive spots and sometimes adhered it more completely.^[3]

The choice could alter the visible sheet. Spots of paste pull on paper as it dries, creating shallow rises and hollows. Some movement belongs to how an object was made; more severe local tension can later tear or weaken it. The conservators' treatment of Bauchtanz distinguished its original paper character from harmful distortion. They did not simply assume that the flattest possible sheet would be truest to Klee. In another case, separating Wachsendegras from its mount disclosed an earlier Klee etching on the back; the authors later questioned whether that discovery justified taking the compound object apart. Their paper is valuable both for its findings and for the way it revisits its own treatment decision.^[3]

Nina Quabeck's later research at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen compared one hundred Klee works with archival photographs and surviving original components. She shows that some works on paper had mounts cut down, toned or replaced after leaving Klee's hands. Fragments carrying his writing can remain on the back of a later support. For Zwischenzeit gegen Ostern and Gedanken bei Schnee, she uses those fragments, early photographs and the catalogue to reconstruct former presentations. A caption or photograph of the present object may thus describe a later arrangement as well as Klee's original one.^[15]

Quabeck also describes Der Boulevard der Abnormen (1938), coloured paste on newsprint mounted on card. A 1990s treatment flattened the sheet and changed the three-dimensional topography produced by spot attachment. The conservator at the time had a reason: concern that the buckling threatened the paint. Quabeck's comparison asks what was lost when a material condition was read only as damage. It is an object-specific conservation history, not permission to leave every distorted work untreated.^[15]

The framing question extends beyond paper. Some Klee paintings had simple wooden strip-frames, recorded in his catalogue and visible in early photographs. Quabeck found surviving strips on Bunter Blitz but also a later ornate frame that concealed them and reduced the visibility of its relief. Moderna Museet's conservators likewise opened frames around their Klee works and found folded or cut original mounts, discolouration and old tapes. Their new framing solution sought to reveal the proportions of Klee's card while protecting fragile surfaces. Quabeck observes that such modern choices, however careful, are themselves historically situated. The point for a viewer is to notice the edge as evidence, not to assume every current frame is by Klee.^[15][2]

Cutting, turning and the other side

Klee also changed the identity of an image by changing its shape. The Zentrum Paul Klee documents works he turned, repainted, cut apart and recombined, particularly from the period after his Tunisia journey into the early 1920s. It identifies Friedhof and Mädchen am Fenster as two of seven pieces from an earlier single picture. In another instance, Kränze für M and Garten=Rhythmus came from a support divided during the making process. A later independent title should not conceal the earlier physical relationship, and a join or edge can be a record of artistic decision rather than damage.^[1]

The reverse of a work could also be an active surface. In 2026, Zentrum Paul Klee curator Marie Kakinuma reported finding work on the backs of about 600 of Klee's roughly 9,600 works. That is a dated research finding, not a fixed proportion beyond further examination. Thin paper may let a reverse image show through; opaque canvas or card may keep it unseen until restoration or technical study. On the back of Glass Façade, restoration revealed another depiction beneath a later covering layer. Kakinuma also points to Child and Kite / Flower and Snake, two worked sides for which Klee did not settle a front in his own catalogue; Felix Klee designated one only after his father's death.^[16]

These cases resist a simple rule that the back is always a rejected sketch. Sometimes Klee reused material. Sometimes a reverse was deliberately worked and related to the front. In a group of late drawings described by ZPK, coloured paste on the back helped create a faint ground on the front. Each object's support controls what can be seen and what a conservator can discover. The verso may change how we date, title or understand the side we thought we already knew.^[16]

Two material stacks, two very different pictures

MoMA records Cat and Bird (1928) as oil and ink on gessoed canvas mounted on wood. The rounded head and small bird can seem disarmingly simple. Its construction is not: a prepared canvas surface carries distinct paint and ink, and the whole is attached to a rigid board. The museum's interpretation concerns the cat's inward image of a bird, while the medium entry reminds us that an apparently spare design can involve several physical decisions. It would be wrong to replace that entry with the looser phrase “oil on canvas” if the mount and ink matter to the viewer's question.^[17]

Museum Folkwang's Fire at Full Moon (1933) offers a different combination: watercolour over paste colour on prepared canvas. Its broad areas of colour do not mean that the picture was made with one opaque paint. The institutional record distinguishes the preparatory surface, the paste-colour layer and the watercolour above it. Folkwang dates its making to the summer of 1933 only as probable. The work belongs to a politically charged year, but the museum frames a political reading as a question rather than a documented statement of Klee's intent. The material record is secure enough to explain a layered surface without forcing a single symbolic interpretation of its red cross or yellow disc.^[18]

Ancient Harmony (Alter Klang, 1925) makes a useful counterexample. An official loan record transcribing Kunstmuseum Basel's description calls it oil on cardboard nailed to a frame. The near-square painting's many coloured rectangles invite us to think about relationships among hues, yet its support is a rigid, framed card rather than the prepared canvas, worked newsprint or gauze in the examples above. We can describe the visible colour intervals without claiming a specific stamping, spraying or scraping process that Basel has not documented for this object. A picture can be materially distinctive even where the established record names only one paint medium.^[19]

When later treatment changes the appearance

The way a Klee painting looks today may depend on work done after it left his hands. Conservator Barbara Scheibli describes Kleines Haus (Small House), 1928, 28 (L 8), made with oil and watercolour on cardboard. Its paint developed raised cracking and losses. In 1965, a treatment arranged by Felix Klee impregnated the paint with wax to keep more material from flaking away. Scheibli reports that the thick wax later yellowed and became cloudy, changing both colour and surface texture. The treatment had protected a fragile picture while creating a new problem for how it appeared.^[20]

Before its 2016 presentation, conservators removed the wax with a specially developed micro-aspiration device, working into the surface's recesses for more than 100 hours. Scheibli presents before-and-after views and describes a reconstructed frame. Her account shows why a historical photograph and a current photograph of one work may not be interchangeable evidence of Klee's intended colour. It does not mean every Klee picture was waxed, that all colour differences between reproductions are damage, or that the procedure used for Kleines Haus would suit another object. Its value is a precisely documented case of material history changing what viewers see.^[20]

What a reproduction can and cannot tell us

A digital image is useful for following a colour arrangement, comparing motifs and seeing parts of a work unavailable in person. It is less reliable for the height of a paste ridge, the slight shadow of a raised paper edge, the weave beneath thin paint or the full proportions of an artist's mount. Cropping can erase dates and titles. A front photograph cannot show a worked reverse. Brightness and colour reproduction also vary with photography and display. These limits do not make looking online futile; they tell us what questions to take back to an object record, conservation study or museum visit.^[3][15][16]

For any one Klee work, begin with its current owning museum: check the original title, date, catalogue number, support and mount. Ask whether the medium line describes all visible layers, whether the border is by Klee and whether the frame or backing has changed. Then look at the picture itself: where does colour soak in, sit up, scrape away or pass through another layer? The paintings hub and the individual artwork pages offer work-specific routes; the colour page considers relationships among hues, and the drawings and prints pages follow line and transfer further. Materials make these questions visible. They do not replace the image's other meanings.^[1][3]

Explore selected works from Klee’s much larger oeuvre. Titles without a link have an authenticated catalogue identity but no reviewed article yet.

Artworks directory

217 artworks

Search artworks Medium All media Drawing Painting Reset

Name	Date	Medium
A Gate	1939	Painting and mixed media
A Woman for Gods	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Ab Ovo	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Above Mountain Summit	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Abstract Trio	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Acrobats	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Actor's Mask	1924	Painting and mixed media
Ad Marginem	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Ad Parnassum	1932	Painting and mixed media
Adventurer Ship	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Affected Place	1922	Drawing and mixed media
After a Sketch from Zurich	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
After Drawing	1919	Print
After The Floods	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
All Souls' Picture	1921	Print
Ancient Harmony	1925	Painting and mixed media
Angel Applicant	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Angel Serves the Desired	1920	Print
Angel, Still Female	1939	Painting and mixed media
Angelus Novus	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Animal Terror	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arab Song	1932	Painting and mixed media
Archangel	1938	Painting and mixed media
Architecture	1923	Painting and mixed media
Architecture of the Plain	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Around the Fish	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arrival of the Air Steamer	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Asiatic God	1924	Painting and mixed media
Astrological Fantasy Portrait	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Athlete's Head	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Aufgehender Stern	1931	Painting and mixed media
Autumn Flower	1922	Painting and mixed media
Bad Band	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Baroque Centaur	1939	Painting and mixed media
Before the Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Before the Snow	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Besessenes Madchen	1924	Watercolour and mixed media
Bird Garden	1924	Print
Bird Wandering Off	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Blossoms in the Night	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Blue-Bird-Pumpkin	1939	Painting and mixed media
Boats in the Flood	1937	Painting and mixed media
Botanical Theatre	1934	Drawing and mixed media
Boy in Fancy Dress	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Broken Key	1938	Print
Brother and Sister	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
But the Red Roof	1935	Painting and mixed media
C - C = Fisch	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Cacti	1912	Painting and mixed media
Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees)	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Captive Pierrot	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Castle and Sun	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cat and Bird	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cathedrals	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Chalice of the Heart	1937	Painting and mixed media
Characters in Yellow	1937	Painting and mixed media
Chosen Site	1927	Mixed media
Christmas Picture	1923	Drawing and mixed media
City of Towers	1916	Painting and mixed media
Clarification	1932	Painting and mixed media
Collection of Figurines	1926	Painting and mixed media
Colorful Architecture	1917	Painting and mixed media
Comedians' Handbill	1938	Print
Comic Opera Singer	1927	Painting and mixed media
Composition	1939	Painting and mixed media
Composition with Figures	1915	Drawing and mixed media
Composition with the Yellow Half-Moon and the Y	1918	Watercolour and mixed media
Conch–Still Life II	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Cosmic Composition	1919	Painting and mixed media
Crystal Gradation	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Dance of the Grieving Child	1922	Painting and mixed media
Dancing Girl	1940	Painting and mixed media
Das Licht und Etliches	1931	Mixed media
Death and Fire	1940	Painting and mixed media
Death for the Idea	1915	Print
Demon as Pirate	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Diana	1931	Painting and mixed media
Diavolo Player	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Die Kapelle	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Die Vase	1938	Painting and mixed media
Doctor	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Dredger and Sailboat	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Ein Tor	1939	Painting and mixed media
Ein Weib fur Gotter	1938	Mixed media
Embrace	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Episode before an Arab Town	1923	Print
Equals Infinity	1932	Painting and mixed media
Eros	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Error on Green	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Evening Figure	1935	Drawing and mixed media
Falling Bird	1919	Print
Fermata	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Clown	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Full Moon	1933	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire in the Evening	1929	Painting and mixed media
Fish in the Harbour	1916	Watercolour and mixed media
Fish Magic	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Flock of Birds	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Flora on Sand	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Flower Myth	1918	Print
Flower Stand with Watering Can and Bucket	1910	Watercolour and mixed media
Flowering Tree (Abstraction with Reference to a Flowering Tree)	1925	Painting and mixed media
Flowers in Pots	1923	Print
Flowers in Stone	1939	Painting and mixed media
Forest Witch	1938	Painting and mixed media
Fright of a Girl	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Fruits on Red	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Full Moon	1919	Mixed media
Föhn Wind in Franz Marc's Garden	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Garden in St Germain, The European Quarter near Tunis	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version)	1925	Print
Ghost of a Genius	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Girl in Mourning	1939	Painting and mixed media
Glance of a Landscape	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Gluht Nach	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Golden Fish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Goldfish Wife	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Green Plant, Blood, Louse	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Hafenbild	1918	Mixed media
Hammamet with Mosque	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Harbour with Sailing Ships	1937	Painting and mixed media
Hauptweg und Nebenwege	1929	Painting and mixed media
Heavenly and Earthly Time	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Heroic Fiddling	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Roses	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Strokes of the Bow	—	Mixed media
Highway and Byways	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Houses near the Gravel Pit	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Howling Dog	1928	Painting and mixed media
In the Current Six Thresholds	1929	Painting and mixed media
In the Style of Kairouan	1914	Drawing and mixed media
Individualized Altimetry of Stripes	1930	Painting and mixed media
Insula Dulcamara	1938	Print
Interior with the Clock	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Irma Rossa the Animal Tamer	1918	Drawing and mixed media
Journey in Corsica	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Landscape with Bluebirds	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Legend of the Nile	1937	Painting and mixed media
Lemon Harvest	1937	Watercolour and mixed media
Likeness in the Bower	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Limits of Reason	1927	Painting and mixed media
Little Hope	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Magdalena before the Conversion	1938	Drawing and mixed media
Mask of Fear	1932	Painting and mixed media
May Picture	1925	Painting and mixed media
Monument in a Cemetery	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Monuments at G	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Municipal Jewel	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Mural from the Temple of Longing Thither	1922	Print
Nach der Uberschwemmung	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
New Harmony	1936	Painting and mixed media
New House in the Suburbs	—	Mixed media
Old Steamboat	1922	Drawing and mixed media
On the Edge	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Once Emerged from the Gray of Night	1918	Drawing and mixed media
One Who Understands	1934	Painting and mixed media
Oriental Pleasure Garden	1925	Painting and mixed media
Park of Idols	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Passing by Red Pillars	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Persian Nightingales	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Popular Wall Painting	1922	Painting and mixed media
Prestidigitator	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Rainy Day	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Red and White Domes	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Red Balloon	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Refuge	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Rhythmic Rythmical	1930	Painting and mixed media
Saint of the Inner Light	1921	Print
Scaffolding of a New Building	1930	Painting and mixed media
Scholar in Dealing with Stars	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Seated Woman	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Senecio	1922	Painting and mixed media
Separation in the Evening	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Sinbad the Sailor	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Skeptically Smiling	—	Mixed media
Small House in the Garden City	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Small Portrait of a Girl in Yellow	1925	Painting and mixed media
Southern Gardens	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Static-Dynamic Gradation	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Still Life	1927	Painting and mixed media
Still Life with Gladioli	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Strange Garden	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Stricken City	1936	Painting and mixed media
Strong Dream	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Struck from the List	1933	Drawing and mixed media
Structural I	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Sumpflegende	1919	Painting and mixed media
Temple Gardens	1920	Drawing and mixed media
The Arrow before the Target	1921	Drawing and mixed media
The Barbed Noose with the Mice	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
The Flora of the Heath	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Goldfish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Hour Before One Night	1940	Painting and mixed media
The Man in Love	1923	Print
The Mask with the Flag	1925	Mixed media
The Pathos of Fertility	1921	Print
The Rhine at Duisburg	1937	Painting and mixed media
The Way to the Citadel	1937	Painting and mixed media
Three Houses and a Bridge	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Tightrope Walker	1923	Print
Tomb in Three Parts	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
Tomcat's Turf	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Tower in Orange and Green	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms I	1920	Watercolour and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms II	1920	Painting and mixed media
Tropical Dawn with the Owl	1921	Mixed media
Tropische Dammerung	1921	Painting and mixed media
Twittering Machine	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Variations (Progressive Motif)	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor	1923	Print
Viaducts Break Ranks	1937	Drawing and mixed media
Villa R	1919	Painting and mixed media
Village Carnival	1926	Painting and mixed media
Vor dem Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Wald-Hexen	1938	Painting and mixed media
Young Forest	1925	Drawing and mixed media

References

1. Zentrum Paul Klee, “Paul Klee. Ich bin Maler” (German, 2016), exhibition sections on supports, grounds, watercolour, spray, paste colour, cutting and two-sided works, View source.
2. Tora Hederus and Alison Norton, Moderna Museet, “The conservation and re-framing of Paul Klees works of art on paper from the Moderna Museet collection” (English, 2016), View source.
3. Elizabeth Kaiser Schulte, Margaret Holben Ellis and Antoinette King, “An Approach to the Conservation Treatment of Paul Klee Drawings,” The Book and Paper Group Annual 5 (English, 1986), View source.
4. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel 1937 exhibition booklet (German; French edition), Senecio object entry, View German source.
5. Christian Derouet, Centre Pompidou, “Florentinisches Villen Viertel (Villas florentines),” object analysis (French), View source.
6. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Notable Acquisitions 1984–1985, Berggruen Klee collection entry for Hammamet with Its Mosque (English), View source.
7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Static-Dynamic Gradation,” object record (English), View source.
8. The Museum of Modern Art, “Twittering Machine,” object record and 2019 publication excerpt (English), View source.
9. Matsunaga Shintaro, Yokohama Museum of Art, “The Attack's Matter, Spirit and Symbol,” object record (Japanese title; English interpretation), View source.
10. Tamara Trodd, “Drawing in the Archive: Paul Klee's Oil-Transfers,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (English, 2008), abstract only, View source.
11. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “In the Manner of a Leather Tapestry,” object record and Notable Acquisitions 1981–1982 essay (English).
12. Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Fish Magic,” object record (English), View source.
13. Patrizia Zeppetella, Stefan Zumbühl and Nathalie Bäschlin, “Then egg, then watercolour or tempera paints, then alcohol resin: Paul Klee's tempera painting techniques,” abstract in Tempera Painting 1800–1950 (English, 2019), View abstract and publisher listing.
14. Zentrum Paul Klee, image-request object caption (German; Italian interface) and Kosmos Klee easy-language guide (German), Insula dulcamara.
15. Nina Quabeck, “Change the Frame and You Change the Game? Research and Reevaluation of the Presentation Formats of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen's Paul Klee Collection,” The Book and Paper Group Annual 31 (English, 2012), View source.
16. Zentrum Paul Klee, Fokus. Klee's versos press kit (English, 2026), pp. 1–2, curator Marie Kakinuma's research, View source.
17. The Museum of Modern Art, “Cat and Bird,” object record and MoMA Highlights interpretation (English), View source.
18. Museum Folkwang, “Feuer bei Vollmond / Fire at Full Moon,” collection record (German and English), View source.
19. Boletín Oficial del Estado, Spanish state loan guarantee transcribing Kunstmuseum Basel's object details for Alter Klang (Spanish with German object entry, 2015), View source; Kunstmuseum Basel, 1960 accession list.
20. Barbara Scheibli, “Klees Kleines Haus, 1928, 28 (L8), restauriert und wieder ausgestellt,” Zwitscher-Maschine 2 (German, 2016), direct conservator account with before/after and reconstructed-frame captions, View source.
21. Nathalie Bäschlin, Fragile Werte: Diskurs und Praxis der Restaurierungswissenschaften 1913–2014 (German, 2020), pp. 37–44 and the direct object examination of Legende vom Nil, pp. 181–90, with sample analyses in the appendix. Her technical findings were read directly; the printed catalogue and Klee's original handwritten entry were not independently inspected. Its photographs and diagrams have separate rights and are not reproduced here, View source.

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