Born near Bern into a family of musicians, Paul Klee was introduced to art and music at a very young age. He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, then, after a trip to Italy, met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and joined the Blaue Reiter group.

In 1914, during a trip to Tunisia, Klee was deeply impressed by the quality of the light and colors, and this vision left a lasting impression on him. He used many different media, including oil, watercolor, and ink, which he often combined in his works.

Often associated with Expressionism, Cubism, or Surrealism, Klee's work is actually difficult to classify. It is generally recognized for its fragile, childlike quality and its allusions to poetry, music, and dreams. The geometrization of subjects and the search for perfection in material and color are sublimated by a desire to preserve intuition. His later works are characterized by rapid hieroglyphic symbols.

After World War I, Klee taught alongside Kandinsky at the Bauhaus, then, from 1931, at the Düsseldorf Academy, before being dismissed in 1933 by the Nazi party for his art, which was deemed “degenerate.” The artist then returned to Switzerland, where, deeply affected morally, he suffered from scleroderma and died in Muralto in 1940 at the age of 61.