I’ve been delighted by the work of Paul Klee since I was a schoolboy. You may say that his work is indeed school-boyish, indeed rather childish. He certainly made much of the idea that a painting or drawing can be a very simple, naïve-looking thing. But while I appreciated the apparent simplicity of his work I never mistook that for naivety, or simplicity of intention.
He was in fact both a highly accomplished draughtsman and a keenly analytical thinker on the subject of aesthetics. Some of his very early work would satisfy the most demanding academician. But even at the start, his imagination was bursting the bonds of orthodox pictorial language.
He was born in Switzerland, near Bern, the child of a Swiss mother and a German father, in the cultural context of late nineteenth-century European Symbolism
