Paul Klee may have been remote in person—some 

 him, at times, as “unapproachable”—but the territory he opened up through his work continues to affect other artists today, generations after his death in 1940.

“Nothing is more astonishing to the student of Klee than his extraordinary variety,” Alfred Barr, the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 

 in 1941. “In quality of imagination also he can hold his own with Picasso.”

Klee’s energetic experimentation with forms and materials has proved influential for artists from Anni Albers and Joan Miró in the 1920s to Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and living artists such as Etel Adnan, Michaela Flatley, and Richard Tuttle. Clement Greenberg’s famous observation of 1957—“Almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee”—still holds true.

During the 1920s, Klee’s unique use of line—he is said to have called it his “most treasured possession”—inspired his contemporaries both formally and conceptually. A student in the Bauhaus weaving workshop when Klee began teaching Theory of Design there, in 1927, the young Anni Albers transformed her teacher’s instruction to “take a line for a walk” into physical form 

—an approach that propelled her whole career as an artist.

“I was trying to build something out of dots, out of lines,” she later 

, “out of a structure built of those elemental elements and not the transposition into an idea.”

Among Albers’s notes is her translation into English of a lecture Klee gave in 1924 titled “On Modern Art”—a text she had hoped to have published, as she later wrote in a letter to the German art historian Charlotte Weidler, to “give me a feeling of having said at last in some way THANK YOU to Klee” (emphasis hers).

While the German Bauhaus emphasized rational solutions in the aftermath of the war, Klee’s work also appealed to the surrealist movement with which he was partly aligned, and that sought to reveal the “superior reality” of the subconscious mind. In particular, the “pictorial poetry” of Klee’s work, in which line can have a distinct calligraphic quality within a composition, was a revelation to artists seeking to convey the unconscious.

III Ich bin gesandt einen Alb zu Nehmen von der Menschheit (III I am sent to relieve mankind of a nightmare) 

Die Zwitscher-Maschine (The twittering machine)

 (1922), Klee enacted his famous statement, made in a 1920 essay titled “Creative Confession,” that “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” In Klee’s work, other artists found a realm of abstraction between the verbal and the visual; his fitful, organic handling appeared to directly inscribe a train of thought, and with a unique lyricism that 

The influence of Klee’s line and his tendency to detach forms from a definitive ground is clear, for example, in the “

”or “painting-poetry” works of the 1920s by Joan Miró, who frequently sought to give expression to memory, and made no secret of the importance the older artist had for him (he likely first encountered Klee’s work in around 1922). “Seeing Miró in light of Klee,“ 

 writes, “was to witness how Miro had gained entry to an autonomous sphere of abstraction and the unconscious via Klee’s seemingly boundless atmosphere of color and running lines.” Miró later said, “My encounter with Klee’s work was the most important event in my life.”

It may have been through his close friend Miró (whom he met in Paris in 1928), that the sculptor Alexander Calder became one of the earliest American artists to have been affected by Klee. Calder’s “mobiles,” in which bent wire creates lines in space that are weighted and lightly choreographed by attached steel shapes, seem indebted to the structural rhythm of Klee’s compositions, which are similarly “suspended” in two dimensions, and which can appear imbued with movement.

Paul Klee with his cat, Fripouille, Possenhofen

Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, Hendaye

Drawing for Nylon Rug

Die Zwitscher-Maschine (Twittering Machine), 1922, 151

A timeline of his enduring appeal to artists

Paul Klee’s Ages of Influence

TIME’s List of the Next 100 Most influential People in the World

Njideka Akunyili Crosby Named to TIME 100 Next

Image With Caption

Media

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings

On Luc Tuymans: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings

Interview with the Editor: Eva Meyer-Hermann

Explore the Exhibition

“I want to be the mediator between Plato and Shakira”

"The actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus remembers her father, William Louis-Dreyfus, swearing on the phone in the 1990s as he almost got outbid on a painting by Bill Traylor, the Alabama artist born into slavery who took up drawing around age 85.

'He amassed quite a number of them,' she said of the works, which the artist made with scraps of cardboard as his canvas, using poster paint, charcoal and pencil. 'He really likened Traylor to the greats—the Giacomettis, the Kandinskys.'

Forty of those Traylors will go on view at the David Zwirner Gallery’s Upper East Side space on Tuesday in an exhibition whose proceeds will mostly go toward the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit organization that seeks to break the cycle of poverty for youngsters in Central Harlem through education.

The show includes prime examples of Traylor’s signature style—elegantly spare, alternately buoyant and elegiac. Despite their stick-figure minimalism, the characters in his paintings and drawings have personality; his rabbits, birds and dogs seem to move through space.

'They’re almost modern in composition,' Ms. Louis-Dreyfus said, “and they have a joyfulness that reminds me of my father at his best.'"

 is on view through February 8, 2020 at 34 East 69th Street, New York.

Image: Alabama artist Bill Traylor working under a shade tree in a Montgomery neighborhood, 1946. Photo courtesy of the Alabama State Council on the Arts

The New York Times, feature by Robin Pogrebin

“He likened Traylor to the greats—the Giacomettis, the Kandinskys.”

Opening November 30, 2019, David Zwirner will present an exhibition of work by American artist Dan Flavin (1933-1996) at its recently opened Paris location. Spanning three decades of his career, this will be the first major presentation of Flavin’s work in the French capital since his 2006 retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

, 1970. Installation view, David Zwirner, Paris, 2019

November 30, 2019—February 1, 2020

Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin Exhibition Opening in Paris

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.