A Guardian Angel Serves a Small Breakfast (Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück) for the yearbook Die Freude: Blätter einer neuen Gesinnung (Joy: Papers for a New Consciousness)

Paul Klee

1920

A lithograph in which Paul Klee reduces a whimsical scene—a guardian angel serving a small breakfast—to a poetic, childlike line drawing that turns a private vision into print.

A spare, wavering contour frames a birdlike, winged figure holding a tiny tray; the economy of strokes feels both playful and mysterious, like a delicate doodle charged with quiet gravity.

This 1920 print shows Klee’s pioneering use of minimal, symbolic line to carry narrative and inner life, helping expand modern art’s vocabulary by proving that simple marks can convey complex metaphor and mood in drawing and printmaking.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Abstraction Bauhaus Expressionism Figurative

Exhibitions

Prints by Paul Klee

1954

Paul Klee

1941

Paul Klee

1987

Paul Klee Centennial: Prints and Transfer Drawings

1979