"Or The Mocked Mocker"
Paul Klee
German, born Switzerland. 1879–1940
1930
An oil-on-canvas portrait in which Klee reduces a laughing, mocking head to a single, continuously drawn, brightly colored line, aiming to translate rhythmic, musical gesture into pictorial caricature.
What strikes you is the neon-like ribbon of red, orange, yellow, and turquoise that snakes across a deep brown ground to invent a playful, almost cartoonish profile whose loops and overlaps read like a drawn melody.
By making line itself the subject, Klee transformed portraiture into a language of gesture and color, influencing modernist ideas about abstraction, teaching practice at the Bauhaus, and how simple marks can convey complex emotion and thought.
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
17 x 20 5/8" (43.2 x 52.4 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of J. B. Neumann
Accession
637.1939
Palette
Exhibitions
