Was Läuft Er? [How he runs?]

Born in the small town of Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, Klee left his homeland early to attend art school in Munich. In 1898, on a school excursion to visit the artist Walter Ziegler in Burghausen, Klee became enamored of the etching process and made his first experiments in the graphic medium. Although his print output was not extensive, he created both etchings and lithographs throughout his life, stopping only in 1932 when the Nazi regime put an end to his public career. Klee’s work is inhabited by tragicomic characters, figural exaggerations prompted by a combination of imagination and reason, an intellectualized innocence and a child’s fantasy. He said of his own work that “graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality” – a quality derived from his enthusiasm for primitive and folk art, and children’s drawings. His two figures in Was läuft er? seem to be acting out a scenario, complete with pathos and drama and laughter, encompassing so much of the human experience in a few lines. In 1932 Christian Zervos, publisher of the Cahiers d’Art, was having financial difficulties, and many leading artists of the day, including both Klee and his old friend Kandinsky, contributed prints to an edition of the Cahiers that was intended to help Zervos out of his troubles. Klee’s work, Was läuft er?, was his final print; in 1933, under the Nazis, he lost his professorship at Düsseldorf and thereafter worked in seclusion until his death in 1940. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)