Paul Klee
(1879 - 19409)

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee

Gespenst eines Genies [Ghost of a Genius]
1922
Oil transfer and watercolour on paper laid on card
50 x 35,40 cm
National Galleries Scotland
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/1329

This work may be a self-portrait. Klee had very large eyes, a domed head and a closely cropped beard. The artist made many puppets for his son, and this figure, with its arms flopping down and tilted head, appears to have been inspired by a puppet. The figure was created by a process of oil transfer, rather like making a carbon copy. The artist used a sharp instrument to draw the outline of the figure on a sheet painted with special oil paint on the underside. The black smudges show where Klee's hand rested on the paper.