His German Expressionist roots fracture against Swiss formalist precision; North African light bleeds through square-based color studies, chromatic scales layering tonal gradations like fugal structure. Childlike primitivism masks rigorous design theory. The work refuses static categorization. Figuration dissolves into abstraction, then reconstitutes. Symbolic notation systems—arrow motifs, alphanumeric glyphs—function as visual polyphony, each mark simultaneously pedagogical tool and mystical cipher. This is art made during exile, responding to degenerate art persecution by constructing alternate symbolic languages. Klee's late expressionist phase intensifies the paradox: forms grow more elemental as conceptual density multiplies. What looks playful is pedagogically calculated. What seems abstract carries political weight. The Bauhaus professor's legacy persists—not as style, but as method for seeing color, shape, line as interlocking philosophical propositions.

Made during a brief but transformative trip to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, this statement marks the exact moment Klee resolved a years-long struggle to master color, after which faithfulness to nature receded and he moved decisively into what he called the "cool romanticism of abstraction."

The phrase, central to his Bauhaus teaching, reframed line not as a fixed contour but as a spontaneous, almost living process — an idea that helped formalize core tenets of abstract art and modern design education, and that continues to be cited as a defining statement of his artistic philosophy.

Variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, Klee worked largely in isolation from his peers and interpreted each new trend in his own idiosyncratic way — a refusal to be pinned down that Marcel Duchamp specifically praised, noting "a Klee never became another Klee."

André Breton cited Klee in his first Surrealist manifesto and included his work in the 1925 group exhibition, drawn to Klee's spontaneous, dreamlike symbol systems — even as Klee's confidant Will Grohmann insisted he was "by no means a dreamer" but a disciplined modern professional.

His Writings on Form and Design Theory, later published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, systematized color theory and formal composition into a teaching framework so influential that scholars directly compare its weight for 20th-century art to Leonardo's Treatise on Painting for his own era.

Denounced in the press as a "Galician Jew" and "cultural Bolshevik," searched by the Gestapo, and fired from his teaching post in 1933, Klee painted the self-portrait Struck from the List to commemorate the moment — and 102 of his works were later seized from German public collections and 17 displayed in the 1937 "Degenerate Art" exhibition.