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# Paul Klee’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/paul-klee-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-07-27T11:49:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T21:27:36.000Z
- Description: Angels, fish, floating balloons and grids of color: ten works by the twentieth century’s most inventive and least pompous modernist.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born outside Bern, Switzerland, to a German music teacher and a Swiss singer, and was a good enough violinist to have made a career of it. He chose drawing instead, and spent the next four decades producing an extraordinary body of work — close to ten thousand paintings, watercolors and drawings, most of them small enough to hold in two hands. He is often quoted as describing drawing as taking a line for a walk, and the phrase catches something true about him: his art wanders, follows its own logic, and arrives somewhere no one expected.

For ten years he taught at the Bauhaus alongside Wassily Kandinsky, filling notebooks on color and form that are still read as one of the most searching accounts of how pictures work. He also had an unusual gift for keeping theory light. Arrows, fish, moons, letters of the alphabet, cats, angels and small crooked houses drift through his pictures with the seriousness of a child at play. The Nazis dismissed him from his teaching post in 1933 and hung his work in their exhibition of “degenerate art”; he returned to Switzerland, fell ill, and painted with new starkness until his death. Here are ten of his most famous works.

## [Angelus Novus](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-angelus-novus-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Angelus Novus by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-angelus-novus-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-angelus-novus-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Made in 1920 by pressing an inked drawing onto paper and then washing it with color, Angelus Novus shows a wide-eyed, scroll-haired figure with open wings and small dangling feet, hovering on a stained ochre ground. It would be a minor curiosity but for its owner: the critic Walter Benjamin bought it the following year and kept it with him for the rest of his life. In his last essay he read the picture as the angel of history — a figure driven helplessly backward into the future by a storm, staring at the wreckage piling up behind it. The painting now hangs in Jerusalem, and it has become one of the most written-about images of the twentieth century.

## [Fish Magic](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-fish-magic-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Fish Magic by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-fish-magic-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-fish-magic-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Fish Magic (1925) is Klee at his most enchanting. Against a scratched, near-black ground he sets a small aquarium of a universe: striped and spotted fish, cut flowers, a crescent moon, a clock face on a tower, and two odd human figures at the edges. Klee let a rectangle of muslin into the canvas and painted across it, so that a faint seam runs through the picture like a curtain half drawn back on the scene. The blacks were scraped and rubbed until the colors beneath glow through. It is a night picture, a stage set, and a joke about how much can be made out of a very dark surface.

## [Red Balloon](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-red-balloon-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Red Balloon by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-red-balloon-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-red-balloon-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A red disc floats above a loose stack of colored rectangles that reads as a small town — a roof here, a window there, a wall of pale yellow — in this 1922 oil, made during Klee’s Bauhaus years. He primed the gauzy fabric support with chalk so the paint sank in and dried to a soft, chalky bloom, which is why the picture looks lit from within rather than from outside. Almost nothing in it is drawn: the balloon is the only firm shape, and everything else is weight, color and proportion. It is a good demonstration of Klee’s claim that a painting should be built rather than copied.

## [Ancient Sound (Abstract on Black)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-ancient-sound-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Ancient Sound by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-ancient-sound-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-ancient-sound-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Nothing here but a grid of squares — ochre, rust, olive, dull gold — laid over a black ground and set slightly askew, so the whole surface seems to breathe. Ancient Sound dates from 1925, and its title is not decoration. Klee came from a family of musicians, played the violin all his life, married a pianist, and thought constantly about how color might work the way harmony does: individual notes, chords, a key. These square-grid paintings are his closest approach to that idea, and this is the most resolved of them, dark and warm and oddly solemn for a picture with no subject at all.

## [Hammamet with Its Mosque](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-hammamet-with-its-mosque-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Hammamet with Its Mosque by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-hammamet-with-its-mosque-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-hammamet-with-its-mosque-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

In April 1914 Klee traveled to Tunisia with two painter friends, and the two weeks changed him. In this watercolor of the coastal town of Hammamet, gardens, walls and a minaret dissolve into transparent rectangles of rose, violet and sand, with a band of dotted greenery holding the middle together. He wrote in his diary that color had taken possession of him and that he no longer needed to chase it — he and color were one. He was thirty-four, and had until then worked mostly in black and white. Everything he did afterward, including his abstractions, grows out of these few weeks.

## [Villa R](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-villa-r-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Villa R by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-villa-r-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-villa-r-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted on cardboard in 1919, Villa R assembles a landscape out of pieces that refuse to settle: a striped hillside, a white house with checkered windows, a wedge of dark mountain, a flat yellow moon, and — planted in the foreground at the size of a boulder — a large green letter R. Klee liked letters because they sit exactly on the line between picture and sign, and here the R behaves like a signpost, a monogram and a rock all at once. The tilted, cut-paper look of the composition anticipates a great deal of later graphic design, though Klee was thinking about none of that.

## [Castle Garden](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-castle-garden-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Castle Garden by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/1-castle-garden-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-castle-garden-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Castle Garden (1931) is built entirely from small dabs of color — hundreds of them, laid down like tiles — out of which towers, arches, a bowl of flowers and a scatter of trees slowly emerge. Klee had been looking hard at the pointillists, and for several years he made pictures this way, letting the mosaic of touches do the drawing. Standing close, the surface is pure confetti; step back and a garden assembles itself. He painted it in the year he left the Bauhaus to teach at the Düsseldorf Academy, a post he would hold for barely two years before being dismissed.

## [In the Current Six Thresholds](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-in-the-current-six-thresholds-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![In the Current Six Thresholds by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/4-in-the-current-six-thresholds-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/4-in-the-current-six-thresholds-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Horizontal bands of green, rust and blue-black run the width of this 1929 canvas, broken by narrow bright lines and interrupted by blocks that step up and down like terraces. Klee had recently spent a winter in Egypt, and the picture carries the memory of irrigated fields seen from a distance, of strata and water levels and long flat horizons — though he was careful never to make it a view of anything. The bands read equally as a landscape and as a stave of music, and the title’s six thresholds are simply the six points where the rhythm changes. It is one of his most quietly ambitious paintings.

## [Ad Marginem](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/ad-marginem-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Ad Marginem by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/ad-marginem-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/ad-marginem-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Latin title means “to the margin,” and that is precisely what happens: a dull red sun sits alone in the middle of a mottled green field while everything alive — plants, a bird, a caterpillar, small letters, a staring face — crowds around the four edges, some of it upside down, as though the picture had been rotated while it was being made. Klee began the watercolor in 1930 and reworked it years later, deepening the ground until it looks weathered, almost archaeological. Reading it means turning it, or turning yourself, which is the point. Few paintings make so much out of the parts we are trained to ignore.

## [Howling Dog](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-howling-dog-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Howling Dog by Paul Klee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-howling-dog-paul-klee-1.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-howling-dog-paul-klee.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A dog throws its head back beneath a small burning disc of a moon, and the whole surface of the picture spins around it in currents of gray, apricot and pale green, as though the sound itself were bending the air. Painted in 1928, Howling Dog is drawn with a single wiry line that loops through the swirl and only intermittently resolves into an animal — a muzzle, an ear, a splayed paw. Klee returned to cats, dogs and birds throughout his career, always treating them as creatures with an inner life rather than as subjects for a study. Here he manages the difficult trick of painting a noise.

Klee’s pictures are small, strange and unfailingly good company. They reward slow looking without demanding it, they hold their own on a wall beside almost anything, and their color — chalky, warm, faintly faded even when new — flatters a room rather than shouting across it. A century on, no other modernist looks less dated.

[Shop Paul Klee prints here](https://fineartamerica.com/art/paul+klee?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and explore the rest of our famous paintings collection for more of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.