The Met: Valloton and Paul Klee

The Metropolitan Museum's 2019 exhibit of Swiss-born painter Felix Vallotton was titled "Painter of Disquiet."  He lived and worked in Paris most of his life, 1865-1925.  He was a technical master and employed many techniques and media.  Here are but two images:

 On the left, Felix Vallotton, 1907, Gertrude Stein.

On the right, Pablo Picasso, 1905-06, Gertrude Stein.

Felix Vallotton, 1903, Interior with Woman in Red.   (Kunsthaus Zurich on loan)

And then there is always Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) at the Met.  "The Metropolitan is home to a large collection of art by Paul Klee, one of the most aesthetically versatile and celebrated abstract painters of the twentieth century.  In 1984, Heinz Berggruen, an influential art dealer and collector of modern art, gave ninety paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Klee to the Museum.  A selection of the Berggruen Klee Collection, spanning the German artist's career from his student days in Bern, Switzerland, in the 1890's to his death in Muralto-Locarno in 1940, rotates on a permanent basis.
  Bergruen's deep interest in Klee began in 1945, when he saw the artist's work in San Francisco.  Recalling that experience in 1988, Berggruen wrote, 'Subconsciously, Klee's work must have evoked the emotional vibrations that filled the many happy years of my youth in Berlin.'  As this recollection suggests, Klee's work is widely admired for its playful sense of wonderment and discovery, qualities achieved via the painter's ceaselessly inventive, sophisticated, but also subtle technique."

Paul Klee, 1927, Still Life.  Oil on gypsum.

Paul Klee, 1929, Monuments at G.  Gypsum and watercolor on canvas.

"Shortly after his return to Dessau from Egypt in 1929, Klee created several works that recall the North African desert landscape.  In this painting, thin horizontal stripes cover the entire surface from edge to edge and top to bottom, while vertical and diagonal lines, some forming acute or obtuse angles, interrupt the colorful flow of the horizontal bars.  The two triangular shapes in the bottom half of the composition probably represent two of the three pyramids at Giza."

Paul Klee, 1934, One Who Understands.
Oil and gypsum on unprimed canvas.

  

"The squared circle of the abstracted head in Klee's painting is made of the same lines that divide the picture like a cracked windowpane.  Klee taught at the Bauhaus - first in Weimar and then in Dessau - between 1921 and 1931 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf from 1931 to 1933.  Hitler's National Socialists declared his work 'degenerate' and fired him in 1933.