Paul Klee, Red Balloon, 1922

We have been talking about Paul Klee and his painting "Red Balloon". Klee was born December 18, 1879 – died June 29, 1940. He was a painter born in Switzerland and is considered to be a Swiss German. 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 got deep into color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Paintings was for the Renisance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and also his musicality.

Although much of Klee’s work is figurative, compositional design nearly always preceded narrative association. The artist often transformed his experiments in tonal value and line into visual anecdotes. Red Balloon, for example, is at once a cluster of delicately colored, floating geometric shapes and a charming cityscape. –  Guggenheim.com