Paul Klee Posters

Klee is the Bauhaus master whose work does not look like the Bauhaus. Where his colleagues built with circles and primaries, he built with small squares of colour laid side by side, wandering lines and figures that look drawn by someone who has decided not to be clever. That apparent simplicity is deceptive: he taught colour theory at the school and filled some three thousand pages of notebooks working out why one hue does what it does next to another.

Why the work is free to reproduce

Klee was born in 1879 and died in June 1940. In the EU, copyright in an artistic work lasts for the author's lifetime plus seventy years, which means his output entered the public domain at the start of 2011. That is why a Klee print can be sold as a faithful reproduction while his Bauhaus colleagues Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers, who died in 1985 and 1976, cannot be reproduced at all. Everything in the Klee collection stands on that date.

The three things to look for

The colour squares. His best-known method is a field built from small rectangles of watercolour, each slightly different from its neighbour, so the surface shifts as you move past it. Nothing in the image is outlined; the shapes are made of colour meeting colour. These are the prints that reward being hung where you walk past rather than where you sit.

The line. Thin, continuous, apparently aimless, and in fact very deliberate — he described drawing as taking a line for a walk. The line works make good small formats, because the whole content is in a few marks and enlarging them adds nothing.

The near-childlike figures. Fish, cats, faces, arrows, castles. This is the part that gets Klee hung in children's rooms, and it works there, but the work is not childish. The figures sit on top of colour fields that are the product of a colour theorist, which is why the same print holds up in a living room.

Which format suits which kind of Klee

Type of work	Best formats	Reason
Colour-square fields	50×70, 70×100	The shifting surface needs area to work
Line drawings	21×30, 30×42	Few marks; scale adds nothing
Figurative pieces	30×42, 50×70	Read at 1-1.5 m, where a child stands
Dense mixed compositions	50×70	Detail survives; smaller loses it

One practical warning about the originals. Klee worked small and often on odd supports — many pieces are under 30 cm on their longest side, mounted on card he cut himself. A reproduction at 70×100 is therefore four or five times the size of the thing he made, and on the densest works that shows. If a print looks slightly soft at the largest size, that is the original's scale, not the printing.

Hanging Klee

Two rules, both from the colour work. First, give him a plain wall. A patterned wallpaper against a surface already made of shifting colour produces a headache. Second, resist grouping several Klees together; two colour-field works side by side cancel each other, because each is already a composition of many parts. If you want more than one, pair a colour field with a line drawing and let them differ.

Standard centre height of 145 cm applies, and the hanging height guide covers the one common exception, above a bed. In a child's room, hang lower than the adult standard so the picture is at the child's eye level rather than yours — the reasoning is in the children's collection, where several of the figurative works belong as much as they do anywhere.

Frames

Oak is the default. Klee's palettes are warm and dusty — ochre, rose, olive, brick — and pale wood extends them. Black works on the line drawings, where the image is ink on plain ground and the frame simply continues the line. A coloured frame is possible up to 50×70 but rarely wise, since the print already contains twenty colours and the frame would have to agree with all of them. Both default finishes run through every size in the frame range, and the exact dimensions are in the size guide.