Klee: Reevaluating the Artist With the Silent Smile

Few twentieth-century artists generate such division in critical opinion as Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940). During the 1950s, when pressing the cause of Jackson Pollock, critic Clement Greenberg dismissed Klee as a "respectable bourgeois." In 1987, Hilton Kramer, editor and critic for the New Criterion, deplored the "Sad Case of Paul Klee" as "an aesthetic eclipse." Klee's misfortune, like that of John Singer Sargent, was to be an artist of subtlety and wit in an age of revolutionary transition.