Much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter's work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today. He left behind not just those 9,000 pieces of art (not counting the hand puppets he made for his son), but plenty of writings as well, the best known of which came out in English as Paul Klee Notebooks, two volumes (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature) collecting the artist's essays on modern art and the lectures he gave at the Bauhaus schools in the 1920s.

"These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance," says Monoskop...[+]