From 1911 until his death Paul Klee kept a complete record of all his paintings, watercolours and drawings, recording the year and the sequence in which each work was commenced. An inscription indicates that this was the tenth work that Klee began in 1922.

In Ghost of a Genius, an oversized head hangs heavily on a tiny body. It may be a self-portrait; Klee had large eyes, a domed head and a closely cropped beard. Klee was born near Bern in Switzerland, and studied in Munich. Ghost of a Genius dates from an important moment in Klee’s career. Just a couple of years earlier, in 1920, he had his first major survey exhibition when he showed a large number of his works at a gallery in Munich. In January of the following year he took up a teaching post at the Bauhaus, the school of architecture and design founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, which later moved to Dessau. Almost half of Klee’s total production of some 10,000 works were made during his ten years as a teacher at the Bauhaus. Often watercolours and drawings on a small scale, they exhibit an astonishing range of styles and demonstrate both his preoccupation with artistic theory and process as well as his concern with unlocking fantasy and invention.

This combination of logic and imagination is a hallmark of Klee’s approach. One of his fellow teachers at the Bauhaus, the artist Lyonel Feininger and his wife Julia later recalled their first meeting with Klee in 1922, noting what they described as the carefully ordered confusion of his studio; they described how Klee was, ‘surrounded by a number of easels, each carrying one of those miraculous creations, his paintings, growing into completion slowly and by stages. His method of working can really be compared to the organic development of a plant. There was something akin to magic in the process’ (M. Gale, The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee: making visible, London 2013).

This figure was created by a process of oil transfer. Klee would have begun by painting a sheet of paper with sticky oil paint, and then, before it had dried, laying a fresh sheet under it, so that when he drew or traced the figure on the first sheet it transferred the paint through to the second, without reversing it. The black smudges show where Klee’s hand rested on the paper. This approach allowed Klee to make several variants of a work from one drawing. The present work appears to have been transferred from a drawing now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and then coloured with watercolour. Another, uncoloured variant, dated 1923, is in the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio.