Paul Klee, who lived from 1879 to 1940, was not only a prominent Swiss-born painter but a musician as well. Klee was a professor at the Bauhaus Art School in Germany and was highly impressed by the Cubist works; going as far as taking a lot of inspiration from the movement and putting it into his own works. “To him these experiments showed not so much the way to new methods of representing reality as to new possibilities of playing with form” (Gombrich 578). He reasoned that nature herself creates through the artist.
This painting, of which he called A Tiny Tale of a tiny dwarf, is an example of his view on painting. The concept of playing with form rather than methods of reality is integrated very well into this painting. It tells the story of a fairy-tale transformation of a gnome that is cohesively told using the circular format of the painting.
