Senecio

Paul Klee painted this small head in 1922, while he was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, the young German school where art was being rebuilt out of squares, circles and primary colour after the war. Senecio is that idea turned into a face. An old man's head, round as a moon, is assembled from rectangles of orange, pink and pale yellow, with two small triangles for the raised brows and the eyes set slightly off from each other, so the whole face seems to flicker between calm and alarm. The title is the Latin name of the common groundsel weed, and Klee added a German nickname meaning something like an old man near his end. For all the geometry, he keeps it warm and almost comic. The panel is only about 40 centimetres across.