Marcel Franciscono offers an exhaustive historical and critical study of Klee's artistic personality and thought. Drawing extensively on documentation published since 1940, Franciscono highlights the extraordinary range of artistic, literary, and philosophical speculation Klee brought to his work. The portrait that emerges is one of a great comic artist, an ironist whose most characteristic pictures pit beauty of form and color against the dubious nature of things, yet one whose satiric depictions of everyday life extend to the most rarified evocations of nature. "There is no comparable book in the recent Klee literature. Marcel Franciscono introduces the reader to the artist and, in turn, to all the major Klee problems uncovered by specialists working in one or another area of the master's work. The result is a rich symposium in which all these opinions, as well as the relevant biographical facts, are returned to individual works of art, illuminating them exquisitely. In this low-keyed fashion emerges the splendid general study that is required of every generation for a great artist."--Daniel Robbins, Union College