Around the Fish

A still life surrounded by signs

Paul Klee places a fish on a brightly edged platter, ready, it seems, to be eaten. Yet the meal has no table. Against a deep, nearly black field, a crescent, a full disk, a cross, an arrow, a flag, pale column-like forms and a small human head occupy the space around it. The central fish looks precisely worked; the surrounding signs are spare and discontinuous. Around the Fish is recognisable as a still life and resistant to the idea that a still life must show a stable room or a single moment. It asks what else might be gathered around a familiar object besides the objects one could set beside it.^[1][2]

Klee made the painting in 1926 and called it Um den Fisch. It belongs to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. A close description starts with its pictured relationships: the prepared fish versus its possible watery world, the edible object versus the moon and other signs, and an arrow whose path moves attention away from the platter. The temptation to decode each mark is strong. The sources, however, give several different readings rather than a key left by Klee.^[1][2][3]

Contents

1. The object and its names
2. A fish served in a space without a table
3. Symbols without a fixed translation
4. What Klee wrote about looking beyond appearance
5. From Dresden to New York
6. A later artist puts the fish on a table
7. Looking around it again

The object and its names

MoMA identifies the work as oil and tempera on canvas mounted on cardboard, measuring 46.7 × 63.8 cm. Its museum number is 271.1939, and its acquisition is credited to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. Klee's own annual register number is 1926,124 (C 4), recorded in the 2026 Jewish Museum label and German scholarship. The later Catalogue raisonné Paul Klee gives continuous number 4075. These numbers serve different cataloguing systems; none is a date of acquisition.^[1][2][4]

The 2026 Jewish Museum label abbreviates the medium to “oil on canvas.” An earlier scholarly German description gives oil on Nesseltuch mounted on card, a glue ground, varnish and white tempera beneath the paint. That fuller phrase may reflect catalogue or technical evidence, but it does not make the order of every layer clear. Without the conservation record, MoMA's current “oil and tempera on canvas mounted on cardboard” is the most reliable short caption. It also makes a physical distinction: the painting is mounted on a support, not a loose canvas hung only by a frame.^[1][2][4]

“Around” in the English title keeps attention on the relation between centre and surround. The original German Um den Fisch likewise locates the scattered forms in relation to the fish, while leaving their connection open. The German scholar Harriet Zilch hears an echo of um den Tisch, “around the table.” The resemblance is witty, especially for a painted meal without a table, but it is her interpretation. No consulted Klee document says that he intended the pun, and the title alone does not establish a particular dinner or ritual.^[4]

MoMA's online record marked the painting not on view when checked on 26 September 2026. Ownership is therefore the stable statement here; a current display claim needs a fresh museum check when this page is released.^[1]

A fish served in a space without a table

The platter is a long oval with a strong blue rim. The fish lies along its horizontal axis, patterned with dark and light marks and surrounded by green sprigs. The broad dark field leaves space between the plate and the other forms. That space does not behave as a tabletop: there is no edge, leg, cloth, wall or horizon to give the objects ordinary depth. Instead, the signs appear to hover in a pictorial field. The fish can be read as food, while the rest can be seen as thoughts, forces, other places or phases of its life. Each of those further terms is an interpretation; the visible fish, plate and separation come first.^[1][2]

The upper part of the painting contains a yellow disk partly met by a dark curved form, readable as a full and crescent moon. A small head near the upper left is compressed into a few features. At the right and left, taller pale forms stand like translucent tubes or vessels. There are rounded coloured forms, an emphatic cross, a mark like an exclamation point, a red forked flag and an arrow. Their unequal sizes and styles are important. The platter is a recognisable thing drawn with care; the other elements range from objects to graphic signs. Klee makes us switch ways of looking as our eyes move around the fish.^[1][2][4]

MoMA's 2006 label inventories several of these features and relates the arrow to Klee's Bauhaus diagrams for force and emotion. It says the arrow points toward the stylised head and possibly alludes to human consciousness. That last word matters. The arrow's direction can be observed; a claim about consciousness is the curator's cautious proposal. The page should not turn it into an established private symbol used by Klee in every work.^[1]

The Jewish Museum's 2026 label proposes another path through the image. It sees herbs on the platter as recalling seaweed, so the fish's present state as prepared food evokes the water it once inhabited. It relates lunar phases to tides, reads another form through cellular division, and describes the little head as combining frontal and profile views. These associations make a coherent account of food, nature, growth and perception, but the more specific biological language is a contemporary curatorial reading. A viewer can follow the suggested connections without being told that Klee made a scientifically exact diagram of embryology.^[2]

In a separate MoMA audio account, curator Anne Umland makes the central oval itself uncertain: the fish appears over a blue-and-black plate, or perhaps a pool. She sees a form beneath it as a reflection and wonders whether a second, fainter reflection lies lower still. The Jewish Museum's 2026 audio-description script similarly notices a smaller fishlike silhouette beneath the main body, facing the other way. These are useful prompts for close looking, especially because the platter reading otherwise makes the scene seem settled too soon. They remain attributed observations and interpretations; the available small reproductions cannot verify each faint mark independently.^[10][11]

Writing in a Japanese university journal, Yasuo Ishii reads the oval as a deep dish that also evokes an aquatic setting. He connects the small head, arrow, vessels and plants with the passage from living fish to human food, and notices a second fish form below the first. His emphasis on the fish's scale compared with the little head usefully shifts attention back to the animal rather than letting the orbiting signs take over. Ishii sometimes turns these visible relationships into confident claims about what Klee wanted to say; his article does not supply a Klee document that would settle such intentions. Read beside Umland's plate-or-pool question, it is a distinct, arguable account of the painted forms, not a final decoding.^[10][14]

The contrast between food and environment also separates this fish from Klee's nearby aquatic pictures. In The Goldfish (1925), the fish is an illuminated presence within dark water. In Fish Magic (1925), aquatic and other images intermingle in a theatrical field. Around the Fish first looks like a fish that has been caught and served, while the oval and the form beneath it leave the water reading open. The surrounding signs keep the lost water and a wider cosmos imaginable even after the creature is on a plate. These are comparisons of visible arrangements, not evidence that Klee designed the three works as a fixed trilogy.^[1][2][4]

Symbols without a fixed translation

The cross and fish have histories in Christian imagery. Zilch places both in the wider group of Klee motifs that borrow from religious iconography. Her argument is that he reshapes these motifs playfully and sometimes satirically; a conventional symbol can appear without turning the whole painting into a conventional devotional image. That is a useful restraint. The cross is visible, but it does not by itself make the platter an altar, the fish Christ or the ring of objects a congregation. Those stronger identifications require evidence this painting has not supplied.^[4]

There is a different danger in claiming that none of the symbols matters. The crescent, arrow, flag and exclamation mark are purposeful choices and make the space around the fish feel active. Klee's arrangement encourages associations without settling their order. A cross can recall religion; a moon can recall time or tide; an arrow can direct the eye. The different associations can coexist. The painting's unity comes partly from a shared dark field and from the return of our gaze to the bright dish, rather than from one translated sentence hidden among the signs.^[1][2][3]

In the 1987 MoMA catalogue, curator Ann Temkin treats the picture as an example of Klee's carefully rendered elements that float separately in the same field. She argues against presenting it as a rebus whose final answer solves the experience of looking. Her comparison with collage concerns how the composition works: unlike a traditional still life, the adjacent images do not have to occupy one continuous physical scene. She does not say this painting is physically made of pasted fragments. The medium remains the oil and tempera on mounted canvas recorded by MoMA.^[1][3]

MoMA's 2019 label likewise stresses free-floating images, Klee's interest in apparently childlike forms and the work's resistance to a settled interpretation. It also notes that such procedures helped make Klee attractive to Surrealist artists in the 1920s. That historical relation is more precise than simply calling the painting “Surrealist.” Klee was teaching at the Bauhaus and built a deliberate visual order from recognisable and invented signs. Its open reading was a strength of the work for some contemporaries, even if it later offered hostile critics an excuse to dismiss it.^[1][3]

What Klee wrote about looking beyond appearance

The 2006 MoMA label uses a sentence from Klee about an object exceeding what its outward appearance shows. Its source is his essay Wege des Naturstudiums, published in the Bauhaus book Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923, at pp. 24–25, three years before this painting. The German sentence begins by saying that an object extends beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner nature. Klee then discusses what can be learned from examining an object's interior, as well as routes of study beyond unaided outward sight. The essay concerns his wider approach to nature and art; it is not a written explanation attached to Um den Fisch.^[1][5][6]

The essay helps explain why a prepared fish might be accompanied by signs of life, environment and thought. Seeing its painted outer form is one thing. Imagining its former habitat, biological structure or relation to a person eating it is another. Yet the reasoning must run from a general idea to a question about the painting, not from a single quotation to a claim of certain intent. The moon and small head can lead the eye outward from the food precisely because Klee did not provide a diagram with labels matching his essay.^[2][5]

Klee's handling of the Bauhaus arrow offers a similar balance. He taught with arrows; MoMA identifies the arrow's direction here. Neither fact proves that its red form has a single, unchanging psychological meaning. In a picture built from a dish, astronomical shapes and almost typographic punctuation, the arrow can operate as an instruction to look, a hint of force and a source of tension around the otherwise still fish.^[1][3]

From Dresden to New York

The painting had a public institutional life before MoMA. According to the museum's provenance research, Dresden's Gemäldegalerie acquired it from the Internationale Kunstausstellung held at the city's Städtischer Ausstellungspalast in June–September 1926, where it was no. 528. That was the year Klee made the work. It was an acquisition by a German museum, long before the Nazi attack on modern art.^[1]

Historian Christoph Zuschlag supplies an earlier step in the later suppression: Um den Fisch was removed from the Gemäldegalerie's display in March or April 1933, together with 27 other pictures. It was then displayed in the denunciatory Entartete Kunst exhibition in the Dresden town hall from 23 September to 18 October 1933. MoMA's provenance also records displays at Nürnberg, 7–21 September 1935, and Dortmund, 11 November–8 December 1935. Removal from normal display, exhibition as an object of ridicule and eventual confiscation were distinct acts, not a single event.^[1][7]

The Reich Ministry confiscated the work from Dresden in 1937. MoMA's research identifies it in the confiscation inventory as EK 15982, Um den Fisch. It was shown in the infamous Munich Entartete Kunst exhibition from 19 July to 30 November 1937 and travelled to other venues. Zuschlag identifies it on a touring list and in a photograph of the Salzburg exhibition in September 1938. After that display it was among 71 works sent back to Berlin. The museum record and German archival study together make clear that the painting's route through these exhibitions extended beyond Munich.^[1][7]

MoMA records the picture on consignment to Karl Buchholz in Berlin in 1939, then with Curt Valentin's Buchholz Gallery in New York, before MoMA acquired it on 13 April 1939 through the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. It appeared in MoMA's exhibition Art in Our Time from 10 May to 30 September 1939, no. 182. These dates describe what happened to the object; they do not mean the 1926 symbols forecast the later persecution.^[1]

MoMA's 1987 catalogue brings the human response into view. In a 17 March 1939 letter to Lily Klee, Valentin described the Dresden picture as a favourite and reassured her about its being in New York. The letter's date precedes the museum's recorded formal acquisition date in April. It may reflect an arrangement already underway, but the sources inspected do not establish when every step of title or payment occurred. The responsible account keeps the letter and the museum date distinct. Lily's later correspondence, discussed in the same catalogue, reveals both sadness about German museum disposals and relief when Klee's art reached a safer setting.^[1][3]

MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. publicly framed the 1939 acquisition of displaced works in terms of the receiving country's cultural freedom, as MoMA later recalled. His statement belongs to the reception history of the painting, not its iconography. The shift is striking without being forced into the image: Dresden had purchased Um den Fisch in 1926; Nazi authorities denounced and confiscated it; by 1939 it was part of a New York museum collection. A later MoMA catalogue and the museum's installation record show that it remained visible in exhibitions over subsequent decades. None of those historical facts replaces the questions the painting posed when first made.^[1][8][9]

A later artist puts the fish on a table

In 1970, Dutch conceptual artist Ger van Elk made a work titled Paul Klee – Um den Fisch, 1926. MoMA describes it as eight colour slides projected onto a cloth-covered wooden table. Its 2009 exhibition account says the slides show van Elk appearing to eat a fish dinner modelled on Klee's painting. The Dutch Art & Project collection record confirms the title, date, table-and-projector format, an Amsterdam showing in 1971 and a 2009 MoMA exhibition. This is a documented later response to Klee's specific work, not a clue to what Klee intended in 1926.^[12][13]

Van Elk's performance makes a sharp visual comparison possible. Klee paints a prepared fish with no ordinary table and lets other forms float around it. Van Elk supplies an actual table, food and the time it takes to eat. What remains ambiguous in the painting becomes an event staged before a viewer, while the projected slides keep that event an image. His work shows how a later artist could take the fish's still-life promise literally and make its instability part of a new medium. That is an interpretation of the relationship between the two works, grounded in their documented forms, rather than a claim that one explains the other's private symbolism.^[1][12][13]

Looking around it again

Start with the platter and then follow the objects clockwise. The signs need not form a sentence to change what the fish appears to be. The lunar shapes suggest a world outside the meal; the plants can belong to garnish and perhaps recall water; the head introduces a human observer; the arrow directs our own eyes. Return to the fish and it is still food, but it is harder to see only food. This is the productive force of the painting's title: the subject is the fish and what thought gathers around it.^[1][2][3]

The securely documented object is Um den Fisch, 1926,124 (C 4), now MoMA 271.1939, in oil and tempera on canvas mounted on cardboard. Its dispersed images support several historically recorded readings; their exact private code is not documented. Its later passage from Dresden through Nazi confiscation to New York is unusually well traced and should be kept separate from interpretation of the 1926 scene. The pleasure and difficulty of looking lie in holding together the painted meal, the surrounding signs and the room the painting leaves for the viewer.^[1][2][3][7]

For related forms and fish imagery, see The Goldfish, Fish Magic, the Bauhaus page and the paintings index.

Explore selected works from Klee’s much larger oeuvre. Titles without a link have an authenticated catalogue identity but no reviewed article yet.

Artworks directory

217 artworks

Search artworks Medium All media Drawing Painting Reset

Name	Date	Medium
A Gate	1939	Painting and mixed media
A Woman for Gods	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Ab Ovo	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Above Mountain Summit	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Abstract Trio	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Acrobats	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Actor's Mask	1924	Painting and mixed media
Ad Marginem	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Ad Parnassum	1932	Painting and mixed media
Adventurer Ship	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Affected Place	1922	Drawing and mixed media
After a Sketch from Zurich	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
After Drawing	1919	Print
After The Floods	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
All Souls' Picture	1921	Print
Ancient Harmony	1925	Painting and mixed media
Angel Applicant	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Angel Serves the Desired	1920	Print
Angel, Still Female	1939	Painting and mixed media
Angelus Novus	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Animal Terror	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arab Song	1932	Painting and mixed media
Archangel	1938	Painting and mixed media
Architecture	1923	Painting and mixed media
Architecture of the Plain	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Around the Fish	1926	Painting and mixed media
Arrival of the Air Steamer	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Asiatic God	1924	Painting and mixed media
Astrological Fantasy Portrait	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Athlete's Head	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Aufgehender Stern	1931	Painting and mixed media
Autumn Flower	1922	Painting and mixed media
Bad Band	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Baroque Centaur	1939	Painting and mixed media
Before the Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Before the Snow	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Besessenes Madchen	1924	Watercolour and mixed media
Bird Garden	1924	Print
Bird Wandering Off	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Blossoms in the Night	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Blue-Bird-Pumpkin	1939	Painting and mixed media
Boats in the Flood	1937	Painting and mixed media
Botanical Theatre	1934	Drawing and mixed media
Boy in Fancy Dress	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Broken Key	1938	Print
Brother and Sister	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
But the Red Roof	1935	Painting and mixed media
C - C = Fisch	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Cacti	1912	Painting and mixed media
Camel (in Rhythmic Landscape with Trees)	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Captive Pierrot	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Castle and Sun	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cat and Bird	1928	Drawing and mixed media
Cathedrals	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Chalice of the Heart	1937	Painting and mixed media
Characters in Yellow	1937	Painting and mixed media
Chosen Site	1927	Mixed media
Christmas Picture	1923	Drawing and mixed media
City of Towers	1916	Painting and mixed media
Clarification	1932	Painting and mixed media
Collection of Figurines	1926	Painting and mixed media
Colorful Architecture	1917	Painting and mixed media
Comedians' Handbill	1938	Print
Comic Opera Singer	1927	Painting and mixed media
Composition	1939	Painting and mixed media
Composition with Figures	1915	Drawing and mixed media
Composition with the Yellow Half-Moon and the Y	1918	Watercolour and mixed media
Conch–Still Life II	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Cosmic Composition	1919	Painting and mixed media
Crystal Gradation	1921	Drawing and mixed media
Dance of the Grieving Child	1922	Painting and mixed media
Dancing Girl	1940	Painting and mixed media
Das Licht und Etliches	1931	Mixed media
Death and Fire	1940	Painting and mixed media
Death for the Idea	1915	Print
Demon as Pirate	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Diana	1931	Painting and mixed media
Diavolo Player	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Die Kapelle	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Die Vase	1938	Painting and mixed media
Doctor	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Dredger and Sailboat	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Ein Tor	1939	Painting and mixed media
Ein Weib fur Gotter	1938	Mixed media
Embrace	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Episode before an Arab Town	1923	Print
Equals Infinity	1932	Painting and mixed media
Eros	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Error on Green	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Evening Figure	1935	Drawing and mixed media
Falling Bird	1919	Print
Fermata	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Clown	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire Full Moon	1933	Watercolour and mixed media
Fire in the Evening	1929	Painting and mixed media
Fish in the Harbour	1916	Watercolour and mixed media
Fish Magic	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Flock of Birds	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Flora on Sand	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Flower Myth	1918	Print
Flower Stand with Watering Can and Bucket	1910	Watercolour and mixed media
Flowering Tree (Abstraction with Reference to a Flowering Tree)	1925	Painting and mixed media
Flowers in Pots	1923	Print
Flowers in Stone	1939	Painting and mixed media
Forest Witch	1938	Painting and mixed media
Fright of a Girl	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Fruits on Red	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Full Moon	1919	Mixed media
Föhn Wind in Franz Marc's Garden	1915	Watercolour and mixed media
Garden in St Germain, The European Quarter near Tunis	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version)	1925	Print
Ghost of a Genius	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Girl in Mourning	1939	Painting and mixed media
Glance of a Landscape	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Gluht Nach	1939	Drawing and mixed media
Golden Fish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
Goldfish Wife	1921	Watercolour and mixed media
Green Plant, Blood, Louse	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Hafenbild	1918	Mixed media
Hammamet with Mosque	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Harbour with Sailing Ships	1937	Painting and mixed media
Hauptweg und Nebenwege	1929	Painting and mixed media
Heavenly and Earthly Time	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Heroic Fiddling	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Roses	1938	Painting and mixed media
Heroic Strokes of the Bow	—	Mixed media
Highway and Byways	1929	Drawing and mixed media
Houses near the Gravel Pit	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Howling Dog	1928	Painting and mixed media
In the Current Six Thresholds	1929	Painting and mixed media
In the Style of Kairouan	1914	Drawing and mixed media
Individualized Altimetry of Stripes	1930	Painting and mixed media
Insula Dulcamara	1938	Print
Interior with the Clock	1913	Watercolour and mixed media
Irma Rossa the Animal Tamer	1918	Drawing and mixed media
Journey in Corsica	1927	Drawing and mixed media
Landscape with Bluebirds	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Legend of the Nile	1937	Painting and mixed media
Lemon Harvest	1937	Watercolour and mixed media
Likeness in the Bower	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Limits of Reason	1927	Painting and mixed media
Little Hope	1938	Watercolour and mixed media
Magdalena before the Conversion	1938	Drawing and mixed media
Mask of Fear	1932	Painting and mixed media
May Picture	1925	Painting and mixed media
Monument in a Cemetery	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Monuments at G	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Municipal Jewel	1917	Watercolour and mixed media
Mural from the Temple of Longing Thither	1922	Print
Nach der Uberschwemmung	1936	Watercolour and mixed media
New Harmony	1936	Painting and mixed media
New House in the Suburbs	—	Mixed media
Old Steamboat	1922	Drawing and mixed media
On the Edge	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Once Emerged from the Gray of Night	1918	Drawing and mixed media
One Who Understands	1934	Painting and mixed media
Oriental Pleasure Garden	1925	Painting and mixed media
Park of Idols	1939	Watercolour and mixed media
Passing by Red Pillars	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Persian Nightingales	1917	Drawing and mixed media
Popular Wall Painting	1922	Painting and mixed media
Prestidigitator	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Rainy Day	1931	Watercolour and mixed media
Red and White Domes	1914	Watercolour and mixed media
Red Balloon	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms	1920	Drawing and mixed media
Refuge	1930	Watercolour and mixed media
Rhythmic Rythmical	1930	Painting and mixed media
Saint of the Inner Light	1921	Print
Scaffolding of a New Building	1930	Painting and mixed media
Scholar in Dealing with Stars	1926	Watercolour and mixed media
Seated Woman	1930	Drawing and mixed media
Senecio	1922	Painting and mixed media
Separation in the Evening	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Sinbad the Sailor	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Skeptically Smiling	—	Mixed media
Small House in the Garden City	1928	Watercolour and mixed media
Small Portrait of a Girl in Yellow	1925	Painting and mixed media
Southern Gardens	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Static-Dynamic Gradation	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Still Life	1927	Painting and mixed media
Still Life with Gladioli	1932	Watercolour and mixed media
Strange Garden	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Stricken City	1936	Painting and mixed media
Strong Dream	1929	Watercolour and mixed media
Struck from the List	1933	Drawing and mixed media
Structural I	1924	Drawing and mixed media
Sumpflegende	1919	Painting and mixed media
Temple Gardens	1920	Drawing and mixed media
The Arrow before the Target	1921	Drawing and mixed media
The Barbed Noose with the Mice	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
The Flora of the Heath	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Goldfish	1925	Watercolour and mixed media
The Hour Before One Night	1940	Painting and mixed media
The Man in Love	1923	Print
The Mask with the Flag	1925	Mixed media
The Pathos of Fertility	1921	Print
The Rhine at Duisburg	1937	Painting and mixed media
The Way to the Citadel	1937	Painting and mixed media
Three Houses and a Bridge	1922	Watercolour and mixed media
Tightrope Walker	1923	Print
Tomb in Three Parts	1923	Watercolour and mixed media
Tomcat's Turf	1919	Watercolour and mixed media
Tower in Orange and Green	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms I	1920	Watercolour and mixed media
Tree and Architecture - Rhythms II	1920	Painting and mixed media
Tropical Dawn with the Owl	1921	Mixed media
Tropische Dammerung	1921	Painting and mixed media
Twittering Machine	1922	Drawing and mixed media
Variations (Progressive Motif)	1927	Watercolour and mixed media
Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor	1923	Print
Viaducts Break Ranks	1937	Drawing and mixed media
Villa R	1919	Painting and mixed media
Village Carnival	1926	Painting and mixed media
Vor dem Blitz	1923	Drawing and mixed media
Wald-Hexen	1938	Painting and mixed media
Young Forest	1925	Drawing and mixed media

Related artworks

Explore eight other Klee works, beginning with works close in date to this one.

Ancient Harmony

1925

Fish Magic

1925

Flora on Sand

1927

The Goldfish

1925

Actor's Mask

1924

Castle and Sun

1928

Cat and Bird

1928

Fire in the Evening

1929

References

1. The Museum of Modern Art, “Paul Klee, Around the Fish, 1926,” current object data, 2006 and 2019 labels, installation history and detailed provenance research (English; accessed 26 September 2026), View source.
2. The Jewish Museum, New York, Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds, written exhibition labels (2026), PDF viewer page 13, Around the Fish (Um den Fisch), 1926,124, and curatorial reading of nature, growth and perception (English), View source.
3. Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde 1912–1940,” pp. 26–27, and Carolyn Lanchner, “Klee in America,” p. 101, in Lanchner, ed., Paul Klee (The Museum of Modern Art, 1987; English). MoMA publication record; digitized text consulted.
4. Harriet Zilch, Die Engelsdarstellungen von Paul Klee (University of Bamberg dissertation, 2004), pp. 44–45 and note 146, Um den Fisch material and proposed Fisch/Tisch and Christian-iconography readings (German), View source.
5. Paul Klee, “Wege des Naturstudiums,” in Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923 (1923), pp. 24–25, original publication catalogued and digitized by SLUB Dresden; full digitization access challenged during this research. Quotation and context checked via source 6 and MoMA source 1, rather than a direct full-page transcription, View source.
6. Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Paul Klees Lehre vom Schöpferischen (2012), discussion and transcription of Klee's 1923 Wege des Naturstudiums (German), View source.
7. Christoph Zuschlag, “Paul Klee und die »Entartete Kunst«,” Zwitscher-Maschine 4 (2017), German archival study of Dresden's 1933 removal and exhibition and Salzburg's 1938 exhibition and return, View source.
8. The Museum of Modern Art, “Works from Degenerate Art,” retrospective museum feature, including Barr's 1939 acquisition framing and current material description (English), View source.
9. The Museum of Modern Art, Art of the Twenties (1979), catalogue entry for Around the Fish, p. 97, former Dresden ownership and historical medium description (English), View source.
10. Anne Umland, MoMA audio commentary on Around the Fish, curator's plate-or-pool and reflection reading (English; German-language version also checked), View source.
11. The Jewish Museum, New York, Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds, audio-description script (2026), stop 901, visual description of Around the Fish, pp. 2–3 of the PDF (English), View source.
12. The Museum of Modern Art, In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, exhibition audio entry and press release, description of Ger van Elk's Paul Klee—Um den Fisch, 1926 (1970), Object entry, Press release.
13. RKD / Art & Project, Ger van Elk collection entry for Paul Klee – Um den Fisch, 1926, 1970, format and exhibition history (Dutch/English), View source.
14. Yasuo Ishii, “Consideration on Expression in Paul Klee’s Primitivism: Form and Line in His Drawing of Fish,” Journal of Azabu University 28 (2016), pp. 27–36, especially pp. 32–33; original article published in Japan in English, with Japanese and other-language references (English), View source.