Senecio

A face caught between youth and age

A large round head almost fills Paul Klee’s Senecio. Its red eyes meet ours, but they do not look in quite the same direction. One eyebrow rises in a white triangle; the other turns down in a dark curve. A fine line divides the face, while pink, yellow, ochre and violet areas refuse to settle into an ordinary portrait. Klee makes a person immediately recognisable from a handful of shapes, then makes it difficult to say what that person is feeling or even how old he is.^[1][2][3]

The painting was made in 1922, during Klee’s Weimar Bauhaus years, and is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Basel records its full title as Senecio (Baldgreis). The two names are a productive way into the picture: Senecio is a botanical genus, while the German Baldgreis suggests someone who will soon be an old man. The title is playful, but the plant connection is documented by the owning museum, not an eccentric guess to be dismissed. Nor does it identify a performer or diagnose a real sitter.^[1][2][4]

Explore the details of Senecio

Select a numbered area to examine its detail at high resolution.

1 2 3 4 5

1

Upper head and divided colour

2

Unequal eyes

3

Cheeks and central divide

4

Nose and mouth junction

5

Lower neck and painted ground

Contents

1. Which painting is Senecio?
2. Why a plant name for a face?
3. Look at the circle and the grid
4. Colour and surface at close range
5. A painting of the Bauhaus years
6. How the painting reached Basel

Which painting is Senecio?

Basel identifies the work as 1922, 181, a year and number from Klee’s own system of recording his production. Its museum inventory number is 1569. The dated collection record transcribes a lower-left signature and date, KLEE / 1922///181, as well as a partly illegible notation on the reverse. These numbers have different jobs: Klee’s 181 distinguishes the painting within his output for 1922, while the Basel number identifies the object in the museum. The printed nine-volume Catalogue raisonné Paul Klee lists it in volume 3, page 446, entry 3005, according to Basel’s bibliography; that catalogue page has not been directly examined for this account.^[2]

The work measures 40.3 × 37.4 cm. Basel specifies oil on a chalk ground on gauze on cardboard. Each layer matters. Gauze is the fabric support; the chalk ground prepares it for paint; cardboard gives the small picture a stiff backing. The museum’s older record also includes an original yellow-painted frame in its material description. A reproduction usually isolates the painted rectangle, so the frame can disappear from a viewer’s impression even though it belongs to the documented object. A photograph can show colour and some texture, but cannot establish the sequence in which Klee applied particular paints or the present condition of the underlying support.^[1][2][3]

The head is set against a warm, roughly rectangular field. It is not a portrait in the ordinary sense of a documented individual, and the museum has not identified a sitter. Basel’s English rendering of the alternative title is Soon to be Aged and its French rendering is bientôt vieillard. The popular phrase Head of a Man Going Senile changes the sense: “senile” suggests an impairment that neither the German word nor the museum’s object information requires. The face may evoke a mask, an old man, a child, a comic figure or several of these at once; none of those impressions gives the figure a biography.^[2][3]

Why a plant name for a face?

The Kunstmuseum Basel explicitly explains the title through Senecio vulgaris, the botanical name for common groundsel, in German Gewöhnliches Greiskraut. Its older object record says that Klee called the painting Baldgreis in his own oeuvre catalogue and suggests a possible play on the German plant name. “Possible” is the museum’s careful word: the relation between the names is clear enough to discuss, but the exact joke in Klee’s mind is not preserved as a complete explanation from him.^[1][2]

The name Senecio itself comes from Latin senex, “old man.” Kew’s botanical reference explains the name through the conspicuous white pappus, the tuft attached to the fruits of these plants, which can recall an old man’s white hair. Kew confirms Senecio vulgaris as an accepted species. This gives the title a sharper point than saying vaguely that Klee painted “nature”: it is a real plant name whose language already carries an image of age. Basel’s German Baldgreis adds another twist, because bald means soon, not the English adjective for someone without hair.^[1][2][4][5]

There is no need to force the plant’s exact outline into the face. The circular head is not a botanical illustration of common groundsel, and the red eyes do not need to be flowers. A title can set off an association without turning every brushstroke into a code. Klee’s combination of a human face and a plant name lets youth, age and natural change overlap. The picture looks both childlike and weathered; its appearance and its names work together to keep the question of age open.^[1][2][3][4]

The title also shows how misleading a simple translation can be. Senecio is neither a Latin word for “old man” standing alone nor evidence that a person named Senecio posed for Klee. It names a botanical genus whose etymology refers to age. Baldgreis is a compact German coinage that gives the face a future tense. That future is part of the humour: the apparent old man may still be on his way to becoming one.^[2][4]

Look at the circle and the grid

The most commanding shape is the nearly complete circle of the head. It presses close to the top and side edges of the painted field, leaving a relatively narrow border of orange and reddish ground. A thin vertical divide runs from the crown toward the small dark mouth; a horizontal division follows the eyes and cheeks. The divisions promise a simple diagram. Yet the areas they make do not fit like four equal, flat quarters. Colour crosses their borders, and the paired features refuse to match.^[3]

The forehead is particularly unstable. On one side, an ochre and rose field meets a tall white triangular brow. On the other, yellow sits above a white patch and a green-black arc. These are simple forms to name, but their roles change as one looks: the white triangle might be a raised eyebrow, part of a mask, or a bright piece of forehead. Basel’s educational team introduces children to the painting through circles, squares and triangles. That is a useful first inventory of shapes, not a claim that geometry has removed expression from the face.^[3][6]

The eyes carry the strongest expression. Long, narrow white forms hold the two round red pupils. The left eye sits higher, under the angular brow, and the right eye appears lower beneath the curve. They are linked near the centre, but neither is a reflection of the other. Because the red discs are so strong against the pale eye shapes, a slight displacement becomes conspicuous. The gaze can seem alert, startled, weary or comic depending on how the viewer reads the brows and the tiny mouth; the painting does not secure one emotion.^[3]

Across the middle of the circle, broad rose and lavender passages make the cheeks. A light strip runs down the nose. Near its lower end is a very small dark mark, which can become a mouth or a nose-and-mouth junction. The white lower band of the circular face is wider than a conventional chin and contains pale ochre and grey marks. Beneath it, a short column of light, red and violet rectangles suggests a neck or garment. At the bottom edge, sweeping red, dark and yellow shapes hint at shoulders. Klee has given the head a body just substantial enough to keep it from floating free, without supplying costume, setting or identity.^[3]

Spanish scholar Ricardo Devesa Devesa describes the composition as a case of asymmetrical balance. In his architectural study, the divided circle creates a centre while differing eyes, brows, mouth, neck and coloured fields keep the two halves active. This is more precise than calling the image simply symmetrical or simply chaotic. The eye repeatedly checks one side against the other, discovers a mismatch and returns to the central line. Devesa’s analysis is a later formal reading; it does not make the painting an illustration of a building or a Bauhaus teaching chart.^[3][7]

That push and pull explains some of the painting’s peculiar vitality. A perfect diagram of two eyes and a mouth would be easy to classify and then leave behind. Here a triangular brow, a curved brow, two slightly displaced pupils and uneven colour fields keep the face in motion without making it anatomically realistic. The central axis is a support for difference, not a rule that erases it.^[3][7]

Devesa’s choice of this picture also reveals an unusual route of later reception. He records a copy of Senecio on a room divider in Marcel Breuer’s second house in New Canaan, built in 1951, and relates Klee’s divided circle to Breuer’s concern with balance around an axis. The copy is evidence that the image circulated beyond painting collections and remained important to another Bauhaus figure. It is not the Basel original in an American house, and the architectural comparison is Devesa’s argument rather than an instruction left by Klee for architects. The work’s portability as an image may even hide how materially particular the small gauze-and-cardboard original is.^[1][3][7]

Colour and surface at close range

The image’s warm field is not an empty background. Orange, ochre, rust and small darker marks gather around the circle, while warm colours also enter the face. It can be hard to decide where “face colour” ends and “background colour” begins. The most dramatic oppositions are local: red pupils against pale eyes, a dark green curve beside white, lavender cheeks under yellow and ochre. The little violet mouth is almost lost until the viewer finds the light nose that points toward it.^[3]

The high-resolution reproduction shows irregular marks and the suggestion of a fabric texture in places, particularly inside pale passages. This is consistent with Basel’s description of a painted gauze support, but a digital image is a limited witness. It may reveal a change in colour density or a visible scratch; it cannot by itself tell us whether a feature is in the paint, the ground, a later alteration, an artefact of photography or the display screen. Without a conservation report, claims about an exact layer order, the chemical composition of colour or the cause of every worn-looking area would go beyond the evidence.^[1][2][3]

The original yellow frame is worth remembering here. A frame contributes a boundary and another colour beside Klee’s orange field. The Rawpixel reproduction used for the existing details below presents the painted image without that frame. It is excellent for studying the face’s relations at close range, but it does not recreate the painting’s full framed appearance in Basel. The five close-ups can help distinguish the upper division, the unequal eyes, the meeting of cheek colours, the tiny central mark and the narrow neck. Each crop should be checked against the whole painting, because the balance depends on relationships across the circle.^[2][3]

A painting of the Bauhaus years

Klee was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar when he painted Senecio. The Bauhaus-Archiv describes his teaching in the study of form and colour alongside the work of other masters. That context helps explain why relations among line, plane, colour and movement are useful questions to ask here. It does not mean the painting is an exercise sheet, a student project or a demonstration of a single formal law. Its joke about a plant and an aging face belongs to a particular artwork.^[1][8]

Later teaching material can sharpen our looking but needs to be dated correctly. Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook was published in 1925, three years after this painting. It may help a reader understand ideas about lines and movement circulating in his Bauhaus work, but the later publication cannot be made into a source that Klee followed in making a 1922 picture. Likewise, the proximity of Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus stage does not by itself identify the head as a theatrical role. The older local account’s statement that “Senecio himself was a performer” has no support in Basel’s records.^[2][8]

Basel’s older object record reports art historian Jim M. Jordan’s suggestions of formal relationships with a Picasso portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, a Chagall figure, Schlemmer’s Bauhaus emblem and disc-headed figures in Asante puppetry. These are comparisons offered in scholarship, not a list of proven sources Klee set in front of him. The museum’s language about Klee’s knowledge of the Asante figures is qualified. Jordan’s original relevant pages have not been directly studied for this manuscript, so neither his full argument nor a specific object-to-object borrowing should be asserted here. A broad phrase such as “African simplicity” would obscure the particular visual comparison and make an entire continent into a single style.^[2]

One can see why comparisons arise. A round, flat head with simplified features has affinities with many modern pictures and designed objects, while its grid and colour divisions look deliberately constructed. But resemblance alone cannot trace influence. Klee’s own face differs from a conventional Cubist portrait: it does not require a viewer to reconstruct one person from several visible viewpoints. Its most immediate problem is how a simple circle can become a complex expression.^[2][3][7]

The painting’s humour is also open to later readings. In a 2025 Zentrum Paul Klee exhibition guide, curator Dieter Roelstraete places Senecio near satire and asks whether its small mouth and apparent mood suggest anger or silence. These are questions from the work’s reception, not a dated statement of Klee’s political intention in 1922. The guide also notices the image’s later life on book covers. Such uses show how readily the face can carry new meanings precisely because it does not identify one individual or one fixed emotion.^[9]

How the painting reached Basel

The picture had a public life before it became a museum favourite. Basel’s dated object bibliography records it in a 1924 Stuttgart exhibition catalogue as no. 89, in Hans Goltz’s Munich Klee exhibition of 1925 as no. 14, and in a 1929 Kunsthalle Basel Bauhaus exhibition catalogue as no. 93. Kunsthalle Basel’s own archive confirms that it held an exhibition called bauhaus dessau in 1929 with Klee among its listed artists. The catalogue entries are evidence of contemporary circulation and attention, though the original catalogues have not been checked page by page here; they should not be turned into a story of the painting’s movements between every intervening city.^[2][10]

Basel’s provenance account names the dealer Alfred Flechtheim in Düsseldorf and Berlin, Galerie Neue Kunst Fides / Rudolf Probst in Dresden and Mannheim in 1927, and later the Graphisches Kabinett of Günther and Sophie Franke in Munich. It prints an explicit gap between the Fides and Franke stages. The Kunstmuseum Basel bought the work from the Frankes in 1931. The gap is a fact about the present documentation, not a blank to be filled by an attractive narrative. Additional archival records may refine the chain; this page follows what the museum currently publishes.^[1]

There is a more specific institutional trail for that final sale. The Kunstmuseum Basel’s finding aid lists a 1931 Otto Fischer correspondence file containing material on Günther Franke and the purchase of Senecio. A finding aid tells us that a dossier exists and what topic it covers; it does not give the terms of a transaction or resolve the earlier ownership gap. Historian Nikolaus Meier, writing about Fischer, notes that Fischer had already encountered the painting in the 1924 Stuttgart exhibition and later bought it for Basel as an example of a new tendency towards abstraction. Meier cites the museum’s 1931 annual report for this assessment. The primary report and letters would be the next sources for a fuller account of Fischer’s choice; their contents should not be invented from the file listing.^[12][13]

The museum describes Senecio as one of its early acquisitions of modern painting. That position matters in a Basel exhibition about the collection’s fractured modern history: the 1931 purchase predates the museum’s separate 1939 acquisitions of works confiscated from German museums under National Socialism. It would be misleading to merge those two episodes simply because they appear in the same exhibition booklet. Klee himself suffered Nazi pressure after 1933, but that later persecution cannot be made the cause of this already completed 1922 painting or its 1931 sale without specific evidence.^[1]

Basel’s bibliography follows the work into subsequent museum catalogues and exhibitions, including Klee retrospectives in 1941, 1967 and 1976, a 1969–70 Paris catalogue whose cover reproduced the image, and a 1979 Cologne show. Those references document how widely the painting was reproduced and discussed; they are not a substitute for reading each exhibition’s own interpretation. A Spanish government indemnity notice records a later Madrid loan context in 2015. None of this changes the work’s ownership by the Kunstmuseum Basel.^[2][11]

The face’s later familiarity can make it seem simpler than it is. A circle and two red eyes make a memorable icon at a glance. In the painting itself, the eyes are unequal, the colours do not settle into neat quarters, and the title slips between a person and a plant. The work remains funny without being a mere caricature, geometric without being a diagram, and portrait-like without giving us a sitter. Looking between the whole image and its close details is a way to experience that unresolved balance rather than to solve it too quickly.^[1][2][3][7]

For related reading, explore Klee’s Bauhaus years and the materials and techniques guide. Cat and Bird offers another compact image of a face and animal association, while Twittering Machine shows Klee using an apparently simple title to set a more ambiguous image in motion.

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.

Red Balloon

1922

Twittering Machine

1922

Crystal Gradation

1921

Sinbad the Sailor

1923

Actor's Mask

1924

Angelus Novus

1920

Ancient Harmony

1925

Fish Magic

1925

References

1. Kunstmuseum Basel, Zerrissene Moderne: Die Basler Ankäufe «entarteter» Kunst, German exhibition booklet, PDF p. 6 (source page 5): object caption, 1931 purchase, named provenance stages and explicit gap, botanical explanation, and collection context, View source.
2. Kunstmuseum Basel, Senecio (Baldgreis) collection record as printed 4 April 2017, pp. 1–3, a dated museum-record facsimile hosted by a third party. Source for annual and inventory numbers, inscription, original frame, bilingual title translations and bibliography. The current live collection interface has not yielded equivalent fully readable text, View source.
3. Rawpixel, exact-match Senecio image item 3590266, item-level CC0 high-resolution reproduction; visual observations checked against the project’s unenhanced 3712 × 4031 px master, natively 300 dpi. This is an image source, not a conservation examination. The existing splash and five detail images derive from this master, View source.
4. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Senecio genus account and etymology and accepted Senecio vulgaris record, Plants of the World Online. Botanical naming and Latin derivation, not an interpretation of Klee’s intent.
5. Kunstmuseum Basel, French Zerrissene Moderne exhibition booklet, French title and séneçon commun wording. Translation of reference 1, not an independent object study, View source.
6. Kunstmuseum Basel, “Mein Museum – Mitmachbogen Nr. 7: Ich mal anders” (6 May 2020), German educational account of the work’s elementary geometric forms; a later teaching use, View source.
7. Ricardo Devesa Devesa, Aportes teóricos al proyecto de arquitectura: la Casa y el Árbol (doctoral dissertation, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 2012), printed pp. 97–99. Spanish formal analysis of balance and a later Marcel Breuer comparison. The university PDF was read directly; its images are not reused, View source.
8. Bauhaus-Archiv, “Unterricht” (German), Klee’s Weimar form and colour teaching, and Bauhausbücher 5 / Pedagogical Sketchbook publication note (English), 1925 publication context. These provide period setting, not proof of a specific lesson behind Senecio.
9. Dieter Roelstraete, “Senecio: Paul Klee und das Altern/Schweigen,” Fokus. Cover Star Klee, Zentrum Paul Klee digital exhibition guide (2025). A curatorial reception essay whose satirical and emotional readings are speculative, not artist statements, View source.
10. Kunsthalle Basel, bauhaus dessau exhibition archive, 1929 show with Klee named. Its displayed dates differ by a day from Basel’s older bibliography; only the year is used above, View source.
11. Boletín Oficial del Estado, 2015 Spanish state indemnity notice, later Madrid loan context. This official notice is a reception/loan anchor, not a source for the painting’s creation or interpretation, View source.
12. Kunstmuseum Basel archive, Otto Fischer correspondence finding aid, dossier F 001.024.006.000 for 1931; its summary names Günther Franke and the purchase of Senecio. The underlying letters have not been read, View source.
13. Nikolaus Meier, “Ars una: Der Kunsthistoriker Otto Fischer (1886–1948)”, p. 176, citing Jahresberichte 1931, p. 5, for Fischer’s acquisition of Senecio from a Klee exhibition. The 1931 report itself remains to be checked, View source.