Fish Magic

Fish Magic combines a charming scene with vibrant colour to produce one of Klee's most famous paintings

A Paul Klee painting is one that evokes mixed emotions on the viewer, and the Fish Magic painting is nothing short of this aura. Klee completed this painting in his prime years as an artist before losing his life to Scleroderma, at the age of 60.

The Fish Magic remains one of the pieces that immortalise the painter's creativity in fusing different element to create something outstanding.

Fish Magic was created on panel using watercolour and oil. It combines elements of the sea (fish), the earth (flowers), and the galaxy (moon and planets). It's as if Klee was communicating a complex story of the earth, sea and sky on canvas, portraying them in a romantic, surreal and expressionist mood.

Anyone examining the Swiss-German painter's work for the first time would definitely mistake it for a Kindergarten watercolour work. Until you gaze at the elements carefully, how they fuse together to portray a message is when you realise Klee was an artistic genius.

The original painting is currently the possession of the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it’s curated under the museum's Modern Art department.

Several replicas of the Fish Magic painting have been produced after its completion and today they are sold online to willing buyers.

Klee is famous for other artistic works that show his prowess as a modern artist. Another notable creation of his is the 1922 Twittering Machine painting. With oil and canvas, Klee paints a scenario of birds and what appears to be fish fastened to a machine operated with a clank.

Both the creatures and the machine they are tied to appear fragile, dark or sombre depending on the viewer's depiction. By the turn of the clank, the birds begin to twitter. More paintings by the artist include Cat & Bird (1928), Ad Parnassum (1932), Red Balloon (1922) and Dream City (1921).

Paul Klee was a modern-art painter of Swiss German decent. He loved to paint in the surreal, expressionist and romantism mood characteristic of all his paintings. His original paintings are held in different museums all over the world.