THE SWISS-BORN German artist Paul Klee created more masterpieces in the closing years of his life than most artists do in their prime.  

Diagnosed with sclerosis, his resolve hardened along with myriad symptoms of his disease and he raged against the dying of his artistic light. Near the end, he had trouble lifting his arms and walking and he suffered from bronchitis and arthritis.

It was as if his struggle to speak the language of pure perception as an artist intensified the nearer his fatal disease brought him to his vision’s closure.

In their new biographical survey, Paul Klee: Life and Work, Christine Hopfengart and Michael Baumgartner tell us that from 1937 to 1940, when he died, Klee created many hundreds of works — mixed media paintings, watercolours and drawings.

His work included Revolution of the Viaduct —  thought to be a middle-finger “sieg on this” to Hitler and his underlings, Harmonised Region, a black-and-white interweaving of fugal shades, Conch-Still Life II and his final expressionist painting Death and Fire.  

There is a deliberate focus in the book on Klee’s artistic development and the richness of his choices growing up, as well as the unusual influences that helped him work his art.

One of the extraordinary things about his life, which the authors explore throughout, is his skill as a violinist. He and his wife Lily, an excellent pianist, regularly played in chamber ensembles and orchestral gatherings.  Felix, their son, remarks that his parents would sometimes “play chamber music all day long, as if truly obsessed.”

Musical lines especially would later be incorporated into his visual art in ways that led to his unique images. Klee’s musical training and instincts drew him to Bach’s fugues, cascading entities whose frames of reference pour out of themselves, like slightly varied clones, replicants or viruses.  

His work with concentricity and flow, colour and shade, probably led quite naturally to what he came to refer to as “perspectival distortions.” A good example is his watercolour Dream City (1921), seemingly requiring 3D glasses to fully understand.

Klee’s play with lines, mechanics, expressionism and surrealism seem to come together in his famous early avant-garde watercolour The Twittering Machine (1922), which comes from his period as as tutor at the Bauhaus school in  Dessau, Germany, and it brings to mind Duchamp, Picasso and mechanical design.

Klee took teaching seriously, even if it wasn’t his first passion, and the authors tell us that it was grounded within “a cosmic, holistic system and its connection to considerations of world view, science and philosophy.”

Out of this Dessau period came a notable movement toward abstract symbolism and a kind of mysticism of order. This quality is perhaps best depicted in his famous painting The Goldfish (1925). As if illuminated from within, the depicted subject emits a phosphorescent glow against a deep black background that sometimes oscillates into red or blue.

Space and time seem suspended in the iridescent colours of this twilight realm.

From 1931 to 1933, Klee taught at the Dusseldorf Academy and, if he found more intensity in Dessau than elsewhere, in Dusseldorf he found broad-mindedness: “Even if everyone isn’t a genius in Dusseldorf as they are in Dessau, one senses the atmosphere of artistic saturation and feels at home,” he wrote in his diary.

“Even the conservative minds have an intense interest in progress; some of them are more honest than the modernists and that’s why some are interesting.”

Klee was in full swing in Dusseldorf, comfortable and settled. But then the Nazis came and Hitler and his posse started pointing fingers.

He was singled out by a Nazi newspaper as “a typical Galician Jew.” The Gestapo raided his home  and he was sacked from his teaching post.

According to the authors, Klee detested Hitler. But his disapproval resulted not just from political opposition but also from his condescension, as artist and intellectual, toward primitive demagoguery and populist lust for power.

The feeling was mutual. Klee had pieces put on display in a Nazi exhibit of “degenerate art” in 1937, among them Around the Fish and his print The Saint of the Inner Light. The Nazis juxtaposed the latter with a painting by a mental patient and ridiculed it as the expression of psychological decay.

With mounting pressure from the Nazis in his life and work, Klee felt that he had to leave Germany and he returned to his native Switzerland late in 1933. He died at the age of 60 in 1940.

Journalistic rather academic or overly analytical, Paul Klee: Life and Works is a clear, straightforward account of an artist’s life and development. It allows the reader ample mental space to move the art works around at his or her own pace and way, enhancing the book’s account of individuality at work.

Paul Klee: Life and Work is published by Hatje Cantz, £36.