Painted in 1927, Figurine: Small Fire Devil dates from the years when Paul Klee worked at the Bauhaus in Dessau under the directorship of Walter Gropius. Earlier, in 1920, Klee published his famous Creative Credo: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible. The very nature of graphic art lures us to abstraction, readily and with reason. It gives the schematic fairy-tale quality of the imaginary and expresses it with great precision.’

In general, colour dominated his work during the four years from 1927 to 1930 (the year of Klee’s solo show at MoMA and the year in which Mies van der Rohe took over as director of the Bauhaus). As early as 1914, he wrote in his diary, ‘Colour possesses me. I no longer need to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy moment: Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’ The present work is an exquisite example of his confident use of colour in this period.

Always an advocate for going beyond ‘pure plasticism’, Klee transcends many of his subjects with a vibrant imagination and poetic sensibility. Figurine is a testament to this. Alongside purely abstract contemporary works associated with his teaching at the Bauhaus, there are works in which the influence of naive, childlike art, in particular, is clear. The little horned devil of the present work is to be found in German culture, with its regional, romantic overtones. An artist who was frequently inspired by the broadest possible influences in music, literature and science, Klee was particularly interested in the folk poetry of his native country, where forests and lakes were filled with monsters, fairies and other imaginary creatures.

Figurine was formerly owned by Curt Valentin, one of the major dealers who worked in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century. In 1934, he left Berlin and moved to Hamburg where he joined Karl Bucholtz’s gallery. From the back room of a bookshop, the two dealers bought and sold avant-garde works of art of the highest quality that the Nazis had classified as ‘degenerate’. In 1937, Valentin emigrated to the United States and opened a highly successful gallery specialising in German art.