Specters emerging from the darkness are the subject of Klee's Bauhaus-period work from 1929. While the mask-like imagery rendered with punctuations of color on a stark black background may appear fierce, the subject of this composition is rooted in tenderness. Klee’s chosen theme alludes to his son Felix Klee and his affinity for puppet shows. 

Felix was first introduced to puppet theater at a very young age when Paul would bring him to the Auer Dult, a traditional flea market held in Munich twice a year. While Paul searched for painting supplies and frames, he left Felix to watch the Kasperl and Gretl (Punch and Judy) performances at the fair. These performances spawned a lifelong interest in puppeteering and storytelling in young Felix. For his ninth birthday in November 1916, Paul gifted Felix eight handcrafted puppets and a homemade theater. Many of the puppets unsurprisingly were characters from Felix’s favorite Kasperl and Gretl
production, including Kasperl, his wife Gretl, his friend Sepperl, Death, a
Devil, a Policeman and the Crocodile. Klee created approximately fifty puppets for Felix between 1916 and 1925 of which only thirty survive today. Felix’s practice of puppet theatre became the preliminary factor in his lifetime
profession as a theater director, and his childhood fascination with puppetry
provided his father with ample subject matter well into the 1920s and 1930s.



Felix’s passion for the theater was not only encouraged by his father Paul but also a shared hobby. Author Hatje Cantz writes, “Paul Klee’s rich artist
imagination is populated by puppets, masks and grotesque and bizarre figurines. Dream worlds, fairytale worlds, and theatrical worlds all become pictorial themes.  Actors, dancers, musicians, magicians, acrobats, ghosts, devils and witches come to life.  Klee opens up primordial and uncanny dimensions in the intermediary realms of fantasy and fairytale embodied in his images.  His formal ideas are motivated by the wishes and fears of children, the traces of his own childhood, during which he was constantly faced with conflicts between the permissible and the forbidden, between the concepts of, as Klee says, ‘good-evil.’ They inspire him to probe into secret and puzzling worlds.  The stage of life, its backdrops and arenas, the theater or theatrical, the dramaturgical and the staged – these all develop into metaphors for Paul Klee’s artist self-understanding” (Hatje Cantz, Paul Klee, Hand Puppets, Bern, 2010, p. 33).



The imagery of the present work held obvious delight for Klee’s artistically
inclined contemporaries including the artist Rudolf Probst (1883-1960). The
present work was later acquired by Helmuth Domizlaff (1902-1983), an antiquarian book dealer based in Munich.