The Painting on Your Bag Was Made by the Man Who Taught Color to the Bauhaus
"Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. Color and I are one. I am a painter."
— Paul Klee, diary entry, Tunisia, 1914
Each square on your bag is not decoration. It is a unit of color theory — a tile in what Paul Klee called his Magic Square series, a body of work born from a twelve-day trip to Tunisia in 1914, developed over a decade of teaching at the most influential art school of the 20th century, and brought to fruition in works like this one, completed in 1925 at the height of the Bauhaus period.
May Picture lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, acquired as part of the Berggruen Klee Collection in 1984. What follows is the complete story — a musician who became a painter, a journey that changed everything, a school that changed modern art, and a canvas of squares that has never stopped vibrating.
01 — The Artist
Paul Klee: The Violinist Who Became a Painter
Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, to a German music teacher father and a Swiss singer mother. He grew up surrounded by music, became an accomplished violinist, and for much of his early adult life was uncertain whether his primary vocation was music or visual art. He chose painting — but music never left. His lectures at the Bauhaus frequently drew on musical terms: polyphony, color harmony, rhythm, counterpoint. When his students struggled to understand his color theories, he sometimes simply played the violin.
Klee's art is notoriously difficult to categorize. He has been claimed by Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction — and belongs entirely to none of them. André Breton cited him in the first Surrealist manifesto. The Dada artists exhibited his work. Kandinsky was his closest colleague. Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell listed him as a lodestar. His highly personal system of symbols, childlike figures, and pulsating color grids inspired essentially every major movement that came after him — and yet his work looks like no one else's, before or since.
He also wrote. His Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925) and Notebooks — his teaching notes from the Bauhaus — are considered as foundational for modern art theory as Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He was not only one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of its greatest thinkers about art.
"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible."
— Paul Klee, Creative Credo, 1920
02 — The Revelation
Tunisia, April 1914: Twelve Days That Changed Everything
1914
The Journey — Tunis, Hammamet, Kairouan
Klee travels to Tunisia with artists August Macke and Louis Moilliet for just twelve days. He is 34 years old and has been primarily a draftsman — his paintings have been tentative, his color uncertain. In North Africa, the quality of light stops him. He writes in his diary: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He paints his first pure abstract on returning home: In the Style of Kairouan — composed entirely of colored rectangles and circles. The Magic Square series has begun.
1918
War — The Terrible World / The Abstract Art
World War I interrupts everything. Klee serves in the German army but never sees front-line action — he paints aircraft fuselages and transfers payroll. His closest friends August Macke and Franz Marc are killed in battle. He writes: "The more terrible the world, the more abstract the art, while a happy world produces secularistic art." The abstract square — a unit of pure color, detached from the visible world — becomes for Klee a form of philosophical refuge.
The Bauhaus — Weimar, Germany
Walter Gropius invites Klee to join the Bauhaus faculty. He teaches alongside Kandinsky in the most concentrated gathering of artistic talent in the history of modern education. For ten years, Klee delivers lectures on form, color, and composition — developing his own color theory based on a six-part color wheel influenced by Goethe, Delaunay, and Kandinsky. His students create color diagrams, compare color weights, explore the dynamic tension between complementary hues. The squares of his paintings are, in one sense, the visual embodiment of what he is teaching: color as independent force, not description.
May Picture — Completed
Klee completes May Picture — oil on cardboard, 42.2 × 49.5 cm, from his Magic Square series. The Bauhaus has just moved from Weimar to Dessau; Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook is published this same year. The Surrealists include his work in their first group exhibition in Paris. Max Ernst, upon seeing it, is impressed. André Breton cites Klee in his Surrealist manifesto. May Picture is acquired by Heinz Berggruen, who will eventually donate his entire Klee collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"Degenerate Art" — Exile to Bern
The National Socialists come to power and dismiss Klee from his teaching post at the Düsseldorf Academy, declaring his work entartete Kunst — "degenerate art." More than 100 of his works are seized from German public collections and exhibited in the Nazi propaganda exhibition of that name. Klee returns to Bern, Switzerland. In 1935, he develops scleroderma — a progressive illness that will eventually make it difficult to hold a brush. He paints more than ever. He dies on June 29, 1940, with over 9,000 works to his name, including some made in the final weeks of his life using a thick, heavy line necessitated by his failing hands.
The Met — New York
The Berggruen Klee Collection — assembled by art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen over decades — is acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. May Picture enters the Met's permanent collection, where it remains today. It is one of the finest examples of Klee's Magic Square series in any public collection.
03 — The Painting
What a Magic Square Actually Is
The Metropolitan Museum's own description of May Picture is precise: "This painting is from Klee's Magic Square series, which grew out of a visit to Tunisia in 1914. Klee embraced the full power of abstraction by fractioning the landscape into squares, which seem to extend beyond the edges of the painting. The squares themselves can be viewed as odd-shaped stones assembled to form a mosaic. The work also reveals Klee's preoccupation with color theory, which informed his teaching at the Bauhaus."
The key word is fractioning. Klee did not paint abstract squares for their own sake. He fractioned a landscape — broke a seen world into its smallest meaningful color units, then reassembled those units as pure color relationships freed from the objects that produced them. The result is neither purely abstract nor representational. It sits between: you feel landscape, you feel depth, you feel atmosphere — but you see only squares. The Magic Square works operate at the precise threshold where the visible world and pure color theory meet.
The muted, complex palette of May Picture — greys, sage greens, terracottas, teals, mauves, rusts — is not a limitation. It is a demonstration of color theory at its most sophisticated: the relationship between colors when they are adjacent, the way grey activates its neighbors, how a small square of bright teal in a field of warm earth tones creates a vibration that no single color produces alone. Klee called these kinds of color interactions "polyphonic" — the same term he would use for a Bach fugue, where multiple voices interact according to rules to produce something greater than any single line.
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1914 Tunisia — The Birth of the Square Twelve days in North Africa produced a revelation about color and light that Klee spent the next decade translating into an entirely original visual language. May Picture is the mature expression of that journey. |
9,000+ Works in Klee's Lifetime Klee produced over 9,000 works across his career — mostly small-scale watercolors and drawings. He catalogued every one himself. May Picture is among the finest of the Magic Square series and among the works that most directly demonstrate his Bauhaus color teaching. |
The Met New York, Since 1984 May Picture entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Berggruen Klee Collection in 1984, where it remains in the permanent collection — 5th Avenue, Central Park, New York. |
04 — The School
The Bauhaus: Where Art and Making Became One
The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919 — a radical experiment in art education that rejected the separation between fine art and applied craft. Students at the Bauhaus were trained simultaneously by a "Form master" (a fine artist) and a "Craft master" (a skilled artisan), in workshops that made furniture, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, typography, and theater. The goal was to create artists who could design anything — and anything that was designed should carry the quality of art.
Klee was the Form master for bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting. Kandinsky taught alongside him. The school's faculty — which also included László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, and Herbert Bayer — represented the highest concentration of modernist artistic talent ever assembled in a single institution. Their influence spread to the International Style in architecture, to the typographic foundations of every advertisement and interface you have ever read, to the color theory taught in design schools today.
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Klee's Color Theory The Six-Part Color Wheel Drawing on Goethe's color wheel, Delaunay's color experiments, and his own observations, Klee developed a six-part rainbow color wheel with dynamic relationships between complementary colors. He taught his students that colors were not static — they moved in relation to each other, activated by contrast, quieted by proximity. His sphere model placed white at the top and black at the base, with hue and saturation as dimensions. The May Picture is, in part, a demonstration of this theory made visual. |
Color as Music Polyphony in Paint Klee often played the violin for his students during color lectures. His metaphors were consistently musical: colors "sing in harmony or dissonance," combinations of colors are "polyphonic" or "monophonic," the movement between colors follows rules analogous to musical counterpoint. In May Picture, the squares interact across the surface the way notes interact across a score — each one affecting the perception of its neighbors, creating a whole that is different from any of its individual parts. |
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The Square as Principle The Unit That Extends Infinitely The Metropolitan Museum describes the squares of May Picture as "seem to extend beyond the edges of the painting." This is intentional. For Klee, the square grid was not a bounded composition but a window into an infinite field — one that the eye could in principle continue in every direction. The painting's edges are arbitrary; the color relationships could continue forever. This is a deliberate philosophical position: reality, like color, is continuous. The frame is our limitation, not the world's. |
The Mosaic Analogy Stones in a Field of Light The Met also notes that the squares "can be viewed as odd-shaped stones assembled to form a mosaic." This is the key to understanding the textured, slightly irregular quality of Klee's squares — they are not mechanically identical but handmade, each one carrying the evidence of the brush stroke. Like ancient Byzantine mosaic tesserae, they are units that catch light at slightly different angles, creating a surface that shimmers. Each square is both a tile and a brushstroke simultaneously. |
05 — The Stakes
Why This Painting Was Called "Degenerate"
The color squares of Paul Klee were not merely aesthetically radical — they were politically dangerous to a regime that understood abstract art as evidence of cultural disorder. In 1933, the National Socialists dismissed Klee from his teaching post, declared his work entartete Kunst ("degenerate art"), and seized more than 100 of his works from German public museums.
Those works were exhibited in the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937 — designed to humiliate modern art by displaying it without frames, with mocking captions, alongside examples of work by the mentally ill (which the regime also considered symptomatic of degeneracy). The exhibition attracted over two million visitors — more than any exhibition of officially approved Nazi art. Many visitors came specifically to see the modern art they had been told was degenerate and left convinced it was brilliant.
The squares of May Picture are, in this context, an act of survival as much as aesthetics. Klee's color theory — which posited that color relationships had independent meaning beyond any representational content — was precisely what the regime could not tolerate: art that communicated something real without illustrating anything approved. He returned to Switzerland, painted until his hands failed him, and died in exile.
"The more terrible the world,
the more abstract the art."
— Paul Klee, from his diary
06 — The Object
May Picture 1925 Crossbody Bag
May Picture entered the public domain following the expiration of its copyright, making faithful reproductions of this masterwork legally available. The Coocosh May Picture 1925 Crossbody Bag carries a reproduction of Klee's original oil on cardboard — its muted, complex mosaic of grey, sage, terracotta, teal, plum, and rust — printed directly onto premium faux leather. The bag's soft surface captures the textural quality of Klee's handmade squares in a way that rewards close inspection.
| Outer Material | Premium Faux Leather |
| Dimensions | 11″ × 8″ × 1.5″ / 27.9 × 20.3 × 3.8 cm |
| Closure | Zip-Top |
| Interior | Multiple zip and slip pockets |
| Straps | Adjustable, removable wrist + shoulder — 14″ to 27″ |
| Care | Wipe clean · Avoid prolonged direct sunlight to preserve color |
A note on the original: May Picture (1925) measures 42.2 × 49.5 cm — intimate in scale, which makes the complexity of its color relationships all the more concentrated. The original is held in the Berggruen Klee Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York. If you are in New York, it is worth finding. Up close, the individual brushwork on each square — the slight irregularity, the way paint sits differently on different tiles — is visible in a way no reproduction can fully convey.
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Carry the Masterpiece
May Picture 1925 is available across the full collection.
07 — For the Curious
Things to Say When Someone Asks
Because they will ask.
◈ The Met Drop
"It's a real painting — May Picture by Paul Klee, 1925. The original is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Klee taught at the Bauhaus — alongside Kandinsky — and developed his own color theory based on Goethe's color wheel. These squares are from what he called his Magic Square series, which grew out of a twelve-day trip to Tunisia in 1914. He painted the Tunisian landscape and then removed everything representational until only the color relationships were left. The squares are what remain when you strip a landscape down to pure color."
◈ The Music Connection
"Klee was also a violinist — he sometimes played for his students during color theory lectures. He described color relationships using musical terms: 'polyphony', 'harmony', 'dissonance.' He said that combinations of colors, like musical notes, can be harmonious or discordant depending on what's next to what. If you look at May Picture as a musical score, the grey squares are the sustained notes and the pops of teal and terracotta are the syncopations — the things that make you feel movement in what is actually a static image."
◈ The Degenerate Art Story
"The Nazis declared Klee's work 'degenerate art' in 1933 and seized over 100 of his paintings from German museums. They put them on display specifically to mock abstract art — but the exhibition attracted two million visitors and arguably did more to promote modern art than suppress it. Klee fled to Switzerland, developed a serious illness that made it hard to hold a brush, and kept painting until the end. He made over 9,000 works in his lifetime. He catalogued every single one himself. And the Bauhaus — the school where he taught, which the Nazis shut down as well — is still the single most influential school of art and design that has ever existed."
Coocosh — Object Stories
Every piece we make carries a story
older than the brand itself.
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