In January 1911 Alfred Kubin visited his fellow artist Paul Klee in Munich. In February of that year Klee began to compile a catalogue of his works. Klee is among those artists who refer programmatically to childhood as the ideal of artistic activity. Of the forty or so children’s drawings preserved, he included 18 in his catalogue of works, and afforded them the status of works.

His handwritten catalogue of works proved a very practical instrument for monitoring, classifying and sorting his artistic output – much in the same way as he systematically kept diaries relating to his biography and his artistic development from as far back as 1898. By keeping book in this way Klee was able to evaluate what he felt was of significance for his artistic development up until that point. He was to continue this cataloguing of his artistic output, which began in 1911, with great meticulousness right up until his death.

In May 1911 Klee began the drawings that would illustrate the German translation of Voltaire’s novel Candide ou l'optimisme (first published 1759). In these drawings he created a new type of figure: His drawing style was situated at the point of fracture between figurative function and autonomous abstraction. With the pronounced ghostliness of his figures Klee perfectly captured by purely artistic means the pessimistic statement underlying Voltaire’s novel, with which he also identified personally. What’s more, with the illustrations for Candide, he also achieved a distinct modernistic conception of drawing. The translated novel with Klee’s illustrations was published in 1920 by Verlag Kurt Wolff in Munich.

1911 and 1912 brought encounters that were to shape Klee’s life as an artist. In 1911 he met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky, and in 1912 Robert Delaunay (in Paris), Hans Arp, Franz Marc and Herwarth Walden. During his second journey to Paris in April 1912 Klee became more deeply involved with cubism. His encounter with the members of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) sharpened his interest for children’s drawings. Klee also had closer contacts with the avant-garde in Switzerland, which had formed in the artists’ group Der Moderne Bund, with Hans Arp.

From 1911 Klee regularly took part in group exhibitions: In 1911 at Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, in 1912 at the 2nd exhibition of the Blue Rider in Munich, at the international exhibition of the Sonderbund in Cologne, at the group exhibition Der Moderne Bund in Zurich, and at Galerie Goltz in Munich. Through his participation in the Cologne Sonderbund exhibition of 1913 and the Erster deutsche Herbstasalon (First German Autumn Salon) held at the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin he was represented at the two largest, most influential overview exhibitions of contemporary art to be held in Germany before World War I. Within a short space of time Klee had become a recognised member of the small yet publicly increasingly present group of avant-garde artists in Germany.

Klee’s new-found confidence is also apparent in his temporary role as art and cultural critic. For more than a year starting in November 1911 he regularly contributed exhibition reviews for the Swiss monthly Die Alpen, which was published in Bern by his friend Hans Bloesch. In his reports from Munich he had now explicitly adopted the role of mediator and advocate of new “Expressionist” art.

In 1913-1914 Klee resolutely turned towards colour, embracing the use of watercolour. This fruitful creative phase culminated in a two-week trip to Tunisia in the spring of 1914, which Klee celebrated in his diary as his “breakthrough to colour”. The first results of his travels to Tunisia, namely eight watercolours, went on show in the summer of 1914 at the first exhibition of the New Munich Secession.

The outbreak of World War I on 1 August suddenly broke off the contacts and prospects of success of the German artists of the avant-garde – including those of Paul Klee among them.