Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born near Bern to a German father and grew up in Switzerland, keeping German citizenship all his life. He joined the circle of Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, found his colour on a 1914 trip to Tunisia, and taught at the Bauhaus and then at the Düsseldorf Academy until the Nazis dismissed him in 1933. He left more than 9,000 works, mostly small drawings and watercolours, which makes his market broad and very liquid. Oil paintings of the 1920s and 1930s are much rarer and set the top prices. His auction record, Tänzerin, sold for about $6.8 million in London in 2011, and works by him appear in New York, London and Paris sales every season.