Paul Klee · 1922

Senecio (Head of a Man)

Posters from $10.82 USD · Canvas from $28.14 USD

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Klee's geometric portrait of an old man — orange face built from circles and squares, pinpoint eyes, twin red eyebrows. Bauhaus playfulness in a single canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel.

Up to 12 × 13.1 in · portrait

Size

Larger sizes are unavailable for this painting because the source scan's resolution wouldn't print at gallery quality.

Format & finish

Archival cotton canvas stretched over a wooden frame. Ready to hang as-is. No external frame.

Scale next to a 5'10" person

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Hand-printed in our studio

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Materials & quality

›Canvas & inks

Giclée-printed on archival cotton canvas with fade-resistant pigment inks, hand-stretched over wooden bars. Gallery-wrapped — ready to hang with no extra frame needed.

›Floater frame

Hand-finished solid wood floater frame in five finishes. The canvas sits inside with a clean shadow gap — the way galleries hang contemporary canvas.

›Posters

Premium archival paper — 200 gsm soft matte or 230 gsm vibrant glossy. Ships flat or rolled, ready for your own frame.

›Faithful to the source

Printed from the highest-resolution museum and archive scans available. Each painting's maximum size is capped at what its source scan can support at gallery quality.

About this painting

The story of Senecio (Head of a Man)

A round face fills the square, built from overlapping patches of orange, red, and pale yellow, with a pair of raised red eyebrows and two tiny eyes that seem to be deciding whether to trust you. Klee painted it in 1922 while teaching at the Bauhaus, and it is in the Kunstmuseum Basel. The title refers to a plant, the groundsel, and to an old man going a little soft, and the joke is that the face is both a diagram and a portrait. Look at it long enough and it starts to look back with something like sympathy.

This is one of the warmest small paintings you can hang. The colors are tangerine, brick red, apricot, and butter yellow with a few strokes of gray, so it glows against white, cream, or gray walls and looks especially good in a kitchen, a nursery, a hallway, or a home office. It fits mid-century, Bauhaus, Scandinavian, and playful modern interiors, and it is one of the rare famous paintings that children like as much as adults. It is nearly square and reads well at close range, so we offer it in the Mini at 8 × 8.7 in, the Petite at 11 × 12 in, and the Small at 12 × 13.1 in. The Small is the one to get for a wall on its own; the Mini belongs on a shelf or in a cluster.

Klee's Castle and Sun uses the same warm patchwork on a landscape, Fish Magic is his nighttime opposite, and Twittering Machine has the same dry humor drawn in line. More from Paul Klee.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Basel canvas, with Klee's gauzy, slightly uneven color patches left as he painted them.

About the artist

Paul Klee

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

All Paul Klee prints →

Biography adapted from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Frequently asked

Senecio (Head of a Man)— questions & answers

›What does Senecio by Paul Klee mean?

Senecio — fully titled Head of a Man Going Senile — is Klee's geometric portrait of an old man, the orange face built from circles and squares with pinpoint eyes and twin red eyebrows. It distills the playful, sign-like style he developed during his Bauhaus years.

›When did Paul Klee paint Senecio?

Klee painted it in 1922, in oil on canvas mounted on panel, while he was teaching at the Bauhaus.

›Where is the original Senecio?

The original is held at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.

Pairs well with