Paul Klee’s first serious contact with avant-garde art occurred in 1911 when he met Wassily Kandinsky and the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group of artists. A highly independent artist, he assimilated aspects of Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism over the course of his career but never became defined by any particular style. Klee kept a detailed diary in which he noted how impressed he was by a tightrope act that he witnessed when the famous Knie Circus performed in Bern in 1906. Later, in 1923, after becoming a teacher at the Bauhaus, a celebrated progressive German art school, he produced the delicate lithograph Tightrope Walker. The composition appears to include a face and a little ladder leading up to scaffolding where a figure walks a tightrope. This delicate balancing act may be a metaphor for a kind of mental equilibrium. It may also suggest the fragile balancing of compositional components that the artistic process requires.