Klee's caricatures are rejected as too idiosyncratic, and for many years his small family—increased to three in 1907 by the birth of their only child, Felix—is supported largely by Lily's piano lessons.
Between 1906 and 1909 he has become successively acquainted with the work of van Gogh, Cézanne and Ensor.
He also begins to explore the expressive possibilities of children's drawings.
These varied influences impart to his work a freedom of expression and a willfulness of style equaled by few other artists of the era.
Franz Marc had painted his early works in a self-consciously academic style, but his stolid naturalism was lightened in 1903 by his exposure to French Impressionist painting and later to the sensuous, curvilinear art of Munich's Jugendstil movement.
The twenty-nine-year-old Marc in 1909 joins a group of Expressionist artists known as the Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists' Association).
Here he meets August Macke, whose idiosyncratic use of broad areas of rich color leads Marc to experiment with similar techniques.
Macke, thirty-one, had been influenced, particularly in his earlier work, by his teacher Lovis Corinth, as well as by the Cubists and the Impressionists.
A lyrical temperament, however, is revealed in his works, which avoid the often-violent style and subject matter of his fellow Expressionists.
His art combines the tradition of French painting—;its sense of the grace of movement and atmosphere in landscape painting—with the cosmic sentiment of German art.
