Paul Klee

Through Oct. 26. David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, Manhattan; 212-517-8677, davidzwirner.com.

In 1937 , Paul Klee’s paintings were included in what might have been the best-attended art show of the 20th century: the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich. The Bauhaus, his old school, was long shut; “Angelus Novus,” his early masterpiece of a gasping seraph, languished in the luggage of the exiled philosopher Walter Benjamin ; and Klee, who’d left Germany for his native Switzerland , turned his ironic eye to a continent losing its mind for the second time .

Thirty-six subsequent drawings and paintings on paper he made two years later — most from 1939, the last year of his life — are up now at Zwirner, where Klee’s wily, woozy art looms with a bleak new urgency. These late works depict people confused, annoyed, disoriented; Klee’s lines wobble and shimmy, and his figures struggle to balance. In “Sieht Zurück (Looks Back),” a single line zigzags against a background slicked with a grease crayon until it forms a disjointed human body, hopelessly lost, ready to topple.

A photomontage here by Josef Albers shows the Swiss artist at the Bauhaus, gazing at Albers’s lens with smoldering concentration. But Klee’s final drawings exhibit instead a bewildered detachment, each asserting the need for irony in a world governed by madmen. In the drawing “Ungeheuer in Bereitschaft (Monsters in Readiness),” a cavalcade of ghoulish stick figures, with lumpish heads and stigmata-like eyes, stumbles forward like a pathetically untrained army. Klee pictured the Europeans of 1939 in a manner not unlike the Americans of 2019: petulant, belligerent, strung out, sleepwalking. JASON FARAGO