Paul Klee
”My etching depicts in the most primitive way: a meeting between two men, who each suppose that the other is in a higher position, which means they are crawling in front one another.” (Letter to Lily Stumpf in Munich, 17th September 1903).
Two naked men meet and greet one another with deep bows. In their nakedness they lack the visible features indicating which of them occupies a higher position in society. So they outbid each other with affected modesty, as neither of them knows in which political position the person opposite might be. We can identify the two men by means of their hairstyle and their beards: they are the Emperor Wilhelm II from Prussia and Emperor Franz Joseph I from Austria. Here it is obvious that Paul Klee was making fun of the behavior of the two rulers. Klee was less bothered with the caricature of two prominent heads of state than with the general dishonesty of the social rituals that he criticized with biting irony.