in its beak symbolizes an accompanying shrillness – a horizontal thrust of piercing song. Since a characteristic of chirping birds is that their racket resumes as soon as it seems to be ending, the bird in the center droops with lolling tongue, while another begins to falter in song; both birds will come up again full blast as soon as the machine's crank is turned. History The Swiss-born Klee had been teaching at the Bauhaus school in Germany for a year when he completed this ink drawing on watercolor in 1922. The work was displayed for several years in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin until Adolf Hitler declared it and many other works by the Swiss-born Klee "degenerate art" in 1933. The Nazis seized the painting and sold it in 1939 for $120 to an art dealer in Berlin. The New York MoMA purchased the painting that same year. Although Klee produced more than 9,000 works in his lifetime, Twittering Machine has become one of his better known images. According to Danto, the painting is "one of the best-known treasures at the Museum of Modern Art". Legacy The son of a musicologist, Klee himself drew parallels between sound and art, and Twittering Machine has been influential on several composers. In fact, as of 2018, Klee's painting has inspired more musical compositions than any other single piece of art, with more than 100 examples, from full symphony orchestra to solo piano. The first such work is the 1951 orchestral work Die Zwitschermaschine by German composer Giselher Klebe; probably its two most famous appearances are as movement four in David Diamond's 1957 four-movement "The World of Paul Klee" and as the fourth movement of Gunther Schuller's "Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee", composed in 1959. According to Time magazine, the two composers drew very different interpretations from the piece, with Schuller's work consisting of a "snatch of serial music in which the orchestra beeped, squeaked and rasped like a rusty hinge while the muted brasses burped out shreds of sound" while Diamond drew on "more somber tones: muted, dark-hued movements of the strings, with the picture's more jagged lines delineated by scampering woodwinds and brasses." Larson wrote in New York Magazine (1987) that the image was then "embedded in childhood prehistory", commenting that it "always seemed to be taped to kids' bedroom walls, next to Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy". See also