“Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” at the Jewish Museum is one of the rare art events that can literally be called revelatory. As we learn from its accompanying catalog, it is the first survey the artist has had in a New York museum in decades. Almost as significant, it is the first in this country to focus primarily on his late work. These are pictures done in the later 1930s when Klee, living in his native Switzerland after a professional life spent largely in Germany and gravely ill with the then-incurable disease scleroderma—he would die in 1940 at sixty—developed a new and bolder approach to making images.

While his works from the 1920s, when he created his best-known pictures, were small in size and populated with diminutive and delicately drawn figures and forms, and often gave viewers a sense that they were peering into enchanted and flickeringly lit other worlds, his later works, although showing the same enclosed, almost park-like realms, could be large (for him) in size and much punchier in their…