Paul Klee
The poet of line and colour.
Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus and created thousands of small, playful pictures between abstraction and figuration.
Paul Klee was born in 1879 in Münchenbuchsee near Bern in Switzerland. His father was a German music teacher and his mother a singer. Klee was an accomplished violinist and long hesitated between music and art. He chose art and studied in Munich, including under Franz von Stuck at the academy.
In his early years he worked mostly in drawing and etching. In 1906 he married the pianist Lily Stumpf. She supported the family by giving piano lessons while he looked after the home and their son Felix and worked on his art. He came into contact with Kandinsky and Franz Marc and took part in Der Blaue Reiter’s second exhibition in 1912.
In the spring of 1914 he travelled to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. The light there was a turning point. In his diary he wrote that colour and he were now one and that he was a painter. After the journey he worked on watercolours built up of small squares of colour. He created a pictorial language of his own from arrows, letters, figures and signs, often with poetic and humorous titles. Twittering Machine of 1922 is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
From 1921 to 1931 Klee taught at the Bauhaus, and his lectures on form and colour became influential. He then taught at the academy in Düsseldorf, but was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 and moved back to Bern. His works were shown in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937. From 1935 he suffered from a serious illness, scleroderma. Even so, he was extremely productive in his final years, and in 1939 he created more than a thousand works.
Klee died in 1940. He left some ten thousand works. The largest collection is at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, which opened in 2005. His picture Angelus Novus of 1920 became famous through the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of it as the angel of history. Klee has influenced abstract art, Surrealism and art education alike.