Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, a small town near Bern, Switzerland. His father, Hans Wilhelm Klee, was a German music teacher at the Bern-Hofwil teachers college, and his mother, Ida Marie Frick, was a trained singer from Basel. Because citizenship passed through the father under the law of the time, Paul held German nationality from birth even though he spent nearly his whole childhood and much of his life in Switzerland ^[1].

Music came first. Klee began violin lessons at age seven and was skilled enough by his teens to play as an occasional member of the Bern municipal orchestra. Drawing ran alongside it: his grandmother had encouraged him with crayons as a small child, and his school notebooks filled with caricatures and landscape sketches. For years he weighed a career in music against one in art, and the discipline of musical structure never left his thinking about painting ^[2].

After finishing secondary school in Bern in 1898, Klee chose art and moved to Munich, then one of the liveliest art centers in Europe. He studied first in the private drawing school of Heinrich Knirr, then entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the class of the celebrated Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck, who had also taught Kandinsky. Klee later judged that he learned little about color there, a gap he would spend two decades closing on his own ^[1][3].

A journey to Italy in 1901 and 1902 with the sculptor Hermann Haller gave Klee his first sustained encounter with Renaissance and classical art, an experience he found both exhilarating and daunting. He returned to his parents' home in Bern and worked in near isolation for several years, playing violin professionally while producing a series of satirical etchings he called Inventions, exhibited in Munich in 1906. These small prints, precise and often grotesque, were his first public statement as an artist ^[2].

In 1906 Klee married the Munich pianist Lily Stumpf and settled in the city. Their son Felix was born the following year, and since Lily's piano lessons supported the household, Klee kept house and cared for the child while working in a small studio, an arrangement unusual for the period. Progress was slow. He absorbed lessons from Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and the drawings of children, which he admired for their directness ^[1][4].

The decisive breakthrough came through friendship. In 1911 Klee met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, and in 1912 he took part in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the Munich circle that treated color and form as vehicles of inner feeling. A visit to Robert Delaunay's Paris studio that year deepened his grasp of color as an independent structure. Then, in April 1914, a two-week trip to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Moilliet transformed him. The light of Kairouan and Tunis unlocked something he had pursued for years, and he recorded in his diary that color now possessed him. The watercolors from that journey mark the true beginning of his mature work ^[3][5].

The First World War cut through the Blue Rider circle. Macke was killed in the opening weeks of fighting in 1914 and Marc fell at Verdun in 1916. Klee was conscripted into the German army in 1916 but was spared the front, serving behind the lines where his duties included painting camouflage on aircraft and clerical work at a flying school in Bavaria. He continued to paint in whatever hours he could find, and, remarkably, his reputation grew during the war: a 1917 exhibition at the Sturm gallery in Berlin sold well ^[1][4].

In 1920 the architect Walter Gropius invited Klee to join the faculty of the Bauhaus, the experimental school of art, craft, and design founded in Weimar the previous year. Klee taught there for a decade, first in Weimar and after 1925 in Dessau, leading workshops in bookbinding, stained glass, and weaving, and above all teaching the theory of pictorial form. His course notes, running to thousands of pages, analyzed line, tonality, color, and rhythm with a patience closer to a composer's counterpoint manual than to an art school lecture ^[3][6].

Two publications carried his ideas beyond the classroom. His essay Creative Confession appeared in 1920 with its often cited proposition that art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible. His Pedagogical Sketchbook, published in 1925 as one of the Bauhaus books, distilled his teaching into a short illustrated primer that remains in print a century later. In 1931, wearied by the school's internal politics, Klee left the Bauhaus for a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy ^[6][7].

Klee's output was enormous and meticulously ordered. He kept a handwritten catalogue of his own works from 1911 onward, and by his death it recorded roughly 9,000 items: paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints ^[5]. Most are small, many no larger than a sheet of writing paper, yet they compress wit, invention, and technical daring into intimate formats. He mixed and layered media freely, painting in oil over watercolor, on burlap, newsprint, cardboard, gauze, and glass, and he invented an oil-transfer drawing technique that gave works such as Twittering Machine (1922) their frail, scratchy line ^[4][8].

Among his best-known paintings are the shimmering color-block compositions inspired by North Africa and by music, including Ad Parnassum (1932), a large pointillist-inflected canvas now in Bern. Twittering Machine entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York and became one of the most reproduced images of twentieth-century art. Fish Magic (1925), Castle and Sun (1928), and the late Death and Fire (1940) show the range of a man who moved between abstraction and figuration without treating them as opposites ^[4][8].

Any fair account of Paul Klee achievements must include his influence as a theorist. His Bauhaus teaching notes, later published in English as The Thinking Eye, are often compared in scope to Leonardo's notebooks on painting. Generations of artists, from the Abstract Expressionists in New York to European postwar movements, studied his handling of sign, color gradation, and pictorial rhythm. Composers, too, responded to him: his works have inspired pieces by Gunther Schuller and others, a fitting return for a painter who described drawing as taking a line for a walk ^[6][7].

Klee's marriage to Lily Stumpf lasted from 1906 until his death. Their son Felix Klee, born in 1907, grew up partly inside the Bauhaus, where as a teenager he became the school's youngest student and later worked in theater; after the Second World War he became the principal keeper of his father's estate and memory ^[1][5].

Those who knew Klee described a reserved, ironic, self-contained man who guarded his working hours closely. He played the violin throughout his life, often beginning the day with Bach or Mozart before entering the studio, and he read widely in poetry and natural science. Cats were constant studio companions and appear repeatedly in his work. His diaries, kept from 1898 to 1918 and published after his death, show a writer of considerable sharpness who examined his own development with unusual detachment ^[2][5].

Nationality followed him as an unresolved question. German by paternity, Swiss by upbringing and residence, he applied for Swiss citizenship after returning to Bern in 1933. The Swiss authorities processed the request slowly, and approval was finally granted only after he had died, so the artist most associated with Bern never legally became Swiss in his lifetime ^[1][5].

The rise of National Socialism ended Klee's German career abruptly. In 1933, soon after Hitler came to power, the new authorities suspended him from his Düsseldorf professorship, and the National Socialist press attacked him as a degenerate and foreign element. In December of that year he and Lily left Germany for Bern, the city of his childhood. In 1937 the regime included 17 of his works in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and removed more than a hundred of his pieces from German public collections ^[1][7].

Illness arrived alongside exile. In 1935 Klee began to suffer from what was later diagnosed as scleroderma, a rare autoimmune disease that stiffens the skin and attacks internal organs. His production collapsed in 1936 to a few dozen works. Then came an astonishing recovery of will if not of health: in 1939 alone he catalogued over 1,200 works, the most productive year of his life. The late pictures grew bolder and starker, with thick black bar-like lines, simplified signs, and titles that face mortality directly, among them Death and Fire and the unfinished Still Life left on his easel ^[4][8].

Klee died on June 29, 1940, in a clinic at Muralto, near Locarno in southern Switzerland, at the age of 60. He was cremated, and his ashes were later placed in Bern's Schosshalden cemetery, where his gravestone carries words adapted from his diary about dwelling as much among the dead and the unborn as among the living ^[1][5].

Anyone asking who was Paul Klee today can find the fullest answer in Bern. The Zentrum Paul Klee, designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2005, holds about 4,000 of his works, the largest collection of a single artist of comparable rank anywhere, and functions as both museum and research center ^[5]. Major holdings also sit in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Städel in Frankfurt, and his paintings have brought multimillion-dollar prices at auction ^[8].

His influence spread in several directions at once. The Surrealists claimed his dreamlike imagery; André Breton included him in early Surrealist exhibitions. American painters of the 1940s, including Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell, absorbed his use of signs and pictographs, and critics have traced his mark on artists as different as Joan Miró and later generations of abstract painters. His writings continue to be taught in art schools, and the Pedagogical Sketchbook has never gone out of circulation ^[6][7].

Perhaps the most durable Paul Klee facts are the simplest: a musician's son who nearly chose the violin, a slow starter who found color at 34 in Tunisian light, a teacher whose notes filled thousands of pages, and a dying man whose final years were his most prolific. His work resists any single label, touching Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and abstraction while belonging fully to none. That independence, joined to humor and rigor in equal measure, is why his small pictures still hold their own beside the largest canvases of his century ^[3][7].