Klee, Paul (1879–1940). German-Swiss painter, graphic artist, writer, and teacher, one of the most individual and best-loved figures in 20th-century art. He was born at Münchenbuchsee, near Berne, to a German father and a Swiss mother (he is often referred to as Swiss, but he was a German citizen throughout his life, and although he eventually sought Swiss citizenship this was not granted until the day after his death). From 1898 to 1901 he studied in Munich, principally at the Academy under Franz von Stuck. After travelling in Italy, 1901–2, he lived in Berne for the next four years, then in 1906 moved to Munich after marrying the German pianist Lily Stumpf (both Klee's parents were musicians and he was himself a violinist of professional standard—as a boy he had played in the Berne Symphony Orchestra). Lily was the main breadwinner with teaching work until Klee's career took off after the First World War. In 1911 he became friendly with Jawlensky, Kandinsky (whom he had first met as a student ten years earlier), Macke, and Marc, and in the following year he took part in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition. Also in 1912 he visited Paris for the second time (he had earlier been there with Louis Moilliet in 1905); he met Delaunay on this occasion and saw Cubist pictures. At this point he was principally an etcher, his most notable prints including a series of eleven Inventions (1903–5)—bizarre and satirical works with freakishly distorted figures. However, in 1914 he visited Tunisia with Macke and Moilliet and was dramatically awakened to the beauty of colour. Two weeks after arriving he wrote: ‘Colour possesses me. I no longer need to pursue it: it possesses me forever, I know. Colour and I are one—I am a painter.’

In 1916 he was drafted into the German army, but unlike his friends Macke and Marc (both of whom died in action) he was not involved in combat; his work included painting aeroplanes. After the war he returned to Munich, and in 1919 he applied to succeed Adolf Hölzel at the Stuttgart Academy. He was rejected on the grounds that his work (in Schlemmer's words) was ‘playful in character and lacking firm commitment to structure and composition'. The following year, however, he had a huge success when the Munich dealer Hans Goltz staged a large retrospective exhibition of his work. This secured his reputation and led Gropius to invite him to teach at the Bauhaus; he moved to Weimar to take up the post in January 1921 and remained with the school for the next ten years. He proved an inspired, undogmatic teacher, both in his specialist work in the stained glass, bookbinding, and weaving workshops and in the more general classes of the preliminary course devoted to the understanding of basic principles of design. (His popularity with his students was so great that to mark his 50th birthday in 1929, one of them, Anni Albers, hired an aeroplane to drop bouquets of flowers on his house.)

In 1925 the Bauhaus published Klee's Pedagogisches Skizzenbuch, the best-known of his writings (it was translated into English as Pedagogical Sketchbook in 1953). There is no complete and reliable edition of his theoretical texts (few of which were published during his lifetime), and it difficult to summarize his views on art, especially as his statements tend to be couched in poetically compressed language. Frank Whitford writes (TLS, 8 April 1994): ‘Apparently objective but in reality highly personal, Klee's theories deploy vivid metaphor and terminology borrowed from natural science in an attempt to identify and comprehend the well-spring of all creation, natural and artistic, and to examine the work of art as a microcosm of the universe.’ During his Bauhaus days Klee was particularly close to another theoretician of poetic cast of mind—his colleague Kandinsky (they even lived in adjoining parts of the same building). He kept aloof from the internal disputes of the school (his detatchment earned him the nicknames ‘Bauhaus Buddha’ and ‘the heavenly father'), but the quarrels became increasingly tiresome to him and he resigned in 1931 and took up a post at the Academy in Düsseldorf. Two years later he was dismissed by the Nazis and returned to Switzerland, settling permanently in Berne. His work was included in the notorious exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937.

Although Klee was not politically inclined, his mood during his last years was one of profound disappointment; he was cut off from the German public that had greatly admired his work, and although he received visits from distinguished admirers (including Picasso in 1937), the Swiss artistic milieu was generally less sympathetic. In 1935 he suffered the first symptoms of the illness that killed him—a rare debilitating skin disease called scleroderma—and although he remained highly productive to the end, his earlier playfulness gave way to a preoccupation with malign and malevolent forces. His exquisitely sensitive line grew deliberately rough and crude and his sense of humour became macabre; his imagery was haunted by premonitions of death, as in Death and Fire (Paul Klee Foundation, Kunstmuseum, Berne, 1940), one of his starkest and most powerful works. It depicts a ghastly, ashen face, the features of which are made up of letters forming the word ‘Tod'—German for ‘death'. In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘ Paul Klee: The Last Years (Hayward Gallery, London, 1974), Douglas Hall writes: ‘The late work of Paul Klee, besides its enormous psychic interest, was of high importance for the future development of modern art. His disjunctive method of composition, his abnegation of the necessity to focus on a point or an episode of a painting, represent one of the very few new inventions in painting since cubism.’

Klee was one of the most inventive and prolific of modern masters, his complete output being estimated at some 9,000 works. He usually worked on a small scale; initially he painted only in watercolour, but he took up oils in 1919 and sometimes used both media in one painting. It is impossible to categorize his work stylistically, for he moved freely between figuration and abstraction, absorbing countless influences and transforming them through his unrivalled imaginative gifts as he explored human fantasies and fears. In spite of this variety, his work—in whatever style or medium—is almost instantly recognizable as his, revealing a joyous spirit that is hard to parallel in 20th-century art. The finest collection of his work is in the Paul Klee Foundation in the Kunstmuseum, Berne.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss painter and graphic artist of extraordinary formal inventiveness whose art combined a childlike, primary vision and the utmost sophistication.

Paul Klee was one of the great masters who established the essence and character of modern art. He was an artist of a creative capacity and an artistic range and depth that had not existed in German countries since Albrecht Dürer's time. Like Dürer, Klee was predominantly a draftsman. Color entered his art late, and the main body of his work was always dominated by the linear component. His fantasy seemed inexhaustible—the demonic bordering on the grotesque, the humorous on the anecdotal—but it was always rooted in his metaphysical, even mystical, attitude to life and art. Klee was also an outstanding writer on formal and esthetic problems and a distinguished teacher. To him we owe some of the most beautiful statements on modern art.

In Klee's work, thought and emotion form a whole out of which grows a myth of universal validity. Thus, he wrote: "My hand is only a tool of a far-off sphere. Nor is it my head that functions but something else, something higher, farther, somewhere. … The primitive mentality does not invent myths, it experiences them. … Progression toward a philosophy of life is essentially productive. … At the point where the central organ of all temporal spatial movement rules all functions: who would not live there as an artist? There, in the womb of nature, where the secret key to all being is hidden? … Our quaking hearts drive us downward, deep down to the origin of things."

Klee was born on Dec. 18, 1879, in München-Buchsee near Berne. His father was a musician, and in his youth Paul could not decide whether to become a musician or a painter. He was a fine violinist, and music remained a source of inspiration throughout his life.

Early Influences

In 1898 Klee went to Munich, Germany, where he studied briefly with Erwin Knirr and then attended the academy until 1901, studying with Franz von Stuck. The Jugendstil with its emphasis on curved lines and the fin-desiècle symbolism and romanticism of the Munich school influenced the young Klee, who admired Odilon Redon, Aubrey Beardsley, William Blake, Francisco Goya, and James Ensor. In 1901 Klee visited Italy, and in 1905 he made his first trip to Paris. Between 1902 and 1906 he lived in Berne, where he produced his first characteristic works.

In 1906 Klee married the pianist Lily Stumpf and moved to Munich. They had one son, Felix. Klee exhibited etchings in the Munich Secession in 1906, and the first large exhibition of his graphic works took place in Switzerland in 1910. The following year Klee met the artists of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group and exhibited drawings at the Galerie Tannhauser in Munich. In 1912 Klee visited Paris, where he met Robert Delaunay, whose Orphist paintings stimulated him; saw pictures by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; and was much impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. This trip to Paris and one to Kairouan in Tunisia in 1914 in the company of August Macke and Louis Moilliet were decisive for Klee as a painter. At the age of 35 he was still predominantly a draftsman and only occasionally a watercolorist. But after his trip to Tunisia all the influences he had been absorbing fused into a totality, and his unique pictorial metaphor was established.

Bauhaus Years

In 1914 Klee helped to found the Neue Münchner Sezession (New Munich Secession). From 1916 to 1918 he served in the German army. In 1920 he had a large retrospective at the Gallery Goltz in Munich and was invited to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He taught there and at the Bauhaus in Dessau until 1931; the Bauhaus years were most inspiring for Klee both as an artist and as a teacher. In 1923 he had a one-man show at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, and the following year his first exhibition in the United States took place.

In 1924 Klee made a trip to Sicily, in 1926 to Italy, in 1927 to Corsica. He was one of the founders of the Blaue Vier (Blue Four) group in 1924. The following year he participated in the first surrealist exhibition in Paris. In the winter of 1928/1929 Klee visited Egypt. To celebrate his fiftieth birthday, Klee was given a major retrospective in Berlin in 1929. His work became more inaccessible to rational analysis. The titles of his works, which had always been poetic and surprising, became mystical, for example, Archangels, Angels Bring What Is Longed For, and Saints of the Inner Light.

Last Works

In 1931 Klee began to teach at the Düsseldorf Art Academy; the Nazis dismissed him from his post in 1933. He returned to Berne, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1935 and 1936 he had large exhibitions in Switzerland. In 1935 the first signs of the illness that caused his death appeared. His paintings became larger, more hieroglyphic, and more remote; they are filled with images of death and angels.

In 1937 Picasso, Braque, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner visited Klee in Berne. That year his works were included in the Nazi exhibition of "degenerate" art in Munich, and 102 of them were confiscated from public collections in Germany.

Klee's most important writings are the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (1925; Pedagogical Sketch Book, 1944); Schöpferische Konfession (1920; Creative Credo); and Ü ber die Moderne Kunst (1945; On Modern Art, 1947), a lecture delivered at the Jena Kunstverein in 1924. He executed nearly 9,000 individual works, beginning with a preponderance of pen and pencil drawings and gradually expanding to watercolors and oil paintings. He died on June 29, 1940, at Muralto near Locarno.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive study of Klee is Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (1954), which contains extensive quotations from Klee's writings, a bibliography, and an index. See also Carola Giedion-Welcker, Paul Klee (trans. 1952). Important books on special aspects of Klee's art are Karl Nierendorf, Paul Klee: Paintings, Watercolors, 1913-1939 (1941); Margaret Miller, ed., Paul Klee (1941), which has statements by the artist and articles by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Julia and Lyonel Feininger, and James Johnson Sweeney; James Thrall Soby, The Prints of Paul Klee (1945); Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee (1954), a penetrating study of Klee's philosophy, his art theory, and his teaching method; and Jürg Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye (1956; trans. 1961), which contains Klee's notebooks with all particulars of pedagogical importance. □

Klee, Paul (b Munchenbuchsee, nr. Berne, 18 Dec. 1879; d Muralto, nr. Lucarno, 29 June 1940). German-Swiss painter, printmaker, teacher, and writer on art, one of the most individual and best-loved figures in 20th-century art. He is often referred to as Swiss (his mother's nationality), but he held German citizenship (through his father) all his life. From 1898 to 1901 he studied in Munich, principally at the Academy under Franz von Stuck. After travelling in Italy, 1901–2, he lived in Berne for the next four years, then in 1906 moved to Munich after marrying the German pianist Lily Stumpf (both Klee's parents were musicians and he was himself a violinist of professional standard). In 1911 he became friendly with Jawlensky, Kandinsky (whom he had first met as a student ten years earlier), Macke, and Marc, and in the following year he took part in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition. Also in 1912 he visited Paris for the second time (he had earlier been there with Louis Moilliet in 1905); he met Delaunay on this occasion and saw Cubist pictures. At this point he was principally an etcher, his most notable prints including a series of eleven Inventions (1903–5)—bizarre and satirical works with freakishly distorted figures. However, in 1914 he visited Tunisia with Macke and Moilliet and was dramatically awakened to the beauty of colour. Two weeks after arriving he wrote: ‘Colour possesses me. I no longer need to pursue it: it possesses me forever, I know. Colour and I are one—I am a painter.’

During the war Klee served in the German army, engaged for part of the time on painting aeroplane wings. After the war he returned to Munich, and a large exhibition of his work there in 1919 secured his reputation and led Gropius to invite him to teach at the Bauhaus, where he worked from 1921 to 1931. He proved an inspired, undogmatic teacher, both in his specialist work in the stained-glass, bookbinding, and weaving workshops and in the more general classes of the introductory course devoted to the understanding of basic principles of design (his popularity with his students was so great that to mark his 50th birthday in 1929, one of them, Anni Albers, hired an aeroplane to drop bouquets of flowers on his house). However, he found the internal disputes at the school increasingly tiresome and in 1931 he moved to the Düsseldorf Academy. He was dismissed from this post by the Nazis in 1933 and left Germany for Berne; four years later works by him were included in the notorious exhibition of degenerate art.

Although Klee was not politically inclined, his mood during his last years was one of profound disappointment. In 1935 he suffered the first symptoms of the illness that killed him—a rare debilitating skin disease called scleroderma—and although he remained highly productive to the end, his earlier playfulness gave way to a preoccupation with malign and malevolent forces. His exquisitely sensitive line grew deliberately rough and crude and his sense of humour became macabre; his imagery was haunted by premonitions of death, as in Death and Fire (1940, Paul Klee Foundation, Kunstmuseum, Berne), one of his starkest and most powerful works. It depicts a ghastly, ashen face, the features of which are made up of letters forming the word ‘Tod’—German for ‘death’.

Klee was one of the most inventive and prolific of modern masters, his complete output being estimated at some 9,000 works. He usually worked on a small scale; initially he painted only in watercolour, but he took up oils in 1919 and sometimes used both media in one painting. It is impossible to categorize his work stylistically, for he moved freely between figuration and abstraction, absorbing countless influences and transforming them through his unrivalled imaginative gifts as he explored human fantasies and fears. In spite of this variety, his work—in whatever style or medium—is almost instantly recognizable as his, revealing a joyous spirit that is hard to parallel in 20th-century art. Various collections of his writings (including his notebooks and diaries) have been published. The best-known individual work is Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, published in 1925 and translated into English as Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).

Klee, Paul (1879–1940). German-Swiss painter, printmaker, teacher, and writer on art, one of the most individual and best-loved figures in 20th-century art. From 1898 to 1901 he studied in Munich, principally at the Academy under Franz von Stuck. After travelling in Italy, 1901–2, he lived in Berne for the next four years, then in 1906 moved to Munich after marrying the German pianist Lily Stumpf (both Klee's parents were musicians and he was himself a violinist of professional standard). In 1911 he became friendly with Jawlensky, Kandinsky (whom he had first met as a student ten years earlier), Macke, and Marc, and in the following year he took part in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition. Also in 1912 he visited Paris for the second time (he had earlier been there with Louis Moilliet in 1905); he met Delaunay on this occasion and saw Cubist pictures. At this point he was principally an etcher, his most notable prints including a series of eleven Inventions (1903–5)—bizarre and satirical works with freakishly distorted figures. However, in 1914 he visited Tunisia with Macke and Moilliet and was dramatically awakened to the beauty of colour. Two weeks after arriving he wrote: ‘Colour possesses me. I no longer need to pursue it: it possesses me forever, I know. Colour and I are one—I am a painter.’ During the war he served in the Germany army, engaged for part of the time on painting aeroplane wings. After the war he returned to Munich, and a large exhibition of his work there in 1919 secured his reputation and led Gropius to invite him to teach at the Bauhaus; he took up the appointment in 1921 and remained with the school for the next ten years, proving an inspired, undogmatic teacher who was enormously popular with his students. However, he found the internal disputes at the school increasingly tiresome and in 1931 he moved to the Düsseldorf Academy. He was dismissed from this post by the Nazis in 1933 and left Germany for Berne; four years later works by him were included in the notorious exhibition of degenerate art.

Although Klee was not politically inclined, his mood during his last years was one of profound disappointment. In 1935 he suffered the first symptoms of the illness that killed him—a rare debilitating skin disease called scleroderma—and although he remained highly productive to the end, his earlier playfulness gave way to a preoccupation with malign and malevolent forces. His exquisitely sensitive line grew deliberately rough and crude and his sense of humour became macabre; his imagery was haunted by premonitions of death, as in Death and Fire (1940, Paul Klee Foundation, Kunstmuseum, Berne), one of his starkest and most powerful works. It depicts a ghastly, ashen face, the features of which are made up of letters forming the word Tod (Ger.: ‘death’). Klee was one of the most inventive and prolific of modern masters, his complete output being estimated at some 9,000 works. He usually worked on a small scale; initially he painted only in watercolour, but he took up oils in 1919 and sometimes used both media in one painting. It is impossible to categorize his work stylistically, for he moved freely between figuration and abstraction, absorbing countless influences and transforming them through his unrivalled imaginative gifts as he explored human fantasies and fears. In spite of this variety, his work—in whatever style or medium—is almost instantly recognizable as his, revealing a joyous spirit that is hard to parallel in 20th-century art. Various collections of his writings (including his notebooks and diaries) have been published. The best-known individual work is Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, published in 1925 and translated into English as Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).

Paul Klee , 1879–1940, Swiss painter, graphic artist, and art theorist, b. near Bern. Klee's enormous production (more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, and etchings) is unique in that it represents the successful combination of his sophisticated theories of art with a very personal inventiveness that has the appearance of great innocence. The son of a music teacher, Klee himself was a violinist, and musical analogies permeate his writing and his approach to art. He traveled through Europe, open to many artistic influences. The most important of these were the works of Blake , Beardsley , Goya , Ensor , and, especially, Cézanne . In 1911 he became associated with the Blaue Reiter group and later exhibited as one of the Blue Four. Klee's awakening to color occurred on a trip to Tunis in 1914, a year after he had met Delaunay and been made aware of new theories of color use. Thereafter his whimsical and fantastic images were rendered with a luminous and subtle color sense.

Klee's works are neither abstract nor figurative, but have strong elements of both approaches. Characteristic of his gently witty paintings are The Twittering Machine (1922, Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) and Fish Magic (1925, Phila. Mus. of Art). Other works reveal strong, rhythmic patterns, as in the unsettling Viaducts Break Ranks (1937, Hamburg). World famous by 1929, Klee taught at the Bauhaus (1920–31) and at the Düsseldorf academy (1931–33) until the Nazis, who judged his work degenerate, forced him to resign. He and his family fled Germany for his native city in 1933. In his series of Pedagogical Sketchbooks (tr. 1944) and lecture notes entitled The Thinking Eye (tr. 1961), Klee sought to define his intuitive approach to artistic creation. His last ten years were spent in Switzerland, and some 4,000 of his works are in the Paul Klee Center, Bern.

Bibliography: See his notebooks, ed. by J. Spiller (2 vol., tr. 1992); his diaries, ed. by his son Felix Klee (tr. 1964); his life and work in documents, ed. by F. Klee (tr. 1962); studies by J. M. Joran (1984), C. Lanchner, ed. (1987), O. K. Werckmeister (1989), and M. Franciscono (1991).

Klee, Paul (1879–1940) Swiss painter and graphic artist. Klee evolved his own pictorial language based on correspondences between line, colour, and plane. Some of his images are entirely abstract art, but some are recognizable figures. He taught at the Bauhaus (1920–31) and at Düsseldorf Academy (1931–33), but returned to Switzerland in 1933 after the Nazis condemned his work as degenerate. Characteristic works include Graduated Shades of Red-Green (1921) and Revolutions of the Viaducts (1937).

http://www.tate.org.uk; http://www.guggenheimcollection.org