bgcolour	#EEDD82
name	Paul Klee
birth date	18 December 1879
birth place	Münchenbuchsee bei Bern, Switzerland
death date	June 29, 1940
death place	Muralto, Switzerland
nationality	German/Swiss
field	Painting
training	Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
movement	Expressionism, Bauhaus, Surrealism
works	more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, and etchings, including Twittering Machine (1922), Fish Magic (1925), Viaducts Break Ranks (1937).
awards	}}

Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Early life and training

Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee (near Bern), Switzerland into a musical family. His father, Hans Klee, was a German music teacher at the Hofwil Teacher Seminar near Bern. His mother, Ida Frick, had trained to be a singer. He was the second of two children.

Klee started young at both drawing and music. At age seven, he started playing the violin, and at age eight, he was given a box of sidewalk chalk by his grandmother. Klee appears to have been equally talented in music and drawing. As a musician, he played and felt emotionally bound to traditional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but as an artist he craved the freedom to explore radical ideas and styles.

Around 1897, he started his diary, which he kept until 1918, and which has provided scholars with valuable insight into his life and thinking. During his school years, he avidly drew in his school books, in particular drawing caricatures, and already demonstrating skill with line and volume. He barely passed his final exams at the “Gymnasium” of Bern, where he qualified in the Humanities. With his characteristic dry wit, he wrote, “After all, it’s rather difficult to achieve the exact minimum, and it involves risks.” On his own time, in addition to his deep interests in music and art, Klee was a great reader of literature, and later a writer on art theory and aesthetics.

With his parents' reluctant permission, in 1898 he began studying art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. He excelled at drawing but seemed to lack any natural color sense. He later recalled, “During the third winter I even realized that I probably would never learn to paint.”

After receiving his Fine Arts degree, Klee went to Italy from October 1901 to May 1902 with friend Hermann Haller. They stayed in Rome, Florence, and Naples, and studied the master painters of past centuries. He responded to the colors of Italy, but sadly noted, “that a long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color.” For Klee, color represented the optimism and nobility in art, and a hoped for relief from the pessimistic nature he expressed in his black-and-white grotesques and satires. He commented, “though I’m fairly satisfied with my etchings I can’t go on like this. I’m not a specialist.” Klee was still dividing his time with music, playing the violin in an orchestra and writing concert and theater reviews.

Marriage and early career

Klee married Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906 and they had one son named Felix Paul in the following year. They lived in a suburb of Munich, and while she gave piano lessons and occasional performances, he kept house and tended to his art work. His attempt to be a magazine illustrator failed.

On meeting Kandinsky, Klee recorded, “I came to feel a deep trust in him. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind.” The association opened his mind to modern theories of color. His travels to Paris in 1912 also exposed him to the ferment of Cubism and the pioneering examples of “pure painting”, an early term for abstract art. The use of bold color by Robert Delaunay and Maurice de Vlaminck also inspired him. Rather than copy these artists, Klee began working out his own color experiments in pale watercolors and did some primitive landscapes, including In the Quarry (1913) and Houses near the Gravel Pit (1913), using blocks of color with limited overlap. Klee acknowledged that “a long struggle lies in store for me in this field of color” in order to reach his “distant noble aim.” Soon, he discovered “the style which connects drawing and the realm of color.” With that realization, faithfulness to nature fades in importance. Instead, Klee began to delve into the “cool romanticism of abstraction”. One of the most literal examples of this new synthesis is The Bavarian Don Giovanni (1919).

After returning home, Klee painted his first pure abstract, In the Style of Kairouan (1914), composed of colored rectangles and a few circles. The colored rectangle became his basic building block, what some scholars associate with a musical note, which Klee combined with other colored blocks to create a color harmony analogous to a musical composition. His selection of a particular color palette emulates a musical key. Sometimes he uses complementary pairs of colors, and other times “dissonant” colors, again reflecting his connection with musicality.

A few weeks later, World War I began. At first, Klee was somewhat detached from it, as he wrote ironically, “I have long had this war in me. That is why, inwardly, it is none of my concern.” Soon, however, it began to affect him. His friends Macke and Marc both died in battle. Venting his distress, he created several pen and ink lithographs on war themes including Death for the Idea (1915). He also continued with abstracts and semi-abstracts. In 1916, he joined the German war effort, but with behind the scenes maneuvering by his father, Klee was spared serving at the front and ended up painting camouflage on airplanes and working as a clerk. He continued to paint during the entire war and managed to exhibit in several shows. By 1917, Klee’s work was selling well and art critics acclaimed him as the best of the new German artists. His Ab ovo (1917) is particularly noteworthy for its sophisticated technique. It employs watercolor on gauze and paper with a chalk ground, which produces a rich texture of triangular, circular, and crescent patterns.

Mature career

In 1919, Klee applied for a teaching post at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. This attempt failed but he had a major success in securing a three-year contract (with a minimum annual income) with dealer Hans Goltz, whose influential gallery gave Klee major exposure, and some commercial success. A retrospective of over 300 works in 1920 was also notable.

Klee taught at the Bauhaus from January, 1921 to April, 1931. He was a “Form” master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops and was provided with two studios. In 1922, Kandinsky joined the staff and resumed his friendship with Klee. Later that year the first Bauhaus exhibition and festival was held, for which Klee created several of the advertising materials. Klee welcomed that there were many conflicting theories and opinions within the Bauhaus: “I also approve of these forces competing one with the other if the result is achievement.”

Klee was also a member of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), with Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky; formed in 1923, they lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1925. That same year, Klee had his first exhibits in Paris, and he became a hit with the French Surrealists. Klee visited Egypt in 1928, which impressed him less than Tunisia. In 1929, the first major monograph on Klee’s work was published, written by Will Grohmann.

Klee also taught at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1931 to 1933, and was singled out by a Nazi newspaper, “Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he’s a thoroughbred Arab, but he’s a typical Galician Jew.” His home was searched by the Gestapo and he was fired from his job. His self-portrait Struck from the List (1933) commemorates the sad occasion. The Klee family emigrated to Switzerland in late 1933. He produced nearly 500 works in 1933 during his last year in Germany. However, in 1933, Klee began experiencing the symptoms of what was diagnosed as scleroderma after his death. The progression of his fatal disease, which made swallowing very difficult, can be followed through the art he created in his last years. His output in 1936 was only 25 pictures. In the later 1930s, his health recovered somewhat and he was encouraged by a visit from Kandinsky and Picasso. Klee’s simpler and larger designs enabled him to keep up his output in his final years, and in 1939 he created over 1,200 works, a career high for one year. He used heavier lines and mainly geometric forms with fewer but larger blocks of color. His varied color palettes, some with bright colors and others sober, perhaps reflected his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism. Back in Germany in 1937, seventeen of Klee’s pictures were included in an exhibition of “Degenerate Art” and 102 of his works in public collections were seized by the Nazis.

Death

Klee suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma, toward the end of his life, enduring pain that seems to be reflected in his last works of art. One of his last paintings, "Death and Fire", features a skull in the center with the German word for death, "Tod", appearing in the face. He died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days after his death. His legacy comprises about 9,000 works of art. He was buried at Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.

Style and methods

Klee has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify. He generally worked in isolation from his peers, and interpreted new art trends in his own way. He was inventive in his methods and technique. Klee worked in many different media—oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, etching, and others. He often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint. Klee employed spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing, and impasto, and mixed media such as oil with watercolor, water color with pen and India ink, and oil with tempera.

He was a natural draftsman, and through long experimentation developed a mastery of color and tonality. Many of his works combine these skills. He uses a great variety of color palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic. His works often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract. Many of his works and their titles reflect his dry humor and varying moods; some express political convictions. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about Klee in 1921, “Even if you hadn’t told me he plays the violin, I would have guessed that on many occasions his drawings were transcriptions of music.”

Legacy

As Klee learned to manipulate color with great skill and passion, he became an effective teacher of color mixing and color theory to students at the Bauhaus. This progression in itself is of great interest because his views on color would ultimately allow him to write about it from a unique viewpoint among his contemporaries.

Klee influenced the work of other noted artists of the early 20th century including Belgian printmaker Rene Carcan.

Composer Gunther Schuller immortalized seven works of Klee's in his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The studies are based on a range of works, including Alter Klang [Antique Harmonies], Abstraktes Terzett [Abstract Trio], Little Blue Devil, Twittering Machine, Arab Village, Ein unheimlicher Moment [An Eerie Moment], and Pastorale. The German Ensemble Sortisatio together with the Swiss Groupe Lacroix worked on the project "8 Pieces on Paul Klee", based on the work of the painter. Another Klee-inspired work is Wingate's Second Symphony, subtitled Kleetüden; Variationen für Orchester nach Paul Klee (Variations for Orchestra after Paul Klee) which consists of 27 tone paintings in homage to Klee. The Spanish composer Benet Casablancas's symphonic work Alter Klang. Impromptu for orchestra after Klee, based on Klee's painting of the same title, was commissioned by Orquesta Nacional de España, which prémièred it in 2007 under the baton of Josep Pons. This is not the only piece by Casablancas that is inspired by Klee; in 2007 he composed a chamber cantata Retablo sobre textos de Paul Klee, for soprano, mezzosoprano and piano, commissioned by Fundación Canal in Madrid. Well into 2011, more than 800 pieces of music, in virtually all genres, are known to have been inspired by Klee's artwork, and sometimes by his words. This is far more music than has been inspired by any other artist.{citation needed}

One of Klee's paintings, Angelus Novus, was the object of an interpretive text by German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, who purchased the painting in 1921. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin suggests that the angel depicted in the painting might be seen as representing the angel of history.

In the late sixties, the psychedelic nature of Klee's pieces was revived musically by a group (including jazz composer Chuck Mangione), The National Gallery released the album Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee in 1968, with music and lyrics that are appropriately surprising, strange, and delightful.

Today, a painting by Klee can sell for as much as $7.5 million.

A museum dedicated to Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland, by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. Zentrum Paul Klee opened in June 2005 and houses a collection of about 4,000 works by Paul Klee. Another substantial collection of Klee's works is owned by chemist and playwright Carl Djerassi and displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The 2005 bottling of Kenwood Vineyards "Artist Series" Cabernet Sauvignon reproduces Klee's "Highway and Byways" (1929) on the label.

See also

Theory of painting

Notes and sources

Footnotes

Paul Klee's father was a German citizen; his mother was Swiss. Swiss law determined citizenship along paternal lines, and thus Paul inherited his father's German citizenship. He served in the German army during World War I. However, Klee grew up in Berne, Switzerland, and returned there often, even before his final emigration from Germany in 1933. He died before his application for Swiss citizenship was processed.

Citations

References

Jardi, Enric (1991) Paul Klee, Rizzoli Intl Pubns, ISBN 0847813436

Kagan, Andrew (1993) Paul Klee at the Guggenheim Museum (exhibition catalogue) Introduction by Lisa Dennison, essay by Andrew Kagan. 208 pages. English and Spanish editions. 1993, ISBN 9780892071067

Partsch, Susanna (1993) Paul Klee 1879–1940, Taschen Basic Art, Köln, ISBN 3822802999

Books, essays and lectures by Paul Klee

1922 Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre ('Contributions to a pictorial theory of form', part of his 1921-2 lectures at the Bauhaus)

1923 Wege des Naturstudiums ('Ways of Studying Nature'), 4 pages. Published in the catalogue for the Erste Bauhaus Ausstellung (First Bauhaus Exhibition) in Summer 1923. Also published in Paul Klee Notebooks vol 1.

1924 Über moderne Kunst ('On Modern Art'), lecture held at Paul Klee's exhibition at the Kunstverein in Jena on 26 January 1924

1924 Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch ('Pedagogical Sketchbook')

1949 Documente und Bilder aus den Jahren 1896–1930, ('Documents and images from the years 1896–1930'), Berne, Benteli

1956 Graphik, ('Graphics'), Berne, Klipstein & Kornfeld

1956 Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre ('Writings on form and design theory') edited by Jürg Spiller (English edition: 'Paul Klee Notebooks')

* 1956 Band I: Das bildnerische Denken., ('Volume I: the creative thinking'). 572 pages review. (English translation from German by Ralph Manheim: 'The thinking eye')

* 1964 Band 2: Unendliche Naturgeschichte ('Volume 2: Infinite Natural History') (English translation from German by Heinz Norden: 'The Nature of Nature')

1964 The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918 ed. Felix Klee Berkley, University of California

1976 Schriften, Rezensionen und Aufsätze edited by Ch. Geelhaar, Köln,

1960 Gedichte, poems, edited by Felix Klee

1962 Some poems by Paul Klee ed Anselm Hollo. London

Further reading

Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné. 9 vols. Edited by the Paul Klee Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Berne. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998–2004.

Paul Klee: 1933 published by Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Helmut Friedel. Contains essays in German by Pamela Kort, Osamu Okuda, and Otto Karl Werckmeister.

Reto Sorg und Osamu Okuda: Die satirische Muse – Hans Bloesch, Paul Klee und das Editionsprojekt Der Musterbürger. ZIP Zürich 2005 (Klee-Studien; 2), ISBN 3909252079

Otto Karl Werckmeister: The Making of Paul Klee's Career, 1914–1920. University of Chicago Press, 343 pages, 125 halftones, 1984, 1989.

Marcel Franciscono: Paul Klee: His Work and Thought. University Of Chicago Press, 406 pages, 1991, ISBN 0226259900.

Wilhelm Hausenstein (1921) Kairuan oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters ('Kairuan or a History of the Artist Klee and the Art of this Age')

External links

Zentrum Paul Klee - The Paul Klee museum in Bern

Current exhibitions and connection to galeries at Artfacts.Net

Paul Klee – Swissinfo web special

Paul Klee at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Klee's Mandalas

Gallery of Klee's artwork

Category:1879 births Category:1940 deaths Category:People from Bern-Mittelland District Category:Bauhaus Category:Cubism Category:German painters Category:Swiss painters Category:Expressionist painters Category:20th-century painters Category:Academy of Fine Arts, Munich alumni Category:Kunstakademie Düsseldorf faculty

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