Paul Klee

Swiss, 1879 - 1940

BiographySwiss painter. Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, near Berne. The son of a music teacher, he became an accomplished violinist and music had a constant if tangential influence on his mature paintings. He trained at the Munich Academy (1898–1901) under Franz von Stuck, whose Jugendstil influence may be seen in his early graphic works, like the etching Young Woman in a Tree (1902) with its fin de siècle perversity. From 1901 to 1902 he travelled in Italy and in 1905 visited Paris with the painter Louis Moilliet (1880–1962). In 1906 he settled in Munich and married the pianist Lily Stumpf whose earnings allowed him financial independence. By 1911 he was connected with the Blaue Reiter and exhibited with them in 1912, the year of his second visit to Paris, where he first saw the work of Picasso and Henri Rousseau and was influenced by the colour theories of Robert Delaunay. A visit to Tunisia, with Moillet and August Macke, in 1914 had a profound and permanent effect on Klee's use of colour which had been largely confined to black and white. Works like The Niesen (1915; Berne, priv. coll.) in which he portrays an Alpine landscape in Tunisian colours, in a formalized style with debts to Cubism and Delaunay, reveal the total yet personal adoption of modernism which characterizes his mature work. After the war, in which he served 1916–18, a large exhibition in Munich (1919) established his reputation and led to an invitation from Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. During his Bauhaus years (1921–31) Klee was an influential teacher and formulated an artistic philosophy expressed in his lecture On Modern Art (1924), published in English in 1948. His approach is essentially mystical; the artist is the medium through which experience and imagination are transformed into art, a different but equally valid reality. An interest in the art of children and the insane influenced his own work, but when accused of childishness in his spidery almost automatist drawings, Klee replied, in On Modern Art, ‘I do not wish to represent the man as he is but only as he might be.’ Despite his versatility of style, through figuration to abstraction, his work is nonetheless instantly recognizable, vivacious, sometimes almost whimsical, as in The Twittering Machine (1922; New York, MoMa), yet sophisticated in colour and composition. From 1931 to 1933 he taught at the Düsseldorf Academy before being dismissed by the Nazis. He then moved to Berne where he continued to work until his death. A large collection of his work is held by the Klee Foundation in the Kunstmuseum, Berne.

Rodgers, David. "Klee, Paul." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e1371 (accessed April 27, 2012).

Person TypeIndividual