Klee

Klee
Name	Paul Klee
Birth date	18 December 1879
Death date	29 June 1940
Birth place	Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland
Nationality	Swiss
Known for	Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Movements	Expressionism, Surrealism, Bauhaus

Klee was a Swiss-born painter, draughtsman, and teacher whose work bridged Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Trained as a musician and visual artist, he taught at the Bauhaus alongside figures such as Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger, producing a prolific body of work that influenced 20th century art, Abstract art, and Modernism. Klee's output includes thousands of works—paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints—that intersect with ideas from Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse.

Biography

Born in Münchenbuchsee near Bern, Klee was the son of a music teacher and grew up in a family connected to the Bern Conservatory and the cultural life of Switzerland. He studied at the Frankfurt Academy and later at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where contemporaries and influences included Franz Marc, August Macke, and artists linked to the Der Blaue Reiter circle. Early professional life included a period in Munich where Klee met Wassily Kandinsky and exhibited with journals and galleries associated with Blaue Reiter Almanac. A formative trip to Italy and Tunisia informed his chromatic experiments, resonating with the color investigations of Paul Cézanne and the light studies of J.M.W. Turner.

In 1914 Klee married Lotte Klee (Charlotte), and World War I shaped his network among artists including Max Liebermann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Klee joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1921 and later the Düsseldorf and Weimar art circles, where he taught theoretical courses and developed pedagogical writings alongside Johannes Itten and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. After the rise of Nazi Germany, Klee's work was labeled "degenerate" in exhibitions organized by figures in the Nazi Party, prompting his eventual relocation to Bern in 1933. During the 1930s he suffered from scleroderma, reducing his output but intensifying late works until his death in 1940.

Artistic Style and Techniques

Klee's visual language fused references to Paul Cézanne, not linked, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky into unique experiments with color, line, and form. He developed a systematic approach to pedagogy documented in his Bauhaus lectures, synthesizing color theory with ideas derived from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's color writings and Michel Eugène Chevreul's color contrast. Klee used mixed media—watercolor, oil, pastel, ink, and etching—employing techniques akin to printmaking traditions practiced by Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn. His surfaces range from delicate washes reminiscent of Japanese woodblock printing to densely worked impasto recalling Vincent van Gogh.

Line and notation functioned as compositional scaffolding; Klee often integrated quasi-musical structures informed by his studies at the Bern Conservatory and affinities with composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. He experimented with microcosmic motifs and cartographic grids that connect to the graphic sensibilities of Paul Nash and Giorgio de Chirico. Klee's palette shifted over time from muted tones to luminous primaries, paralleling developments in the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard.

Major Works and Series

Notable works span multiple series and media: watercolors from the 1920s including pieces that echo the landscapes of Switzerland and the architectural fragments of Italy; the Bauhaus pedagogical drawings and notebooks; and late-career "angel" motifs that dialogue with Medieval iconography and Renaissance compositional devices. Key individual works frequently discussed in scholarship include watercolors that appear alongside studies by Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque in retrospectives, and prints that have been compared with portfolios by Käthe Kollwitz and Pablo Picasso.

Klee's series often bore idiosyncratic titles reflecting literary and musical references, creating associative networks with writers and composers such as Gottfried Keller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich Heine. The notebooks and theoretical notebooks produced at the Bauhaus constitute a major corpus cited in relation to pedagogues Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy.

Exhibitions and Critical Reception

Klee exhibited widely during his lifetime in venues including Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art, and later in municipal museums across Germany and Switzerland. In the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition organized by officials in Nazi Germany, Klee's works were removed from public collections, a political action echoed in the purge of artists like not linked and Pablo Picasso. Posthumous retrospectives in institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern reassessed his contributions alongside exhibitions of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.

Critical reception has ranged from early praise by critics associated with Expressionist journals to sharp condemnation during the 1930s political climate; later 20th- and 21st-century scholarship situates Klee within narratives of Abstract art, Modernism, and theoretical debates involving Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

Influence and Legacy

Klee's influence extends to generations of artists, educators, and theorists. His pedagogical writings informed curricula at the Bauhaus and later at art schools influenced by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Artists citing his impact include Joan Miró, not linked, Anselm Kiefer, Mark Rothko, and Cy Twombly. Curators and historians place Klee in dialogues with Abstract Expressionism, Concrete art, and contemporary practices that emphasize hybridity and intermedia, such as works by Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Brice Marden.

Collections holding substantial Klee holdings include the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Paul Klee Center, and major international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate. His notebooks and letters are principal sources for researchers in art history and cultural studies, intersecting with archival materials related to Bauhaus figures and European intellectual life between the wars.

Category:Swiss painters Category:20th-century painters