Paul Klee

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Born: 1879

By developing a new expressive, mostly abstract or poetic language of graphical symbols and signs, Klee broke established barriers dividing literature and visual art. Arrows, letters, musical notation, old hieroglyphs, or a few black lines resembling a person or object appear frequently in his work, although they rarely demand a precise reading.

Klee appreciated children’s work because it seemed to be created without reference to models or precedents. In his own work, he aimed for a similar untutored simplicity, frequently using vivid colours inspired by a trip to North Africa and line drawing in the untutored way of an ordinary worker.

Klee was continually experimenting with creative techniques and the expressive power of colour, violating many traditional or “academic” conventions of painting in oils on canvas in the process. During his time at the Bauhaus, Klee experimented with unconventional methods of painting, such as spraying and stamping. Klee painted on a range of mundane materials, such as burlap, cardboard panel, and muslin, to keep his work within the realm of the “ordinary,”

Biography of Paul Klee

Childhood of Paul Klee

Paul Klee was born in Berne-Hofwil, Switzerland, to a German father who taught music at the Berne-Hofwil teacher’s college and a Swiss mother who had studied singing professionally. He began playing the violin at the age of seven, thanks to his musical parents’ encouragement.

Drawing and composing poetry, on the other hand, were not nurtured in the same way. Despite his parents’ hopes for him to pursue a musical career, Klee felt that the visual arts, where he could create rather than merely perform, would be a better fit for him.

Early Life of Paul Klee

Klee’s academic coursework was mostly centred on his sketching abilities. He trained for two years in a private studio before joining the German symbolist Franz von Stuck’s workshop in 1900.

He met musician Lily Stumpf during his studies in Munich, and the two married in 1906. Even after the birth of their son, Felix, in 1907, Lily’s employment as a piano instructor funded Klee’s early years as an artist.

Until 1911, when he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter, Klee remained insulated from the advances of contemporary art.

In 1912, he encountered the work of prominent avant-garde painters such as Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition. In the same year, Klee paid a visit to Delaunay’s studio in Paris. Around this period, he began experimenting with abstraction.

Klee’s connection with colour was altered during a trip to Tunisia in 1914. In his diaries, he said, “Color and I are one,” “I am a painter.” she says. He sketched and painted watercolour landscapes of Tunis, Hammamet, and Kairouan while travelling with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Following his return, Klee painted a series of abstract paintings based on his Tunisian watercolours.

Mid Life of Paul Klee

Wilhelm Worringer’s thesis Abstraction and Empathy (1907), which argued that abstract art was developed during a period of conflict, impacted Klee’s ideas on abstract art. Only three months after Klee’s return from Tunisia, World War I broke out.

Klee was drafted into the army in 1916, but he was not sent to the front lines. Meanwhile, he was financially successful, particularly after a big show at Berlin’s Der Sturm Gallery.

When a communist government was formed in Munich in November 1918, Klee gladly accepted a seat on the Executive Committee of Revolutionary Artists, despite his reservations about the war. Soon later, the November Revolution failed, and Klee returned to Switzerland.

In 1920, Klee accepted a teaching position at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. The Bauhaus was a well-known architectural and industrial design school that intended to provide students a solid foundation in all of the visual arts.

Klee was a ten-year instructor at the Bauhaus, which moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. His effect as a teacher was most notable in his series of comprehensive lectures on visual form, which he taught workshops in book binding and stained glass painting (Bildnerische Formlehre).

When Hitler was proclaimed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Klee departed the Bauhaus for the art college in Düsseldorf. Klee’s art was slammed as “Galician Jew” and “cultural Bolshevik,” and he was labelled a “subversive” and an “insane.” His Dessau home was searched, and he was fired from his job as a teacher in April 1933. In December, Klee and his wife arrived in Berne.

Late Life of Paul Klee

Klee became unwell two years after returning to Switzerland, and was subsequently diagnosed with progressive scleroderma, an autoimmune condition that causes the skin and other organs to harden.

The artist only produced 25 pieces the year after he became ill, but his output climbed dramatically in 1937, reaching a high of 1,253 works in 1939. His later works explored sorrow, agony, perseverance, and acceptance in the face of impending death.

The National Socialists held a “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich in 1937, which featured several of Klee’s works. Klee’s application for Swiss citizenship in 1939 was hampered by the charges levelled against his character and politics in Germany.

Despite the fact that he was born in Switzerland, Klee’s father was German, making him a German citizen according to Swiss law. Before his final application could be granted, Klee died on June 29, 1940, in Locarno, Switzerland.

Klee’s creative impact is enormous, even though many of his followers have avoided overtly referencing his work as a source or inspiration. The Surrealists saw Klee’s seemingly random combination of text, abstract signs, and reductive symbols as a metaphor for how the mind in a dream state recombines diverse daily items, revealing fresh insights into how the unconscious has power even over waking reality.

Paul Klee Facts

Why was Paul Klee so important?

Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre, or Paul Klee Notebooks) and Klee’s experiments with colour theory, published as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered as fundamental to contemporary art as Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings.

How did Paul Klee change the world?

Many famous American abstract artists, including Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell, were influenced by Klee’s innovative paintings and unique approach to painting (illuminated in his vast writings). Even Klee’s harshest detractors at the time lauded him as a key American influence.

What disease did Paul Klee have?

At the age of 57, Klee was diagnosed with scleroderma. In 1940, he succumbed to illness and died. Since the diagnosis, Klee’s output began to wane, but the artist altered his approach and produced more than 1,000 works in the latter years of his life.

How many artworks did Paul Klee create?

More than 9,000 of Klee’s paintings and musical compositions have been used as inspiration for other artists. In 1938, Steinway Pianos introduced its “Paul Klee Series” pianos, a tribute to the artist.

How much is a Paul Klee?

Many of Paul Klee’s works have been offered for sale at auction, with final sales prices ranging from six dollars to six million nine hundred and fifty-five dollars, depending on the size and material of the artwork. Tänzerin, sold in 2011 at Christie’s London for $6,791,965 USD, has held the auction record for this artist since 1998.

Famous Art by Paul Klee

Winged Hero (Der Held mit dem Flugel)

1905

Before becoming a painter, Klee worked as a draughtsman. Klee’s early series, Inventions, has etchings that exhibit his ability to manipulate line and tonal value to create a person with odd and monstrous limbs.

The underlying notion is explained by an artist’s note in the lower right corner of the painting: “This man felt he could fly since he was born with only one wing. Of course, his attempts have ended in wrecks and a shattered left arm and leg.” The odd creature might be a self-portrait of a typical progressive artist at the start of the twentieth century, constantly chasing his full potential while constantly battling against popular opinion.

Hammamet with Its Mosque

1914

Klee was inspired to produce brilliant watercolour splashes by the bright light of Tunisia. The painting’s upper half is representational, while the lower half is based on Robert Delaunay’s idea to utilise colour and its contrasts for expressive purposes—in this case, a juxtaposition of red and green patches in the style of a folk textile or other popular craft tradition.

Color, shape, and the tiniest hint of a topic, according to Klee, are sufficient to effectively re-create in the viewer’s mind the genuine sensation of calm that the artist experienced in the original environment.

Affected Place [Betroffener Ort]

1922

This painting depicts a scene of confusing signs and symbols against a background of modulated purples and oranges, and was created during Klee’s early Bauhaus years. The horizontal focus of the multiple colour strips hints at a horizon, which is only countered by the brightly painted arrow, which unexpectedly implies something as mundane as a road sign.

The arrow, like the numerous gradations of colour, creates movement and draws the viewer’s eye to the centre of the image. Cubist still lifes, such as those by Picasso and Braque, definitely influenced Klee: Klee indicates a theme painted from nature while also cancelling it, as if to remind us that this isn’t a window but a type of abstract symbol symphony.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• Paul Klee, a Swiss-born German painter, printmaker, and draughtsman, was a founding member of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and later taught at the Bauhaus, Germany’s most important art school during the interwar period.
• Klee’s varied body of work, on the other hand, defies categorization into a single creative style or “school.”
• His paintings, which are sometimes bizarre, childish, or otherwise humorous, influenced the New York School and many other twentieth-century painters.

• Design, pattern, colour, and tiny sign systems are all examples of his attempts to utilise art as a window into that philosophical concept.
• Klee spent much of his life as a musician, and he used to warm up by playing the violin before painting.
• He found parallels between music and visual art in the transitory character of musical performance and the time-based processes of painting, or in the expressive power of colour as being comparable to musical sonority.

• Klee even contrasted the structural, percussive rhythms of a musical work by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master of counterpoint, in his lectures at the Bauhaus.
• Arrows, letters, musical notation, old hieroglyphs, or a few black lines resembling a person or object appear frequently in his work, although they rarely demand a precise reading.
• During his time at the Bauhaus, Klee experimented with unconventional methods of painting, such as spraying and stamping.
• Klee painted on a range of mundane materials, such as burlap, cardboard panel, and muslin, to keep his work within the realm of the “ordinary,”

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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