Paul Klee: The Complete Story
Paul Klee was the Swiss German artist who made painting feel like music and play, small, witty, deeply strange works of floating shapes, signs and color.
He famously described drawing as taking a line for a walk. Behind the childlike charm sat one of the most original and intelligent minds in modern art, and a master teacher at the Bauhaus.
His pictures look simple and joyful. They rest on a vast private theory of color, form and rhythm that he taught and wrote about for years.
Born: near Bern, Switzerland, 1879
Known for: playful abstraction, color theory, the Bauhaus
Died: Muralto, Switzerland, 1940
Three more, if you want them
Three that changed how I look at a picture:
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the object at the bottom that only works from one side
Luncheon of the Boating Party, detail by detail, who everybody at that table actually was
Ten women artists you need to know, the names the textbooks skipped
A musician who painted
Klee was a trained violinist from a musical family and nearly became a professional musician. Music never left his art. He spoke of rhythm, polyphony and harmony in paint, and many works feel like visual music, with bands of color like bars in a score.
He drew constantly, building a private language of arrows, fish, moons, faces and letters that hovers between abstraction and a secret alphabet. See what is abstract art.
The trip that unlocked color
For years Klee was a brilliant draftsman unsure of color. Then in 1914 he visited Tunisia, and the North African light overwhelmed him. He wrote in his diary that color and he were now one, and that he was a painter at last.
From then on his small, glowing watercolors and oils sang with color. See what is watercolor.
The Bauhaus and the Nazis
Klee taught at the Bauhaus, the famous German school of modern design, alongside his friend Kandinsky, and his teaching notes became a cornerstone of modern art education.
When the Nazis took power they branded his work degenerate, included it in their notorious 1937 exhibition mocking modern art, and forced him out of his teaching post.
He fled to Switzerland, where a painful illness, scleroderma, hardened his skin and eventually killed him. His late work grew darker, with thick black signs like grave markers.
What readers want to know about Klee
What is Paul Klee famous for?
Playful, musical, semi abstract works and his Bauhaus color teaching.
What did taking a line for a walk mean?
Letting a drawn line wander freely to see where it leads, his image for creativity.
Why did the Nazis target him?
They condemned modern art as degenerate and purged his work from German museums.
Why Klee still delights
Klee proved that art could be small, funny and profound at once, and gave modern painting a sense of humour and play it badly needed. Children love his work, and so do scholars, which is the rarest kind of greatness.
A final number. He was astonishingly prolific, leaving around 9,000 works, and he kept a meticulous handwritten catalogue of nearly all of them, numbering his output like a composer numbering opus after opus.