Paul Klee: The Complete Story
Paul Klee was a concert-grade violinist who numbered every artwork he ever made, nearly 10,000 in all, taught color like a science at the Bauhaus, and produced 1,253 works in his final dying year. Switzerland granted him citizenship six days too late.
The paintings look like play. The notebooks behind them run to thousands of pages. That gap is the whole story of Klee.
Paul Klee at a glance:
1879: born near Bern to a German music teacher and a Swiss singer; he plays violin at professional level all his life.
1914: two weeks in Tunisia; the diary announces that color and he are one, and he is a painter.
1921: joins the Bauhaus, where his form-theory lectures grow to thousands of pages.
1933: dismissed by the Nazis, defamed in the press, he returns to Bern; 17 works hang in the Degenerate Art show.
1940: dies in Switzerland of scleroderma complications, his last year the most productive of his life.
A violinist chooses the harder art
Klee was born near Bern, in Munchenbuchsee, on December 18, 1879, to a German music teacher and a Swiss singer, which made him German by law in the country he lived in.
He was good enough on violin to play with the Bern music society as a teenager, and chose painting precisely because it did not come easily. For years he worked mostly in black and white, convinced he did not understand color.
Tunisia, 1914: two weeks that fixed everything
In April 1914 Klee spent two weeks in Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. In Kairouan the problem dissolved, and he wrote in his diary: Color and I are one. I am a painter. He had already joined Kandinsky's Blaue Reiter circle in Munich in 1911; now he had the instrument to match the theory.
More incredible painter stories
If Paul Klee pulled you in, you will love these too:
Bauhaus: the scientist of the childlike
From 1921 to 1931 Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, and his classes on form and color grew into thousands of pages of notes, some published in 1925 as the Pedagogical Sketchbook.
That is the answer to the oldest jibe about him.
The pictures that look like a child drew them, the twittering machines and fish gardens, were built by the most systematic art theorist of the century, who studied children's drawings deliberately, as a resource.
1933: dismissed, defamed, exiled home
The Nazis dismissed Klee from his Dusseldorf professorship in 1933 and he returned to Bern. In 1937 seventeen of his works hung in the Degenerate Art exhibition while more than a hundred were pulled from German museums.
From 1935 he battled scleroderma, a disease that stiffens the skin, and his line thickened into the heavy black bars of the late angels and masks.
The furious final year, and where to see him
In 1939, with death visible, Klee produced 1,253 numbered works, the most of any year of his life. He died in Muralto on June 29, 1940.
The Swiss citizenship he had requested was approved six days after his death; the most Swiss of painters died German.
The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Renzo Piano's rolling hills of steel opened in 2005, holds about 4,000 works, the largest collection of a single artist anywhere in Europe.
The puppets for Felix
For his son Felix he built hand puppets out of plaster, beef bones, electrical outlets and rabbit fur: some fifty over the years, thirty surviving in Bern.
Among them is a wide-eyed self-portrait puppet, which Felix performed with in the family's kitchen theater.
He never exhibited them and never entered them in his catalogue: art off the books, for an audience of one.
Teaching the invisible
The Bauhaus lectures grew into nearly four thousand pages of notes and diagrams, published as The Thinking Eye: the fullest theory of form any modern painter left.
The famous definition, drawing as taking a line for a walk, comes from that classroom, where students watched him grow worlds from a dot.
He taught the weavers' workshop too, and the textile logic never left his gridded paintings. Composers and architects still mine the notebooks.
The angels
Angels crowd the last two years: roughly fifty of them, forgetful angels, ugly angels, angels still learning their job.
An earlier one, the 1920 Angelus Novus, belonged to Walter Benjamin, who turned it into philosophy's most quoted picture: the angel of history blown backward into the future.
The late angels take dying more lightly: drawn by a man whose skin was hardening, they treat it as one more clumsy apprenticeship.
The Paul Klee questions that keep coming up
What is Paul Klee famous for? Small, dense paintings that fuse drawing, color theory, music, and humor, and for teaching at the Bauhaus, where his notebooks became a grammar of modern design.
Was Paul Klee Swiss or German? Born and died in Switzerland, German citizen his whole life. His Swiss naturalization was approved days after he died in 1940.
What illness did Klee have? Scleroderma, from 1935. It stiffened his hands and skin, and the simplified thick-lined late style is partly his answer to it.
Where can I see Klee? The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern above all, with strong rooms at MoMA in New York and the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
How much does a Klee cost? Top canvases trade in the single-digit millions, modest for his stature: he worked small, and museums hold the icons.
Was he ever granted Swiss citizenship? He applied after fleeing Germany in 1933; the approval was on the agenda days after he died in June 1940. German on paper, Swiss everywhere else.
More secrets to unlock
1,253 works with failing hands
Klee kept a handwritten catalogue of his life's work, entering each piece under a number and year, 9,800 or so entries in the end. The last year holds 1,253 of them, painted by a man who could barely close his fingers.
