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Biographical Information:
Klee was born in Switzerland. The son of a musician, Klee studied the violin in Bern, but having decided on the career of painting, he went to Munich in 1898 to study art. During the years 1903-1906 he produced a number of etchings - " Two Gentlemen bowing to One Another, Each Supposing the Other to Be in a Higher Position " (1903) - that in their precise, hard technique suggest the graphic tradition of the German Renaissance in their mannered linearity Art Nouveau and in their mad fantasies. These were also among the first of Klee's works in which the title formed an integral part of his creative work.
Klee has been identified with surrealism, Dada, and nonobjective art. His painting, however, belongs to the development of abstract expressionism. He brought immense verbal skill and wit to his paintings, drawings, and prints, using letters and words literally as formal devices in his compositions, which he then gave a literary dimension with poetic and often humorous titles.
Klee traveled extensively in Italy and France for 4 years starting in 1901 and familiarized himself with Matisse's paintings. Between 1908 and 1910 he became aware of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and the beginnings of the modern movement in painting. In 1911 he met the "Blaue Reiter" painters Kandinsky, Marc and Macke and participated over the next few years in their exhibitions.
In 1914 he went on a trip with Macke to Tunis and other parts of North Africa. Like Delacroix and other Romantics before him, he was affected by the brilliance of the region's light and the color and clarity of the atmosphere. Here he recognized color as his central inspiration. Klee switched to watercolor and painted in a form of semiabstract color pattern based on a Cubist grid, a structure which he frequently used as a linear scaffolding for his compositions -- "Hammamet with the Mosque" (1914). Although he made larger paintings, he tended to prefer small-scale works on paper.
Klee appears to have found his own way just before he entered the German army in 1914. He continued to paint from time to time throughout his war service and his work was exhibited by the Dada Gallery in Zurich in 1917. His greatest development occurred after 1919 as he exploited both representational and abstract approaches. He created works of a poetically sensitive geometry, working during the same period on his unique, personally construed fantasies of plant and animal forms.
In 1920 Klee was appointed to the faculty of the Bauhaus at Weimar. His work was shown in a number of exhibitions in Berlin, New York and Paris, where his pictures were included in the first surrealist exhibition. Klee visited Egypt in 1927. He taught at the Duesseldorf Academy of Art in 1931 and also traveled to Sicily that year. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1931 he returned to Switzerland.
Klee's art can be subdivided into four major periods: his earliest significant landscape studies in pencil date from the 1890s and show a searching, somewhat impressionist, and talented approach - "Across the Elfenau" (1897). A second phase includes the pre-World War I etchings and engravings of grotesque themes - "Comedian" (1904). Klee's individual style emerges, however, in his small water colors from 1914 continuing through several linear, geometric, and mosaiclike substyles until about 1935. The fourth period comprises an increasingly simplified, flatly painted and broadly drawn series of gouaches and oils done between 1935 and 1940 when he suffered from a progressive skin and muscular disease.
He was one of the most original technicians and theorists among the earlier abstract expressionist artists of the 20th century. His stylistic development is difficult to trace even after 1914, since the artist, from this moment of maturity, continually reexamined his themes and forms to arrive at a reality beyond the visible world. He developed a visual language seemingly limitless in its invention and in the variety of its formal means. His complex language of personal signs and symbols evolved through private fantasy and a range of interests from plant and zoological life to astronomy and typography. With his interest in music Klee set out to create imagery infused with the rhythms and counterpoint of musical composition, claiming that color could be played like a "chromatic keyboard".
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Artists Works:
KLEE
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
Klee, Paul
...more works by Klee, Paul
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Museum Resources:
Neue Nationalgalerie
Phillips Collection
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In the News:
Twentieth-Century Works on Paper from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Last Chance! Twentieth-Century Works on Paper from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Klee Paintings
Modern Starts: Things
Klee, Tanguy, Miró. Three approaches to landscape
ART-WORLDS IN DIALOGUE
Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips
Mondrian Painting Acquired from the Original Owners
InfoArcadia: Manifestation about information design
From Michelangelo to Picasso: Great Master Drawings from the Collection
of the Albertina, Vienna
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Related Information:
the Virtual Muse
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