He was a highly creative and independent individual, a transcendentalist, a talented
musician and an artist. He explored colour theory, combined the ideas of cubism with the uninhibited,
free-flowing art of children in his painting and his teaching at the Bauhaus was seen as legendary.
This remarkable artist was Paul Klee.
Paul Klee was born on the 18th of December 1879 in Muchenbuchsee, near Bern in Switzerland.
His father, Hans Klee, was German and a music teacher at the Bern State Seminary in Hofwil
near Bern. His mother Ida Maria Frick was Swiss and a professional singer. He also had an elder
sister called Matilda. Encouraged by his parents, he started violin classes at age seven at the
Municipal Music School where he proved himself to be a very talented musician who at the age of 11,
received an invitation to play as an extraordinary member of the Bern Music Association.
Not surprisingly, his other hobbies of drawing and writing poems, were not avidly encouraged. When he
was not writing or reading literature, he would be constantly drawing caricatures in his schoolbooks.
These early sketches demonstrated that even at a young age he had an innate understanding
of the use of line, shape and volume. When he left school, the "Gymnasium" in Bern,
he barely passed his final examinations qualifying only in the Humanities. With his characteristic
dry wit, he wrote in his diary, "After all, it's rather difficult to achieve the exact minimum,
and it involves risks." In 1898, with his parents'
reluctant permission, he moved to Munich to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts with Heinrich
Knirr and Franz von Stuck. Stuck was a rather strict academic painter of allegorical pictures,
but his emphasis on imagination proved invaluable. Although Klee excelled at drawing, at this time,
he seemed to lack any natural colour sense and feared that he would never learn to paint.
But student days proved a great distraction, Klee spent a lot of time in pubs
and had numerous affairs, one of which resulted in the birth of a son who, in
1900 unfortunately died a few weeks after birth. In March 1901 Klee left the Academy and before
leaving for Italy with his friend Herman Haller in October, he secretly got engaged to Lily Stumpf,
who he had met at a musical soirée. The beauty of the art of ancient Rome and the Renaissance
led him to question the imitative styles of his teachers and of his own work. So, he began
to explore his undisputed talent for caricature. His first important works, a series of etchings,
called ‘Inventions’ were undertaken between 1903–1905 after his return from Italy. They
are drawn using a tight technique inspired by Renaissance prints, and explore the grotesque
allegories of social pretension, artistic triumph and failure, and the nature and perils of woman.
Living with his parents in Bern, this was a period in which he created 57 works using
the highly experimental technique of drawing with a needle on a blackened pane of glass.
This technique can be seen in ‘Portrait of my Father’ completed in 1906. During this
time he occasionally played in the Berne symphony orchestra and wrote a number of theatre reviews.
In June 1905 he visited Paris where he saw Impressionist paintings and the work of van Gogh,
Cezanne and the Belgian artist, James Ensor. He saw little of the latest in modern art,
but he found the freedom of expression he saw in post-Impressionist art very liberating. This,
together with his interest in the expressive possibilities of children’s drawings
suggested new avenues to explore. On 15th of September 1906
Paul Klee and Lily Stumpf were married and later moved to Munich where they survived on the income
Lily generated from giving piano lessons. She was a virtuoso pianist and an excellent teacher.
In 1907 their son Felix was born and Klee’s attempt to become a magazine illustrator
failed. For the next few years Klee’s art progressed very slowly, because of
dividing his time between housekeeping, and developing a new approach to his art.
Naturalistic painting didn’t interest him. His aim was for creativity and imagination to determine
the outcome of the picture, inspired by the first layers of paint or marks applied to the canvas.
In January 1911 Paul Klee met Alfred Kubin and they became friends. Kubin was a graphic artist
who encouraged Klee to illustrate Voltaire’s Candide which Klee had read some years earlier.
In these drawings Klee finally achieved the style he had been striving for.
For him the form of the art was the important thing because it was not until he worked on the
illustrations that the contents took on a meaning. Later in September he met August Macke and Wassily
Kandinsky and others of the New Munich Society of Artists. But it was Klee’s friendship with
Franz Marc that proved crucial. It was Marc that showed Klee how far abstraction and a
visionary approach to content could be taken. In 1912, 17 of Paul Klee’s pictures were shown
at the second Der Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Goltz gallery in Munich. In April 1912 Paul Klee
and Lily visited Paris where they met Robert Delaunay and saw paintings by Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse, and Maurice de Vlaminck. Their use of bold colour inspired him, but rather than copy
these artists, Klee began working out his own colour experiments using pale watercolour. He
created some primitive landscapes using blocks of colour with limited overlap, including
‘In the Quarry’ and ‘Houses near the Gravel Pit’. But he acknowledged that "a long struggle
lies in store for me in this field of colour”. But other elements were coming together in Paul
Klee’s work. He combined Cubist ideas with children’s art because both, he believed,
returned art to its basics: children’s art by its direct and naive renderings, and Cubism
by its timeless geometry. Klee managed to get these seemingly contradictory qualities to work
together because of his meticulous approach to composition and later by the beauty of his colour.
In 1914 he visited Tunisia with Louis Moilliet and August Macke. It was in Hammamet that Klee claimed
in his diary that his breakthrough to painting in colour had occurred. ‘Colour and I are one.’
In these paintings, you can see how the bright light of Tunisia inspired Klee to create pictures
of colourful watercolour washes. The paintings suggests that colour, shape, and even the faintest
suggestion of a subject is enough to powerfully give us an insight into the feelings the artist
experienced when he was in the original landscape. After Klee's return, he created several abstract
works based on his Tunisian watercolours, and just three months later the first World War broke out.
Paul Klee expected to be called up, but he wasn’t conscripted until 1916. Luckily, he was spared the
horror of the frontline by legislation exempting artists from combat. So, he remained in Bavaria,
painting camouflage on airplanes, working as a clerk and creating his own artwork.
Many of the pictures Klee created during the war years were romantic, innocent
landscapes and abstracts, where war appears only indirectly as images of demons or conflicts,
nevertheless the charm of these images proved popular with the public. Unfortunately,
both his friends, August Macke and Franz Marc died in the fighting and as a result Paul Klee
created several pen and ink lithographs on war themes including this, the Death of the Idea.
Late in 1918 Paul Klee was discharged from the army and returned to Munich.
In the November a new Communist revolutionary government came to power and the following April
Klee enthusiastically accepted a position on the Executive Committee of Revolutionary Artists.
However, he never actually worked for them as the Revolutionary government was toppled soon after,
so Klee returned to Switzerland. In May 1920 Hans Goltz organised
a large retrospective exhibition of 362 Paul Klee paintings in his Munich gallery.
This was Klee’s breakthrough, but despite a guaranteed annual income, he felt it too risky to
rely on just selling paintings. So, he accepted an offer to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.
He was appointed by Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, to work as a ‘Form Master’ to lecture
in the basic design program on the mechanics of art. He also taught workshops in book binding
and painting stained glass, but it his series of detailed lectures on visual form that demonstrated
what an influential teacher he was. His lectures at the Bauhaus were
recorded in more than 3,300 pages of notes and drawings. They are a remarkable resource
showing how the formal elements of art—shape, size, movement, texture colour and tone—could
be used to build complex symbolic compositions. In March 1925 the Bauhaus in Weimar closed
and later that year moved to Dessau where Klee was appointed Director of free sculpture,
painting and artistic design. Later in 1925 Paul Klee’s pedagogical sketchbook, based on
his visual form lectures, was published as a student Bauhaus manual. By the mid-1920s Klee’s
reputation had spread far beyond Germany, and in 1925 he received his first one-man show in Paris.
Also, that year Klee created his famous “Fish Magic” painting. The painting consists of
natural objects such as fish, flowers and people arranged to look like a sacred ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphic with a modern abstract twist. In the centre of this simple design is a mysterious
hanging clock, that according to Klee: “measures the rhythms of the ambient space of planets”.
Fish Magic ideally illustrates Klee’s idea that art is a “parable of creation”.
In 1926 Paul Klee took part in the Surrealist’s first exhibition in Paris
and in 1928 he visited Egypt, but in a letter to Lily he said the country did not have the
same impact on him that Tunisia had done. Although he produced many sketches in Egypt,
later paintings, such as Fire in the Evening and Steps, only contain echoes of Egypt, there are no
explicit paintings of pyramids and the like. In March 1930 the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, USA presented an exhibition of his work, the institution’s first
solo show by a living European artist. After 10 years at the Bauhaus Klee began
to find his biweekly lectures, administrative duties, and tensions over policy and politics,
increasingly onerous, so in the autumn of 1930 he resigned for the less-demanding job
of a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. Klee was now at the peak of his creative powers
and this painting, ‘Ad Parnassum’ is considered one of his masterpieces and the best example of
his pointillist style; it is also one of the largest, most finely worked of his paintings.
Paul Klee’s brief period of calm at the art academy in Düsseldorf ended on 30 January 1933,
when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Klee was denounced as a "Galician Jew"
and a "cultural Bolshevik," and his work derided as "subversive" and "insane." In March 1933 his
house in Dessau was searched by the Gestapo, and in April he was dismissed from his teaching
position without warning. Living in Germany became increasingly difficult so towards the end of 1933
Klee and his wife returned to the relative artistic isolation of Switzerland. The disruptions
caused by this move, along with his sudden financial uncertainty, took a toll on him.
Switzerland wasn’t at the artistic cutting edge and Klee missed not having deadlines,
not being part of the vibrant art world, he had been used to in Germany. Even a major
exhibition of his works held in the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1935 did little to console him.
But later in 1936 Paul Klee was diagnosed with progressive scleroderma,
a rare autoimmune disease that hardens the skin and makes mucus membranes dry up. It is usually
fatal and Klee felt utterly hopeless, and for over almost a year was almost incapable of working.
But in 1937 there was a temporary remission of his illness which led to a remarkable outpouring of
creative energy and a big increase in his output. Also, that year both Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo
Picasso visited him in Bern. In April of 1937 17 paintings by Paul Klee were shown at the infamous
exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich. The Nazi’s defined degenerate art as being
riddled with "decadence", "weakness of character”, “mental disease", and "racial
impurity. The Nazi’s also confiscated over 100 of his works from public collections in Germany.
Paul Klee’s late paintings and drawings are strongly influenced by the harsh distortions
of Pablo Picasso’s work of the 1920s and ’30s. Klee displayed remarkable resilience
and stoic acceptance of his approaching death, but as his health declined Picasso’s ideas gave
him a means of expressing the urgency he felt about his own grief and pain.
Paul Klee died as a German citizen in hospital in Locarno, Switzerland 29th of June 1940.
Despite being born in Switzerland, under Swiss law Klee was classed as a German citizen because
his father was German. Unfortunately, his wish to be granted Swiss citizenship
failed because the final approval meeting was not due to be heard until a few days after he died.
In one of his last paintings ‘Death and Fire’ the German word for death, Tod, T,O,D
creates the features of the white face in the centre of the picture. It is a powerful,
yet simply suggestive of a human or an animal skull. Perhaps a summary of the mortality of man.
Paul Klee’s unique merging of the representational and the abstract
made him one of the most original pioneers of the modern movement in art. The 9,000 paintings,
drawings, and watercolours he created were often small in scale, but remarkable for their delicate
nuances of line, colour, and tonality. In 1947, after the death of Lily Klee,
four prominent art collectors in Bern established the Paul Klee Foundation,
which was housed in the Kunstmuseum in Bern until 2004. The following year the Zentrum
Paul Klee Museum opened as an independent institution and research centre containing
around 40% of Paul Klee’s entire output. Thank you for watching. I hope you have
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