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.  

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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