Paul Klee - painter, graphic artist and style hiker

Paul Klee was for the 72th time, and yet his works by today's admirers are perceived as breathtaking and highly up to date.

In his work, Klee experimented with many styles, he was assigned to expressionism and constructivism , cubism , primitivism and surrealism .

He spent his childhood in a musician household, Klee was musically encouraged very early on and was also supposed to become a musician. In addition to his musical successes, however, Klee discovered his drawing talent early and independently, and as elementary school students, he decorated booklets and books with countless caricatures and always had a sketchbook and drawing pen with him.

Therefore, after graduating from high school, he decided against the wishes of his parents to study art in Munich. Here he enjoyed life life and maybe had more to do with his numerous affairs when he visited the lessons in the art school, which Wassily Kandinsky students students were definitely not familiar with at the time.

He was more impressed by the artistic education, which he learned on a half -year study trip to Italy in 1902. After returning from Italy, clover earned his bread for a few years as a violinist until he married in 1906 and father of a son.

During this time, Klee had admired and studied many artistic techniques and forms of expression, etching and graphic design, copperplate and back glass painting, Renaissance architecture and old art in Paris, nude painting and Impressionism , until he met Macke, Franc Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in autumn 1911 and adopted her artist association "of the Blue Rider" . At that time he mainly worked as a graphic artist, the second exhibition of the “Blue Rider” showed 17 of his graphic work.

During the second stay in 1912, he saw works by Braque and Matisse , Picasso and Rousseau and got to know Robert Delaunay, whose window pictures he recognized as "the type of an independent image that without motives from nature leads a very abstract form ...".

This experience was drastic, Klee's understanding of color and light changed sustainably, after a tour of a tunis with August Macke and Louis Moilliet he found in April 1914:

The color has me. I don't need to hit her. She has me forever, I know that. This is a happy hour: I and the color are one. I'm a painter. "

The painter was liberated and eagerly went to work, even during World War II, he created numerous paintings as a soldier without a front. In several Berlin exhibitions during the war, his war -opposing paintings were enthusiastic. That was the final artistic and commercial breakthrough, followed by the first solo exhibition as a painter in Munich.

Since Klee had finally known himself to the political left, he was appointed to the Weimar Bauhaus for various teaching activities in 1920, from there his works were presented for the first time in the United States in 1921.

In 1924 he followed a solo exhibition in New York, in 1925 he also exhibited in Paris together with the surrealists, in 1926 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, where Klee shared one of the Gropius double houses for Bauhausmeister with the Kandinsky couple.

Several trips followed, while the political climate changed at home: the Bauhaus was increasingly under pressure from the emerging National Socialism, Klee moved to the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1931, and he emigrated to Switzerland in 1933 as a degenerate artist

There were still some retrospectives with his works, even while Paul Klee already suffered from an incurable illness, he had a very productive creative phase from 1937. From August 1937, however, the first contemporary works of art in Germany were confiscated and sold abroad, including over 100 works by Klee, which died in Locarno in June 1940.

However, shortly after the war, his wife Lily Klee prevented the liquidation of the largest in favor of the Allied powers. After some intermediate stations, around 4,000 works in 2005 were brought together in the Bernese center Paul Klee, where the work of the important representative of classical modernism can be admired in alternating exhibitions today.