Paul Klee – painter, graphic artist and style wanderer

June 29, 2012 marked the Paul Klee 72nd anniversary

Klee experimented with many styles in his work; art experts have categorized him as belonging to Expressionism and Constructivism, Cubism, Primitivism and Surrealism .

He spent his childhood in a musical household; Klee received musical encouragement from a very early age and was expected to become a musician himself. Alongside his musical successes, however, Klee discovered his talent for drawing early and independently; even as a primary school student, he decorated notebooks and books with countless caricatures and always carried a sketchbook and drawing pencil with him.

Therefore, after graduating from high school, he decided against his parents' wishes to study art in Munich. There he enjoyed student life and perhaps had more to do with his numerous affairs than attend classes at art school; he certainly didn't meet Wassily Kandinsky, who was studying with him, at that time.

He was more impressed by the artistic education he received during a six-month study trip to Italy in 1902. After returning from Italy, Klee earned his living as a violinist for several years until he married in 1906 and became the father of a son.

During this time, Klee admired and studied many artistic techniques and forms of expression: etching and graphic design, copperplate engraving and reverse glass painting, Renaissance architecture and ancient art in Paris, nude painting and Impressionism, until in the autumn of 1911 he met August Macke, Franck Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky and joined their artists' group, "Der Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider) . At this time, he worked primarily as a graphic artist; the second "Blaue Reiter" exhibition featured 17 of his graphic works.

During his second stay in Paris in 1912, he saw works by Braque and Matisse, Picasso and Rousseau, and met Robert Delaunay, whose window paintings he recognized as "the type of an independent picture that leads a completely abstract formal existence without motifs from nature..."

This experience was pivotal; Klee's understanding of color and light changed permanently. After a trip to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet, he stated in April 1914:

The color has me. I don't need to chase after it. It has me forever, I know that. That is the meaning of this happy hour: I and the color are one. I am a painter

The painter was liberated and eagerly set to work; even during World War I, as a soldier without seeing front-line action, he created numerous paintings. His anti-war paintings were enthusiastically received at several wartime exhibitions in Berlin. This marked his definitive artistic and commercial breakthrough, followed by his first solo exhibition as a painter in Munich.

Since Klee had by then definitively declared himself to be on the political left, he was appointed to various teaching positions at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920, and from there his works were presented in the USA for the first time in 1921.

In 1924 a solo exhibition followed 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 Bauhaus masters with the Kandinsky couple.

Several journeys followed, while the political climate at home changed: The Bauhaus came under increasing pressure from the rising National Socialism, Klee moved to the Düsseldorf Art Academy as a professor in 1931, and a degenerate artist, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1933.

Several retrospectives of his works were held there, and even while Paul Klee was suffering from an incurable illness, he had another very productive creative phase from 1937 onwards. However, from August 1937, the first contemporary artworks were confiscated in Germany and sold abroad, including over 100 works by Klee, who died in Locarno in June 1940.

However, shortly after the war, his wife Lily Klee, operating from Bern, prevented the liquidation of the largest part of his estate in favor of the Allied powers. After several interim locations, approximately 4,000 works were brought together in 2005 at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, where the works of this important representative of Classical Modernism can now be admired in rotating exhibitions.