Klee was born in
Münchenbuchsee (near
Bern), Switzerland, into a musical family—his father, Hans Klee, was a German music teacher at the Hofwil Teacher Seminar near Bern. Klee started young at both art and music. At age seven, he started playing the violin, and at age eight, he was given a box of chalk from his grandmother and was encouraged to draw frequently with it. Paul could have done either art or music as an adult; in his early years, he had wanted to be a musician, but he later decided on the
visual arts during his teen years. He studied
art at the
Academy of Fine Arts in
Munich with
Heinrich Knirr and
Franz von Stuck. After traveling to
Italy and then back to Bern, he settled in Munich, where he met
Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other
avant-garde figures and became associated with
Der Blaue Reiter. Here he met
Bavarian pianist
Lily Stumpf, whom he married; they had one son named Felix Paul.
In
1914, he visited
Tunisia with
August Macke and
Louis Moilliet and was impressed by the quality of the light there, writing, "Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever... Colour and I are one. I am a painter." Klee also visited Italy (1901), and Egypt (1928), both of which greatly influenced his art.
Klee was one of
Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), with Kandinsky, Feininger, and Von Jawlensky; formed in 1923, they lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1924.
Klee influenced the work of other noted artists of the early 20th century including Belgian
printmaker Rene Carcan.
Klee worked with many different types of media—
oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work. He has been variously associated with
expressionism, cubism and
surrealism, but his pictures are difficult to classify. They often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to
poetry, music and
dreams and sometimes include words or
musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery
hieroglyph-like symbols which he famously described as "taking a line for a walk". His better-known works include
Southern (Tunisian) Gardens (
1919), Ad Parnassum (
1932), and
Embrace (
1939).
Following
World War I, in which he painted camouflage on airplanes for the imperial German army, Klee taught at the
Bauhaus, and from 1931 at the
Düsseldorf Academy, before being denounced by the
Nazi Party for producing "
degenerate art" in 1933. The degenerate art exhibit catalogues had even called Klee's work "the work of a sick mind."
Composer
Gunther Schuller also immortalized seven works of Klee's in his
Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The studies are based on a range of works, including
Alter Klang [Antique Harmonies],
Abstraktes Terzett [Abstract Trio],
Little Blue Devil,
Twittering Machine,
Arab Village,
Ein unheimlicher Moment [An Eerie Moment], and
Pastorale.
Another of Klee's paintings,
Angelus Novus, was the object of an interpretive text by
German philosopher and
literary critic Walter Benjamin: In it, Benjamin suggests that the angel depicted in the painting might be seen as representing
progress in history. In 1933, Paul Klee returned to Switzerland; in 1935, he began experiencing the symptoms of what was diagnosed as
scleroderma after his death. The progression of his fatal case of the disease can be followed through the art he created in his last years.
He died in
Muralto, Switzerland, in 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship. The Swiss authorities eventually accepted his request six days after his death. When Paul Klee died at age sixty, he left at least 8926 works of art. The words on his tombstone say, "I belong not only to this life. I live as well with the dead, as with those not born. Nearer to the heart of creation than others, but still too far." Today, a painting by Paul Klee can sell for as much as
$7.5 million. A museum dedicated to Paul Klee was built in
Bern, Switzerland, by the Italian architect
Renzo Piano. Zentrum Paul Klee opened in June 2005 and houses a collection of about 4000 works by Paul Klee. Another substantial collection of Klee's works is owned by chemist and playwright
Carl Djerassi and displayed at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
