Art · 20th century

Paul Klee

1879–1940 · Swiss-German

Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus

Paul Klee made small, intricate, faintly comic pictures out of line, colour squares and pictographs, and taught at the Bauhaus for a decade. A trained violinist, he thought about painting in musical terms — polyphony, rhythm, key — and his teaching notes are among the most influential theoretical writings of modern art.

How to spot them

▸Small-scale works on paper or board, often in watercolour and ink, in a private childlike script of arrows, fish, moons, faces and letters
▸Grids or chequerboards of glowing colour squares, the legacy of a fortnight in Tunisia in 1914
▸Wit and menace together: mechanical birds, twittering machines, angels drawn in a single wavering line
▸A pedagogical habit of mind — the line that goes for a walk, colour taught as a scale

Key works

Four spindly birds on a wire turned by a hand crank, taken by the Nazis in 1937 and now in New York (1922)

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Die Zwitscher-Maschine; confiscated as 'degenerate art' from Germany and later sold abroad

Image: Paul Klee · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

A round red face made of geometric segments, its eyebrows raised, named for an old man (1922)

Kunstmuseum Basel

Senecio (Head of a Man Going Senile) — his best-known single head

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

A monoprint angel bought by Walter Benjamin, who made it the angel of history blown backwards into the future (1920)

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Passed from Benjamin to Gershom Scholem and then to Jerusalem

Image: Christian Mantey ( photographer ), Kulturagent · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

A mosaic of coloured dots with a doorway and a sun, named for the mountain of the muses (1932)

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The masterpiece of his 'pointillist' late Düsseldorf years

Image: Paul Klee · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

A night-blue picture of floating fish, flowers and a clock, painted partly on a scrap of muslin (1925)

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fish Magic

Image: Paul Klee · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Quick-fire facts

•Born at Münchenbuchsee near Bern in 1879 to a German music teacher and a Swiss singer; he was a good enough violinist to play in the Bern orchestra
•Exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich alongside Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke
•Travelled to Tunisia in April 1914 with Macke and Louis Moilliet and wrote in his diary that colour and he were one: 'I am a painter'
•Served in the German army in the First World War, painting camouflage on aircraft
•Taught at the Bauhaus from 1921, at Weimar and then Dessau, where his colleagues included Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger
•Published the Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925); his teaching is the source of the line that a drawing is 'a line that has gone for a walk'
•Dismissed from the Düsseldorf Academy by the Nazis in 1933 and returned to Bern; 102 of his works were seized and some shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937
•Contracted scleroderma, which hardened his skin and hands, and died at Muralto near Locarno in June 1940, still a German citizen — Swiss citizenship came through days after his death
•The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, designed by Renzo Piano, opened in 2005 and holds around 4,000 of his works

Drill it — 8 cards

1 / 8new card

Sources

Israel Museum, Jerusalem — Angelus Novus and the angel of history
New World Encyclopedia — Paul Klee