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Paul Klee (1879 - 1940)

The Swiss painter Paul Klee, a most original master of modern art, produced thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints over the course of his life. His works were known for their fantasy, wit, and invention.

Klee was born near Berne, Switzerland. His father was a music teacher and his mother a singer. Klee became an accomplished musician himself and also had a great interest in literature. Musical and literary themes can be found throughout his art. His pictures are often small and filled with childlike symbols and writing (Fiore di Roccia).

In 1898, he began studying art in Munich and by 1903 his first etchings were complete. He studied the works of Blake and Goya in 1904 and visited Paris in 1905, interested in such painters as Velasquez, Tintoretto, Monet, Manet, and Renoir.

He married and moved to Germany in 1906, and by 1910, his work was accepted in exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.

He became the friend of painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and exhibited with their The Blue Rider group just before World War I. He viewed the work of French modernists and Italian Futurists and a visit to Tunisia in 1914 had a strong impact on his use of color and abstract forms (Untitled, 1914).

Klee taught at the Bauhaus school of design from 1920 to 1929 and during this time his pictures grew in variety and richness. Numerous Klee works were shown at a large Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, when he showed the first of his many famous pictures with rectangles (Architektur, 1923).

The Nazis dismissed him from a teaching post in Dusseldorf in 1933. The Gestapo confiscated a book of his drawings and seized 102 of his works from public museums in 1937, calling his work "degenerate". Red and White Domes was a work from this period. He moved to Switzerland and spent the rest of his life there. In the meantime, numerous galleries in London, New York, and Paris were showing his work (Heroic Roses, 1938).

In the first few months of the last year of his life, he produced a total of 366 works. He died on June 29, 1940.

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