Modern Age
Paul Klee (1879–1940)
German-Swiss Early Abstraction painter.
Paul Klee made some of the most inventive small pictures of the twentieth century, turning line, colour, and sign into a private language poised between abstraction and a childlike, dreamlike figuration. Born near Bern to a German father and Swiss mother, he trained as a musician before choosing art, and music never left his work — he played the violin daily and thought about painting in terms of rhythm, polyphony, and interval. In Munich before the First World War he fell in with Kandinsky and Franz Marc's circle, Der Blaue Reiter, and exhibited with them.
The turning point was a two-week trip to Tunisia in 1914 with the painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Overwhelmed by the North African light, Klee wrote in his diary that colour had taken possession of him — that he and colour were one, and that he was, at last, a painter. From then on colour drove his art. After the war, in which Marc and Macke were both killed, Klee taught for a decade at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau alongside Kandinsky, developing a rigorous theory of pictorial form set out in his 'Pedagogical Sketchbook' and lectures.
His output was enormous and endlessly varied — some nine thousand works, from the mechanical whimsy of 'Twittering Machine' to the mosaic colour of 'Senecio' and the late, heavy hieroglyphs made as illness closed in. Driven from his Düsseldorf professorship by the Nazis in 1933 and branded 'degenerate', he returned to Bern, where a wasting disease and a darkening world pressed his final pictures toward stark, sombre signs. He died in 1940, having insisted all along that art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.
The words the record keeps using: poetic, whimsical, musical, inventive, dreamlike, childlike.
At a glance
- Lived 1879–1940
- Origin German-Swiss
- Worked in Munich
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction, Der Blaue Reiter
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Color-form abstraction
Works in the archive
- Angelus Novus, 1920 (Israel Museum, Jerusalem)
A small, strange angel with staring eyes, scrolled hair, and open mouth, made by Klee's oil-transfer method. Once owned by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, it became world-famous when he read it as the 'angel of… - Twittering Machine, 1922 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
A row of spindly birds perched on a wire that is cranked by a hand-turned handle — a machine for making birdsong, drawn with deadpan, childlike wit. Beneath the whimsy runs unease: the mechanised birds seem like bait or… - Senecio (Baldgreis), 1922 (Kunstmuseum Basel)
A round, glowing face built entirely from small patches of warm colour — a portrait head, sometimes read as an old man or a theatrical mask, assembled like a mosaic. Its title puns on a flowering plant and on old age;… - Fish Magic, 1925 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
A dark, dreamlike aquarium-cosmos in which fish, flowers, a moon, a clock, and human figures float together in deep space, as if underwater and in the night sky at once. A patch of canvas is stitched on and connected to… - Highway and Byways, 1929 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne)
Painted after a second journey to Egypt in 1928–29, this translates the Nile's cultivated fields and receding roads into pure colour structure. A broad central band of vertical stripes — the main road — drives toward a…
What was said
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
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.
In his Bauhaus teaching Klee described the most elementary act of drawing as taking an active line for a walk — a line that moves freely, for its own sake, without a fixed goal.
Lineage
Learned from Henri Rousseau, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Jean Dubuffet, Franz Marc, Robert Delaunay, Theo van Doesburg, Alexej von Jawlensky
What would Paul make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Paul Klee", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Paul · Keep a life moment the way Paul would · Pictures made after Paul