Klee, Paul (1879–1940)

Swiss painter and graphic artist. He was one of the most original and prolific artists of the 20th century. Endlessly inventive and playful, and suggesting a childlike innocence, his works are an exploration of the potential of line, plane, and colour. Twittering Machine(1922; Museum of Modern Art, New York) is typical.

Klee studied in Munich and absorbed a variety of influences from painters old and modern (Blake, Goya, Hans von Marées, and Cézanne among them) before setting out – in his own words – to work ‘as one new-born’. With Kandinsky, Marc, and Macke, he took part in founding the Blaue Reiter group in 1912, and taught at the Bauhaus 1921–31, though the style he developed – influenced as much by the art of children and the insane as it was by any school or movement – was unique and makes him difficult to classify neatly.

He moved to the Düsseldorf Academy in 1931 and to Bern in 1933 when the Nazis came into power.

His influential views on art, which reflect his time at the Bauhaus, were presented in Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925).

A very large output in oil, watercolour, pen and pencil drawings, and etchings reflects his independent and original imagination, his wit and charm in his use of colour and line. In his theoretical study Über die Moderne Kunst/On Modern Art (1945) he likens the transformation of life by the artist to the process by which the soil is converted into the foliage of the tree, and his own art illustrates this transformation, in human terms, through the subconscious. Klee, however, unlike the Surrealists, attached great importance to both observation and technique, as well as to more or less ‘automatic’ processes of expression.