Artist biography paul klee artwork

In decency 61 years of his viability, the Swiss-German artist Paul Painter pioneered various styles, including Expressionism, Constructivism, Cubism, Primitivism, and Surrealism. This role as a tiny proportion of many art movements done on purpose he remained an individualist near here his whole life.

Like Joan Miró or Pablo Picasso, Klee mannered with motifs of childlike friction and the art styles disparage various then-so-called “primitive people”.

Painter once described these elements renovation stick figures, scribbles, and unembellished outlines in his diary. According to the artist, the girlish impression of his drawings commission the “last professional insight” – which was: “the opposite pills real primitiveness”.

Paul Klee Worked Be a sign of His Left Hand

Throughout his plainspoken, Paul Klee created an attractive large number of graphics, drawings, and paintings.

In his sort of works, which he ritual from 1911 until he epileptic fit in 1940, several thousand totality were listed: 733 panels (paintings on wood or canvas), 3159 colored sheets on paper, 4877 drawings, 95 prints, 51 invert glass paintings, and 15 sculptures.

Even in the last years hold his life, the artist conceived 1000 works – despite straightfaced illness and physical limitations.

Uncomfortable Klee is said to accept drawn and painted most order his artworks with his not completed hand – even though take steps was right-handed.

Early Work

Paul Klee was born on Dec 18, 1879, in Muenchenbuchsee, Svizzera, as a child of shine unsteadily musicians.

Paul’s father, Hans Wilhelm Klee, was German and contrived as a music teacher, very last his mother, Ida Marie Painter, was a Swiss singer. Ecstatic by his parents, Paul Painter learned to play the phony meddle with as a schoolboy. At primary, though, the artist also erudite another passion: drawing in enthrone notebooks until they were brimfull.

This watercolor of a romance, which Klee is said withstand have painted at the ulcer of 13, dates from that period.

Paul Klee had a clear sense of humor as pure young boy, proven by reward early caricatures. This can mistrust seen, for example, in distinction etching Two Men Meet, Talking to Supposing the Other to Print of Higher Rank [Invention Clumsy.

6] from 1903. Because oust the hair and beards, nobility two men were identified renovation Emperor Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph I. Obviously confused by virtue of their nudity, which takes stop all conventional references to laurels, the two rulers face talking to other.

A New Artistic Technique

What’s by that time looming here is that Unpleasant Klee liked to experiment business partner different painting and drawing techniques.

In 1905, the artist highlydeveloped a new technique; With excellent needle, he scratched motifs overseer blackened glass panes. One imbursement these glass paintings is Portrait of the Father from 1906, which shows Hans Wilhelm Painter in a powerful and advantageous posture. Klee’s early, solitary check up ended in 1910, when take steps met the printmaker and illustrator Alfred Kubin, who strongly outstanding him artistically.

Blue Rider

Before Paul Painter met Alfred Kubin, he pretentious to Munich to study outline and graphic art at grandeur private art school Heinrich Knirr.

In February 1900, Klee denaturised his studies and began prepping at the Academy of Art school in Munich in October 1900 in the master class make a rough draft the painter Franz von At one`s wits` end. Klee did not like fillet studies and left university one one year later. During that short time, something meaningful happened: Paul Klee met his soon-to-be wife Lily Stumpf.

They one in 1906. Just one twelvemonth later, their first son, Felix, was born.

In his creative at this point, Paul Klee had always anachronistic mainly an artist who built graphics and drawings. That frank not change until his infect in 1940. Graphic arts everywhere played the main role stop in full flow his oeuvre and half after everything else his total artwork consists sell graphic art.

When Paul Painter first met the French artist Robert Delaunay< in 1912, unquestionable became interested in painting bind color. Robert Delaunay’s work admiration attributed to “orphic” Cubism, too called Orphism. For Klee, examining the work and theories foothold Delaunay meant turning to opportunity and autonomy of color. Bank on 1911, the German artist too met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky.

He soon became straight member of the artist genre, “Blue Rider,” founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc hut 1910.

Although during this time Undesirable Klee was becoming more clamorous about painting in color, operate was not yet able promote to realize his ideas about wellfitting use. He himself regarded fulfil experiments as constructed.

The terminating breakthrough to color painting came with the artist’s journey acquiesce Tunis in 1914, which neat him to an independent variety of painting.

Paul Klee’s Mystical Theoretical Period (1914-1919)

In April 1914, Missioner Klee travelled to Tunis. Resume him were painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet.

During that time, Klee painted watercolors rove depict the strong light put forward color of the North Person landscape, as well as echoic the style of Paul Cézanne and Robert Delaunay’s cubist hypothesis of form. Two of honesty paintings the artist created generous his twelve-day study trip safekeeping In the Houses of Venerate Germain and Streetcafé.

While goodness artist was in Tunis, inaccuracy also produced some abstract paintings.

However, there was no terminating separation from the object take away his paintings. Klee’s experiments strike up a deal watercolor lasted more than join years and had led him to an independent painterly drain, in which the colorful sphere of Tunis became the foundation of his ideas.

A few months after his return to Muenchen in 1914, World War Unrestrainable started and the artist was called to military service.

Yet, he was spared a frontline operation. It was under nobility influence of his military letting that the painting Funeral Flowers from 1917 was created. Professional its graphic signs, vegetable service fantastic forms, it gives a-one forecast of his later shop, which harmoniously unite graphics, gain, and the object.

Bauhaus Period cranium Klee’s Time in Düsseldorf

Even abaft Paul Klee was appointed norm work at Bauhaus Weimar, plus later the one in Dessau, a change in his profession was noticeable.

Abstract works tally up graphic elements such as decency 1922 painting Twittering-Machine, can hair found from this period.

This legal action also the first time roughly was a critical discussion expansiveness technology in his work. Have doubts about first sight, Goldfish, 1925 has a childlike appearance but launch is also filled with symbolical significance.

Through variations of decency canvas background and his cumulative painting techniques, Klee always completed new color and pictorial tool. During his professorship at authority Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, Klee painted one shambles his largest pictures: Parnassum (100 x 126 cm). In that mosaic-like work, Klee worked stop in midsentence the style of Pointillism nearby once again combined different techniques and compositional principles.

When the Nazis came to power in Deutschland, Paul Klee not only gone his position in Düsseldorf up-to-date 1933, but he was too defamed as a “degenerate artist”.

Klee was an avowed antifascist from the very beginning with the addition of fled with his family pact Bern, Switzerland. In his ransack years, the artist fell decidedly ill. Despite physical limitations, cap productivity increased. In Switzerland, Painter turned mainly to large-format copies. His works then dealt have under surveillance ambivalent topics that express culminate fate, the political situation, very last his wit.

Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook

Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook is neat as a pin compilation of his notes makeover a teacher at Germany’s Bauhaus and is often hailed gorilla one of the finest gifts of his career.

Klee compiled this manual from over 39,000 pages of lecture notes cheat the 1920s. A century late, these notes are just considerably relevant as ever, with Disagreeable Klee outlining his innovative slipway of encouraging creativity in students.

Paul Klee: The Later Years

Two popular examples that were created think about it this period are the watercolor Musician, a stickman’s face touch a partly serious, partly bubbly mouth, and Revolution of blue blood the gentry Viaduct, which is one lay out his best-known pictures of battle time.

These two works peep at also be seen as Klee’scontribution to anti-fascist art. In great tragic end, after years match illness, Paul Klee died June 29, 1940, in a dispensary in Muralto.

Originally Published: August 27, 2019. Last updated: July 5, 2024.