Paul Klee

Münchenbuchsee, 1879 – Muralto, 1940

Paul Klee is an artist who is extremely difficult to classify, impossible to assign to any clearly defined movement or particular school. During his youth he was close to the intellectual climate of Expressionism, while at different moments his later work approached both geometric abstraction and Surrealism.

He was born near Bern into a family of musicians, and music was fundamental both to his life and to his work. He received his artistic training in Munich, where he became associated with the group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke and Alexej Jawlensky. In this city, then one of the most advanced artistic centres in Europe, he developed an interest in the international avant-garde, which led him to make the essential visit to Paris, where he was particularly impressed by the work of Robert Delaunay.

In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Moilliet. There, the light of North Africa led him to discover colour, which from then onwards became the principal focus of his artistic investigations. During the war he was mobilised, but continued painting — especially watercolours — in a luminous style with a certain expressionist character.

Between 1921 and 1931 he taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and later in Dessau. These were the most fruitful years of his artistic career, when his pictorial language became fully established and his work began to gain recognition. Despite his independent spirit, the constructive approach of the Bauhaus left its mark on his artistic production, particularly during the Dessau period.

In 1928 he travelled to Egypt, whose landscape inspired his striped compositions, linked to his theory of horizontal and vertical structures, and influenced the incorporation of hieroglyphs and inscriptions into his painting. From 1931 to 1933 he lived in Düsseldorf, where he worked as a professor at the Akademie. Following the rise of Nazism, and the classification of his art as “degenerate”, he was forced to leave Germany and return to Bern, where he spent the final years of his life.

Despite his pessimism and physical weakness, resulting from the serious illness he developed in 1935, this final period was one of unprecedented creative intensity. At that time, perhaps more than ever before, his painting achieved a perfect unity between life and art.