Birth Year : 1879
Death Year : 1940
Country : Switzerland
Paul Klee was born near Berne, Switzerland. His Swiss mother was an
amateur painter and his Bavarian father was a professor of music. As a
child, Klee showed both musical and artistic talent, but finally decided
to become an artist and went to Munich to study at the Fine Arts Academy.
Klee's first exhibition held in Berne, in 1910, showed the influence of
Cezanne, Matisse,
and van Gogh. In 1912, Klee exhibited
with the Blaue Reiter, but by the following year in a series of essays
that appeared in Zurich, he had begun to state his own personal and spiritual
approach to art. Until 1914, Klee had worked only in black and white or
in watercolors, but during that year, on a trip to Tunisia with Macke,
Klee began to see the potential of his use of color. Influenced by Cubism
and interested in both children's and primitive art, he created small,
jewel-like paintings in a personal language. His basic themes are nature
and the man-made world of buildings and machines, and his works, although
simple in appearance, are complicated in their inner meaning.
Klee's
subtly differentiated moods range from laughter to tears. His witty titles
are often as important as the paintings themselves, which combine an economy
and precision of technique with the markings of a seemingly limitless imagination.
Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931 and then became professor
of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In 1933, nine of his works were included
in the degenerate art exhibition, the Nazis invaded his studio, and he
was suspended from his post. Luckily, Klee was able to take his paintings,
drawings, and writings with him when he sought refuge in his native Berne,
where he continued to work until his death in 1940.
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Paul
Klee
Fish
Magic
Paul
Klee
Senecio
Paul
Klee
Flora
on the Sand
Paul
Klee
Der
Niesen
Paul
Klee
Moonrise
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