A short life of the author
Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-German artist and art theorist whose enormous, varied, and imaginatively inexhaustible body of work — over 9,000 paintings, drawings, and watercolours — constitutes one of the major achievements of twentieth-century art. He was a central figure of European modernism, associated with German Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction without belonging fully to any of them. His theoretical writings, composed primarily during his years as a teacher at the Bauhaus, are among the most important texts on modern art and remain widely studied.
Life
Klee was born near Bern, Switzerland, into a musical family — his father was a German music teacher, his mother a Swiss singer, and Klee himself was a skilled violinist who seriously considered a career in music. He studied art in Munich (1898–1901), travelled in Italy, and settled in Munich, where he married the pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906.
His early work was primarily graphic — etchings and pen drawings of extraordinary technical refinement and sardonic wit. The breakthrough came in 1914, when Klee travelled to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. The North African light transformed his relationship with colour. He wrote in his diary: “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.”
During World War I, Klee served in the German military (he was a Bavarian citizen) but was assigned to non-combat duties. After the war, his reputation grew rapidly. In 1920, Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he joined Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931 — first in Weimar, then in Dessau — and his course notes, meticulously compiled, became the foundation of his theoretical writings.
In 1931, he left the Bauhaus for the Düsseldorf Academy. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they dismissed him from his position (his work was included in the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition), and he returned to Bern. His last years were shadowed by scleroderma, a progressive autoimmune disease that gradually reduced his ability to work. He died in Muralto, near Locarno, in June 1940. Swiss citizenship, which he had applied for, was granted six days after his death.
The Art
Klee’s work resists classification. He moved freely between abstraction and figuration, between playful and profound, between the childlike and the philosophically complex. His subjects include landscapes, architectural fantasies, musical structures, botanical forms, hieroglyphic figures, and pure colour compositions. His technique was equally varied: oil, watercolour, gouache, ink, mixed media, and combinations involving plaster, burlap, and newspaper.
Among his most celebrated works: Twittering Machine (1922), a delicate, sinister image of bird-like figures on a wire; Ad Parnassum (1932), a pointillist-inspired landscape of shimmering colour; Senecio (1922), a portrait face reduced to geometric colour fields; and Death and Fire (1940), one of his late works, in which mortality is confronted with unflinching directness.
Klee’s late work — produced during his illness, when his capacity for fine detail was diminishing — is characterised by bold, simplified forms, thick black lines, and a directness that many critics consider his greatest period. The late paintings anticipate Abstract Expressionism and Art Brut.
Theoretical Writings
Klee’s theoretical contribution to art is second only to Kandinsky’s among the Bauhaus teachers. The Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 1925) — published as the second in the series of Bauhaus books — distils his teaching on line, form, colour, and composition into a dense, illustrated treatise. The Paul Klee Notebooks (Das bildnerische Denken and Unendliche Naturgeschichte), published posthumously, contain the full extent of his Bauhaus lecture notes — over 3,900 pages — and constitute one of the most detailed accounts of artistic thinking ever produced.
His famous aphorism — “A line is a dot that went for a walk” — captures his belief that art is process, not product: a journey of form through space and time.
Collecting Klee
Original Klee works are held by major museums worldwide. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern holds the largest collection (approximately 4,000 works). At auction, Klee paintings bring $500,000–$10,000,000+; works on paper bring $50,000–$1,000,000. First editions of the Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925, Albert Langen Verlag) bring $200–$1,000. The Bauhaus book edition is particularly sought.