Curriculum Materials: Amazing Animals in
Art
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Image 5 Paul Klee Essays: Questions: |
Paul Klee
Paul Klee grew up in Bern, Switzerland. His parents were musicians, and Klee at an early age displayed unusual talent both as a violinist and as a DRAFTSMAN. As a young boy, Klee was constantly observing and drawing from nature, filling sketchbooks with renderings of fish, flowers, fruits, and birds and forming a vast storehouse of NATURALISTIC observation from which he would draw throughout his career.
Although he briefly considered a career in music, in 1898 he chose to attend art school in Munih where he studied for three years. Dissatisfied with conventional academic training, he spent the next decade going through a process of self-education and self-discovery. He struggled to achieve an independent voice through extensive experimentation in etchings, glass paintings, charcoals, and watercolors, using only black and white. Following his association with the Blaue Reiter group in Munich, he traveled to Tunisia, a journey that inspired a new sense of color in his work. During World War I, he served in the German army.
In 1920 Klee joined the faculty of the Bauhaus, an innovative school that became the center of modern design in Germany during the 1920s. He taught there for over a decade. He was represented in a number of exhibitions during the 1920s and 1930s, and his reputation as a significant artist became established. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Klee's long career in Germany was brought to a close, and he was dismissed by the Nazis from his teaching position at the Dusseldorf Academy. He and his wife left Germany and returned to his native Bern. Despite increasingly fragile health, Klee worked with great intensity until his death in 1940. Creating over 9,000 works of art in his lifetime, Paul Klee is recognized as one of the most inventive and influential artists of the 20th century.
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