59 Facts About Paul Klee

Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Paul Klee's works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland, as the second child of German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Klee and Swiss singer Ida Marie Klee, born Frick.

Paul Klee's sister Mathilde was born on 28 January 1876 in Walzenhausen.

Hans Wilhelm Klee was active as a music teacher at the Bern State Seminary in Hofwil near Bern until 1931.

Paul Klee was able to develop his music skills as his parents encouraged and inspired him throughout his life.

From 1886 to 1890, Paul Klee visited primary school and received, at the age of 7, violin classes at the Municipal Music School.

Paul Klee was so talented on violin that, aged 11, he received an invitation to play as an extraordinary member of the Bern Music Association.

Around 1897, Paul Klee started his diary, which he kept until 1918, and which has provided scholars with valuable insight into his life and thinking.

Paul Klee barely passed his final exams at the "Gymnasium" of Bern, where he qualified in the Humanities.

Paul Klee excelled at drawing but seemed to lack any natural color sense.

Paul Klee had an illegitimate son in 1900 who died several weeks after birth.

Paul Klee met, through Kubin, the art critic Wilhelm Hausenstein in 1911.

Paul Klee was a foundation member and manager of the Munich artists' union Sema that summer.

Paul Klee is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid mind.

Paul Klee became in a few months one of the most important and independent members of the Blaue Reiter, but he was not yet fully integrated.

Paul Klee did not attend it, but in the second exhibition, which occurred from 12 February to 18 March 1912 in the Galerie Goltz, 17 of his graphic works were shown.

Rather than copy these artists, Paul Klee began working out his own color experiments in pale watercolors and did some primitive landscapes, including In the Quarry and Houses near the Gravel Pit, using blocks of color with limited overlap.

In gaining a second artistic vocabulary, Paul Klee added color to his abilities in draftsmanship, and in many works combined them successfully, as he did in one series he called "operatic paintings".

The colored rectangle became his basic building block, what some scholars associate with a musical note, which Paul Klee combined with other colored blocks to create a color harmony analogous to a musical composition.

Paul Klee continued to paint during the entire war and managed to exhibit in several shows.

In 1919, Paul Klee applied for a teaching post at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart.

Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus from January 1921 to April 1931.

Paul Klee was a "Form" master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops and was provided with two studios.

Later that year the first Bauhaus exhibition and festival was held, for which Paul Klee created several of the advertising materials.

Paul Klee was a member of Die Blaue Vier, with Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky; formed in 1923, they lectured and exhibited together in the US in 1925.

That same year, Paul Klee had his first exhibits in Paris, and he became a hit with the French Surrealists.

Paul Klee visited Egypt in 1928, which impressed him less than Tunisia.

In 1929, the first major monograph on Paul Klee's work was published, written by Will Grohmann.

Paul Klee tells everyone he's a thoroughbred Arab, but he's a typical Galician Jew.

Paul Klee's self-portrait Struck from the List commemorates the sad occasion.

Paul Klee produced nearly 500 works in 1933 during his last year in Germany.

However, in 1933, Paul Klee began experiencing the symptoms of what was diagnosed as scleroderma after his death.

Paul Klee used heavier lines and mainly geometric forms with fewer but larger blocks of color.

Back in Germany in 1937, seventeen of Paul Klee's pictures were included in an exhibition of "Degenerate art" and 102 of his works in public collections were seized by the Nazis.

In 1935,2 years after moving to Switzerland and working in a very confined situation, Paul Klee developed scleroderma, an autoimmune disease resulting in hardening of connective tissue.

Paul Klee endured pain that seems to be reflected in his last works of art.

Paul Klee died in Muralto, Locarno, Switzerland, on 29 June 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country.

Paul Klee has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify.

Paul Klee generally worked in isolation from his peers, and interpreted new art trends in his own way.

Paul Klee used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint.

Paul Klee employed spray paint, knife application, stamping, glazing, and impasto, and mixed media such as oil with watercolor, watercolor with pen and India ink, and oil with tempera.

Paul Klee was a natural draftsman, and through long experimentation developed a mastery of color and tonality.

Paul Klee uses a great variety of color palettes from nearly monochromatic to highly polychromatic.

Paul Klee often used geometric forms and grid format compositions as well as letters and numbers, frequently combined with playful figures of animals and people.

Some of Paul Klee's early preserved children's drawings, which his grandmother encouraged, were listed on his catalogue raisonne.

Paul Klee had removed the third Invention, Pessimistische Allegorie des Gebirges, in February 1906 from his cycle.

Paul Klee began to introduce a new technique in 1905: scratching on a blackened glass panel with a needle.

Paul Klee conveyed the scenery in a grid, so that it dissolves into colored harmony.

Paul Klee created abstract works in that period such as Abstract and Farbige Kreise durch Farbbander verbunden.

Paul Klee never abandoned the object; a permanent segregation never took place.

From 1916 to 1925, Paul Klee created 50 hand puppets for his son Felix.

In 1931, Paul Klee transferred to Dusseldorf to teach at the Akademie; the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus soon after.

Paul Klee created in 1940 a picture which strongly differs from the previous works, leaving it unsigned on the scaffold.

When Paul Klee visited the Paris surrealism exhibition in 1925, Max Ernst was impressed by his work.

Andre Breton helped to develop the surrealism and renamed Paul Klee's 1912 painting Zimmerperspektive mit Einwohnern to chambre spirit in a catalogue.

Paul Klee is by no means a dreamer; he is a modern person, who teaches as a professor at the Bauhaus.

Paul Klee had so much to say, that a Klee never became another Klee.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a comprehensive Paul Klee collection, donated by Carl Djerassi.