My Favorite Artist - Paul Klee

Last April at my first drawing class, one of the classmates showed me some of Paul Klee’s work. I Immediately find myself attracted to his work. I do not have exact wordings why I like Klee.  Perhaps it could be that his works are in enchanting colors and forms, filled with childlikeness, friendliness, and some kind of allusions to dreams.

Paul Klee was born in Switzerland in 1879 and spent most of his adult life in Germany until he was expelled by the Nazis in 1933. He grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. But later he began to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich 1900 with the popular symbolist and society painter Franz von Stuck. In 1920 Klee was invited to teach at the Bauhaus school after World War I, where Kandinsky was also a faculty member. Klee was also a member of the Die Blau Vier, a group contributed much to the development of abstract art. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Academy, but he was dismissed by the Nazis. In 1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style and eventually killed him in 1940.

Klee created about 9000 works of art. He was an introverted artist and his work is difficult to clarify, except that it is hardly ever wholly abstract, but equally, never truly realistic. He had a natural sensitivity to music, the least material of the arts, and it runs through all his work, clarifying his spellbinding color and dematerializing his images. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Klee's early works are mostly etchings and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal elements and reveal the influence of Francisco de Goya and James Ensor. Klee often incorporated letters and numerals into his paintings. These, part of Klee's complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. The late works, characterized by heavy black lines, are often reflections on death and war, and his life's concerns as a creator.

Klee influenced the work of other noted artists of the early 20^th century. Klee married the art forms of music and visual art. The psychedelic nature of Klee’s pieces was revived musically. The National Gallery released the album Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee in 1968.

[References]

1.     Will Grohmann, “Paul Klee,” Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publisher, New York (1985) ISBN 081091208-2.

2.     Susanna Partsch, “Paul Klee 1879-1940,” Taschen Basic Art, Koeln (1993) ISBN 3822802999.

3.     Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://www.wikipedia.org/