Paul Klee
Paul Klee (Münchenbuchsee, December 18, 1879 - Muralto, June 29, 1940) was a Swiss-born German painter whose style varied between surrealism, expressionism and abstraction..
Biography
Beginnings
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, into a family of musicians, to a German father and a Swiss mother. His father was born in Tann and studied voice, piano, organ and violin at the Stuttgart Conservatory, where he met his future wife, Ida Frick. Hans Wilhelm Klee was active as a music teacher at the Bern State Seminary in Hofwil, near Bern, until 1931. Paul Klee developed his musical abilities as his parents encouraged and inspired him until his death. In 1880 his family moved to Bern, where finally, in 1897, after several changes of residence, he moved into his own house in the Kirchenfeld district. From 1886 to 1890, Klee studied in primary school and received, at the age of 7, violin classes at the Municipal School of Music. He was so talented on the violin that, at the age of 11, he received an invitation to play as an extraordinary member of the Bern Music Association.
In his early years, and following his parents' wishes, Klee focused on his musical studies; but he decided to dedicate himself to the visual arts during his adolescence, partly out of rebellion and partly because of the belief that modern music lacked meaning for him. He stated: "I didn't find the idea of going into music creatively especially in view of the decline in music history especially appealing." As a musician, he played and felt emotionally attached to traditional works of 18th and 19th century music, but as an artist he longed for the freedom to explore radical ideas and styles. At age 16, Klee's landscape drawings already showed considerable skill.
From his father's he obtained German citizenship, which he would use for his entire life, since Switzerland refused to grant him citizenship after his exile during Nazi persecution. He studied art in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. At seventeen he painted in ink My room (1896).
Klee worked with oil paint, watercolor, ink, and other materials, often combining them in a single work. Her paintings frequently allude to poetry, music, and dreams, and sometimes include words or musical notes.
Returning from a trip to Italy, he settled in Munich, where he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde figures.
The Blaue Reiter
In 1912, Vasili Kandinski and Franz Marc founded an artistic group linked to expressionism in Munich. Paul Klee was not officially a member of this association, but even so, he felt very close to the circle of artists that comprised it and participated in its exhibitions. Members of the Blaue Reiter, as the group was called, included August Macke, Gabriele Münter and Marianne von Werefkin. They all shared an interest in Gothic and primitive art and in the modern movements of Fovism and Cubism. The name of the group derives from a pictorial work by Kandinsky from 1903 that from 1912 served as an illustration for the titles of a yearbook with the same name. The first of the two Blaue Reiter exhibitions opened on December 18, 1911, and remained at the Heinrich Thannhauser Modern Gallery in Munich until January 1, 1912. It included 49 works by Henri Rousseau, Albert Bloch, Heinrich Campendonk, Robert Delaunay, Kandinsky, Klee and Macke. After this period, the exhibition began its tour of other German cities, including Cologne and Berlin.
Travel
In 1914, Klee visited Tunis and was impressed with the quality of light there, so he wrote in his diary:
"The color possesses me, I have no need to pursue it, I know that it possesses me forever... the color and I are one thing. I am a painter."
In this way, by becoming interested in color, he began his career in abstract art. He also visited Italy in 1901 and Egypt in 1928, both of which were strong influences on his art. Klee was one of the Die Blaue Vier ('The Blue Four') along with Kandinsky, Feininger and Jawlensky. This group, formed in 1923, exhibited jointly in the United States in 1924.
Bauhaus
After World War I, where he participated as a soldier because he was a German citizen, Klee taught at the Bauhaus School together with Kandinsky, and from 1931, at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, before being denounced by the Nazis for producing "degenerate art." In his classes, he related spiritual aspects of the human being and nature to certain theories of form, color and composition in the visual arts.
Exile
In 1933 he was expelled from teaching by the Nazi regime and returned to Bern, where he had a major exhibition at the Kunsthalle (1935). In 1936 he was diagnosed with scleroderma, a serious degenerative disease that would accompany him for the rest of his life, although he continued to work at a good pace. In 1940 he was admitted to a clinic in Muralto-Locarno, where he died on June 29 of that year.
Stylistic analysis
Pamela Kort wrote: "Klee's 1933 drawings present the viewer with an unparalleled opportunity to observe the central aspect of his aesthetic, in its combination of parody and wit. And this is where its true meaning lies, especially for those who fail to perceive the political dimensions of Klee's art".
Klee and color
Throughout his life, Paul Klee used color in varied and unique ways, and had a relationship with it that grew over time. For an artist who loved nature so much, it seems somewhat strange that in his early days Klee despised color, believing it to be nothing more than decoration.
Over time, Klee changed his mind and came to manipulate color with enormous precision and passion, to such an extent that he ended up teaching color theory and its mixture at the Bauhaus School. This progression, by itself, is of great importance because it allowed him to write about color with a unique perspective among his contemporaries.
Legacy
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.Paul Klee.
"Klee's act is very prestigious. In a minimum of one line he can reveal his wisdom. He is all; deep, gentle and many more of the good things, and this because: it is innovative', wrote Oskar Schlemmer, future artist colleague of Klee at the Bauhaus, in his diary from September 1916.
The novelist and friend of Klee's Wilhelm Hausenstein wrote in his On Expressionism in Painting: "Perhaps Klee's attitude is generally understandable to music people: how Klee is one of the violinists most enchanting Bach and Handel plays that have ever walked the earth. […] For Klee, the classical German painter of cubism, world music became his companion, possibly even a part of his art; the composition, written in notes, seems to be no different".
When Klee visited the surrealism exhibition in Paris in 1925, Max Ernst was impressed by his work. The partially morbid motifs of him appealed to the surrealists. André Breton helped develop Surrealism and renamed Klee's 1912 painting Room Perspective with People to Chamber Spirit in a catalogue. Critic René Crevel called the artist a "dreamer" that "releases a swarm of little lyrical lice from mysterious abysses". Paul Klee confidante Will Grohmann argued in the Cahiers d'art that he's definitely standing on his feet. He is by no means a dreamer; he is a modern person who teaches as a professor at the Bauhaus & # 34;. Before which Breton, as Joan Miró remembers, was critical of Klee: "Masson and I have discovered Paul Klee. Paul Éluard and Crevel are also interested in Klee, and have even visited him. But Breton despises him".
The art of the mentally ill inspired Klee, as well as Kandinsky and Max Ernst, after Hans Prinzhorn's book Bildnerei der Geisterkranken (The Art of the Mentally Ill) was published in 1922). In 1937, some articles from The Prinzhorn Anthology were featured in the National Socialist propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art" in Munich, for the purpose of smearing the works of Kirchner, Klee, Nolde and other artists by comparing them to the works of madmen.
In 1949 Marcel Duchamp commented on Paul Klee: "The first reaction to a painting by Klee is the very pleasant discovery, what each of us could or could have done, try to draw as in our childhood. Most of his compositions show at first glance a simple and naive expression, which is found in children's drawings [...] In a second analysis, a technique can be discovered, which is based on a great maturity in thought. A deep understanding of the handling of watercolor. painting a personal method in oil, structured in decorative forms, allows Klee to stand out in contemporary art and make it incomparable. On the other hand, his experiment was adopted in the last 30 years by many other artists as the basis for new creations in the most different areas of painting. His extreme productivity never shows evidence of repetition, as is often the case. He had so much to say that a Klee never became another Klee."
One of Klee's paintings, Angelus Novus, was the subject of an interpretive text by the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin who purchased the painting in 1921. In his "Theses on the philosophy of history', Benjamin suggests that the angel depicted in the painting could be seen as the angel of history.
Another aspect of his legacy, and one that demonstrates his multifaceted presence in the modern artistic imagination, is his appeal to those interested in the history of the algorithm, as exemplified by "Homage to Paul Klee" from the pioneer of computer art Frieder Nake.
Some works
- Angelus Novus (1920)
- Little bee (1922)
- The chubby machine (1922)
- Main Street and High Street (1929)
- Ad Parnassum (1932)
- Head of a martyr (1933)
- The future man (1933)
- Poor angel (1939)
- Theory of Modern Art (1879-1940)
- My name is Paul, Paul Klee (1940)
- Death and fire (1940)
- The Autumn Messenger (1922)
Gallery
Der Goldfisch (The golden fish), 1925
Was fehlt ihm? (What's missing?), 1930
Revolution des Viadukts (Revolution of the viaduct), 1937
Untitled hand maroon (self-portrait), 1922
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