Klee, Paul

Paul Klee was a German painter and an extremely prolific and experimental artist who explored numerous techniques from painting to printmaking. He is best known for his paintings on paper in pastel colors. His geometric vocabulary is on the edge of abstraction. The artist contributed to major revolutions in 20th century modern art. For example, he first taught vision in his classes at Walter Gropius' Bauhaus school. From 1931 he accepted a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, losing it two years later when the Nazis gained power. He then quickly sought refuge in Switzerland, whose citizenship he retained until his death.
 

His work initially consisted of abstract, constructive, gradually more spiritual smaller formats on paper, which Klee glued to cardboard. Looking at his various works, it is easy to observe the evolution of his artistic vocabulary. He created a mosaic of different works that enrich each other. Paintings and drawings increase in their symbolic and aesthetic vocabulary year after year to ultimately produce a remarkable unity. Each of Paul Klee's works is numbered and titled by the artist. His oeuvre, so dreamlike and spiritual, is difficult to categorize - with one exception: his fascination with organic forms.
 

Although Paul Klee had an affinity for printmaking, etchings appear extremely rarely in his body of work. Fortunately, a few lithographs were made specifically for art magazines. Their rarity made these prints reach record sums. Today, a considerable number of the artist's works are kept at the Paul Klee Zentrum in Bern. In 2016, a major retrospective of his work (Paul Klee, L'ironie à l'oeuvre) opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.