Paul Klee

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Paul Klee

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Forest Witches

Paul Klee was a Swiss-German artist influenced by Theosophy and by the art movements of Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

Personal Life, Education, and Career

Paul Klee was born December 18, 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland. His German father was a music teacher and his Swiss mother was a singer. The boy, a talented violinist, naturally aspired to a musical career and felt an emotional connection to traditional works from the 18th and 19th centuries.

As a teenager, he began to focus on visual arts, showing considerable skill with landscape drawings. In 1898, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He studied for a time under Franz Von Stuck, who was also Wassily Kandinsky’s instructor. He was an excellent draftsman, but struggled with color. After receiving his degree, he traveled to Italy to study the master painters. He then returned to Bern, where he lived with his parents. While experimenting with art techniques, he also played violin in an orchestra and wrote reviews for concerts and theater performances. In 1906, he married pianist Lily Stumpf and moved to a suburb in Munich. In 1907, they had a son, Felix Paul Klee. Lily taught piano and gave occasional performances while Klee took care of the house and worked on his art.

In 1910, he had his first solo art exhibition in Switzerland. In 1911, he met Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. Shortly after, he joined the editorial team of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) founded by Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Der Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912 included 17 of Klee’s graphic works. Klee traveled to Paris where cubism and abstract art were gaining traction. He was inspired by the works of Robert Delaunay and Maurice de Vlaminck, especially their use of bold color. He worked on several experiments with color, but still lacked color sense.

In 1914, he visited Tunisia with Macke and Louis Millet. There, he experienced color in a way that melded with his artistic abilities. When he returned home, Klee added color to his first abstract work. Scholars have associated his colored rectangles with musical notes, combinations of colored blocks with musical compositions, and his color palette a musical key.

Klee was drafted into military service in 1916, but was able to continue painting during World War I. Impacted by the death of two friends in battle, August Macke and Franz Marc, he created several works based on war themes. His work was exhibited in several shows, sold well, and was lauded by critics.

From 1921 to 1931, Klee taught at the Bauhaus. A year later, Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus faculty and their friendship resumed. He exhibited in Paris in 1924 and visited Egypt in 1928. From 1931 to 1933, Klee taught at the Dusseldorf Academy, where he was singled out by a Nazi newspaper as being a “Galician Jew”. His house was searched by the Gestapo, he was fired from his job, and the Klee family fled to Switzerland in late 1933.

In 1935, he began to experience symptoms of the autoimmune disease scleroderma. His art output decreased significantly in 1936. The following year, his friends Kandinsky and Picasso visited him and feeling somewhat better, Klee resumed his work. In 1937, 102 of his works in public collections in Germany were seized by the Nazis and 17 were included in an exhibition of degenerate art to illustrate what was not politically acceptable. In the last months of his life, he created 50 drawings of angels. Klee produced almost 9,000 works of art during his lifetime. He passed away on June 29, 1940 in Muralto, Switzerland.

Influence of Theosophy

Klee had several friends who were involved with Theosophy. A poet he knew and admired, Christian Morgenstern, became a follower of Rudolf Steiner in 1908-9. In 1911, he met Kandinsky and joined Der Blaue Reiter. In 1917 and 1918, Klee read books by Rudolf Steiner and some of the concepts he was exposed to made it into his teachings at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. During his time at the Bauhaus, he was influenced, directly or indirectly, to Theosophy by his colleague Wassily Kandinsky. In Klee’s work to capture the invisible, he theorized about the need to transcend the visible. Klee was “critical of theosophical color symbolism and spiritual training but agrees with idea of inner creation from nebulous spots.”

Artistic Style

Klee’s work was influenced by music, poetry, nature, politics/war, and various art movements such as cubism, expressionism, and surrealism. Klee did not have a default style, technique, or medium. Rather, he explored numerous styles and experimented to produce works from a highly personal and unique perspective. His work is often characterized by mystical and spiritual elements, successfully merging the representational with the abstract. Klee was known for his writings and lectures on color theory and design.

The plurality of Klee’s techniques are unmatched by any painter during that time. He used varying and unconventional combinations of materials and mediums (inks, linen canvas, burlap, oil, watercolors, tempura, glass, silk, cardboard, pastels etc.) to produce his art. He used a very complex genesis to develop his works. He catalogued the materials used in many of his works and in several instances, he recorded the techniques used in his oeuvre.

Museum Collections

Kosmos Klee The Collection at Zentrum Paul Klee Bern

Paul Klee, Guggenheim New York, Collection of online works by Paul Klee with a detailed explanation of each work.

Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, consists of 90 works by Klee.

Paul Klee, The Phillips Collection.

Paul Klee, MoMA.

Paul Klee, National Gallery of Art.

Paul Klee, Art Institute of Chicago.

Additional resources

Websites

Wikipedia - Contains comprehensive biography of Paul Klee.

Zentrum Paul Klee Bern - Contains online database of manuscripts, the small book Beitrage zur bildernerischen Formlehre, as well as teaching notes from his years teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau (1921 to 1931).

A-Z of Paul Klee, Learn 26 Things about one to the most innovative painters of the 20th century. Tate Modern.

Videos

Paul Klee and the Art of Making the Invisible Visible, YouTube, COGITART, October 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyPx78l4ERo

Paul Klee the Playful Genius. A Journey Through the Life and Art of a Visionary! YouTube Art History School, July 4, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QezvWUxiwI

Paul Klee: “In the Magic Kitchen”|MetSpeaks, YouTube, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://December 14, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tym2Ud7Faug

Paul Klee: A Collection of 212 Works, YouTube, Art Time Capsule, October 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYl3f2UwE3s

Astrology

Paul Klee Natal Horoscope at Khaldea.

Writings by the Artist

Klee wrote a number of books, including poetry, in German. For a biblography, see Wikipedia.