Paul Klee

Paul Klee (born December 18, 1879, died June 29, 1940) was a Swiss-born artist. He has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism.

Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, into a musical family. He studied art in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. After travelling to Italy and then back to Bern, he settled in Munich, where he met Vasily Kandinsky, Hans Marc and other avant-garde figures, and became associated with the Blaue Reiter. In 1914, he visited Tunisia and was impressed by the quality of the light there, writing "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever ... Color and I are one. I am a painter."

Following World War I, Klee taught at the Bauhaus, and from 1931 at the Dusseldorf Academy, before being denounced by the Nazi Party as "degenerate". He returned to Switzerland in 1933, and died in Bern seven years later.

Klee worked in oil paint, watercolours, ink and other media, often combining them in one work. His pictures are difficult to classify, but often have a fragile child-like quality to them, and are usually on a small scale. They often allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. In the later works, they are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. His better known works include Southern (Tunisian) Gardens (1919), Ad Parnassum (1932) and Embrace (1939).