Paul
Klee

Paul Klee (German Paul Klee, December 18, 1879, Munichbuchsee, Switzerland - June 29, 1940, Locarno, Switzerland) - German artist, avant-garde theorist, member of the art association "Blue Rider", teacher of the famous school Bauhaus.

Features of the artist Paul Klee: Being a member of major artistic movements, Paul Klee always remains a unique artist, whose pictorial searches cannot be fit into the framework of one direction. Experiments with various techniques, the invention of his own pointillism (paintings consisting of multi-colored squares), the dream to grow a picture like a plant, the desire to convey maximum movement with a minimum of pictorial means ... Klee practically did not write absolutely abstract paintings. His artistic search is a look at something tangible and definite from within and immediately from all sides, a search for an exhaustive essence.

Famous paintings by Paul Klee: Tweet Machine, "New angel", “The viaduct revolution”, "Cat and bird", "Highways and alleys".

Paul Klee is an unprecedentedly positive hero in the history of fine art. He lived all his life with one woman, in the evenings he played a duet (one on the violin, the other on the piano) with Kandinsky, for his son Felix he became a wonderful father and discoverer of magical worlds. During World War I, he did not shoot, but in the rear he applied camouflage patterns to airplanes. He was an inspiring teacher whom students listened with bated breath. In the Bauhaus, he was called the Buddha. He was bright, calm, laconic and never and was never desperately angry at anyone.

Paul Klee is the first artist who called the drawings of children and crazy people real creativity (10 years before the first books began to be written about this). Theorist of art, who knew how to be extremely frivolous when he spoke about the main thing. Paul Klee is an intellectual and visionary. No contradictions. He was sure that the material and visible world is only one of the worlds accessible to man. And then Klee was dying from a terribly material illness, scleroderma, which brings pain with every movement - it was as if this world wanted to be the only one in his life forever, to make Klee drop anchor here and not look for other worlds. He hardly got out of bed, but during this last, most difficult year of his life, he wrote a record number of works - 1200! To hell with anchors! So said his grandmother.

Well, she didn’t say “to hell,” and she wasn’t sure about the anchors either, she simply recaptured little Paul from other adults and insisted that he be allowed to write and draw with his left hand. She was the first to slip colorful crayons to her grandson and let her portray everything she wanted with both hands at once. This trick of Professor Klee with two hands in many years more than once will force Bauhaus students to open their mouths in amazement. Klee later gently sticks his children's drawings on cardboard, names them and includes them in the catalog of his works, which he conducted throughout his life.

Then Paul had to fight off the world himself. Although at the age of 11 he received a special offer to play the violin at the Berne Academy of Music, by the age of 19 he was able to convince his musician parents that he had no place in the orchestra, his job was painting. After studying at the Munich Academy of Arts and a trip to Italy traditional for all young artists, he will return to Bern. He draws and reads a lot of theoretical works, continuing to earn a living with a proven case - work in the municipal orchestra.

Klee never threw a violin - he loved to play before taking up a brush. Configured. And there is something natural and obvious that the pianist became the artist’s wife. Lily Stumpf was a virtuoso musician, an excellent teacher and an amazing wife. It is she who, after her wedding with Paul Klee in 1906, will earn money, and even after the birth of her son Felix in 1907, she is all the same. Even now, during an almost triumphant feminism, such a distribution of forces in the family cannot be called habitual, and at the beginning of the 20th century it was a real revolution, which laid the foundation for the venomous psychoanalysts to Freud's followers. But Felix was one of the happiest boys in the entire universe. While mom worked, dad fed him, went to the store and made a theater for him. 50 dolls created by Paul Klee for his son’s home theater, with plaster and metal faces, in fantastic outfits, funny and scary, are now included in the expositions of the artist’s largest exhibitions. And Felix Klee, when he grew up, recalled: “My puppet theater turned me into a wizard who was successful with everyone, young and old” - and became a theater director.

Once in Germany, Klee was finally in the right artistic setting: The Blue Horseman, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Mark, Robert Delonewhose work "On the Light" by Klee will translate into German. He will soon have no time to do household chores.

Paul Klee was the first to invent an automatic letter, for which the surrealists would then write it down in their predecessors, he invented unique techniques such as scratching a pattern on tinted glass, for which he would soon be called to teach students in the avant-garde Bauhaus. The creation process for him was always more important than the finished result, becoming - more important than recognition. Klee is born as an artist slowly and with pleasure.

An excellent draftsman, sensitive to the changing forms of the world, Klee nevertheless could not cope with oil for a long time and make the color live in the paintings. Until he went to Tunisia. This journey, made in 1914 (after several solo exhibitions, participation in the second exhibition of the Blue Horseman and in the First German Salon in the Sturm Gallery) will finally free the artist in Klei, who will be free from isms all his life from influences colleagues and masters, which will always be unexpected even in relation to last year.

That was exactly what the teacher of the Bauhaus, the most revolutionary and avant-garde school for artists in all of Europe, should have been, which the artist’s goal was not to decorate the world, but to change it. He will lead stained glass, textile and bookbinding workshops here for 10 years, create several theoretical works that will be published in the Bauhaus Books series and grow several generations of artisans who will have one important skill from Klee: not to blindly repeat their teacher, and have the courage to be free.

In the early 30s, Paul Klee will leave the Bauhaus, without waiting for it to close soon. In order to become a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy for a very short time, to meet people with weapons in his workshop who will come to conduct a search and eventually expel a dangerous artist from the academy, from the city and from the country. In Switzerland, where Klee would leave, there was practically no artistic life, his colleagues mainly emigrated to America, some to the Soviet Union. Klee will no longer have his own workshop, but he never really needed it.

He dreamed of someday growing a work of art as a plant. He knew how to talk with snakes, and they obeyed him. He could, walking in the park, feel like a part of the universe, like a leaf or a cat. He remained a man without earthly citizenship, a ship without an anchor, and received Swiss citizenship only a week after his death. But then Klee was already far from Switzerland.

Author: Anna Sidelnikova