Paul Klee

Paul Klee grew up in Bern; his father was a music teacher and his mother a singer. It was his grandmother who steered him towards drawing, which he chose as his vocation despite his parents’ disapproval. He studied in Munich, where in 1912 he joined the Expressionist artists’ group Der Blaue Reiter, but the World War interrupted his artistic career. After teaching for a decade at the Bauhaus design school, in 1931 he accepted a new teaching post at the Düsseldorf Academy, but in 1933 he was removed from his post because the Nazis classed his works as “degenerate”. Shortly afterwards the first painful symptoms of the incurable autoimmune disease scleroderma began to appear. Klee, however, remained active to the end: in 1939 alone, 1,253 works left his hands. (His catalogue, kept with great care from 1911, is a unique record of his oeuvre.) In 1939 he applied for Swiss citizenship but was at first refused, despite having been born in Switzerland: the Swiss looked askance at him much as the Nazis did. In the end, however, his application was accepted — at the beginning of July 1940, six days after his death.

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