^
Born on 18 December 1879: Paul
Klee, Swiss German Expressionist
painter who died on 29 June 1940.
A Swiss-born painter and graphic
artist whose personal, often gently humorous works are replete with allusions
to dreams, music, and poetry, Paul Klee is difficult to classify. Primitive
art, surrealism,
cubism,
and children's art all seem blended into his small-scale, delicate paintings,
watercolors, and drawings.
Klee grew up in a musical family and was
himself a violinist (like Ingres).
After much hesitation he chose to study art, not music, and he attended
the Munich Academy in 1900. There for his teacher, he got stuck with the
popular symbolist and society painter Franz
von Stuck. Klee later toured Italy (1901-02), responding enthusiastically
to Early Christian and Byzantine
art.
Klee's early works are mostly etchings
and pen-and-ink drawings. These combine satirical, grotesque, and surreal
elements and reveal the influence of Francisco
de Goya and James
Ensor, both of whom Klee admired. Two of his best-known etchings,
dating from 1903, are Virgin in a Tree and Two Men Meet,
Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. Such peculiar, evocative
titles are characteristic of Klee and give his works an added dimension
of meaning.
After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist
Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde
art. That same year he exhibited his etchings for the first time. His
friendship with the painters Wassily
Kandinsky and August
Macke prompted him to join Der
Blaue Reiter, an expressionist
group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. A turning
point in Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Macke and Louis Molliet
in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote:
"Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after
it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of
this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter." He now built
up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics
he saw on his Italian sojourn. The watercolors Red
and White Domes and Remembrance
of a Garden (1914) are distinctive of this period.
Klee often incorporated letters and numerals
into his paintings, as in Once
Emerged from the Gray of Night (1918). These, part of Klee's
complex language of symbols and signs, are drawn from the unconscious
and used to obtain a poetic amalgam of abstraction and reality. He wrote
that "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible," and he pursued
this goal in a wide range of media using an amazingly inventive battery
of techniques. Line and color predominate with Klee, but he also produced
series of works that explore mosaic and other effects.
Klee taught at the Bauhaus school after
World War I, where his friend Kandinsky
was also a faculty member. In Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925),
one of his several important essays on art theory, Klee tried to define
and analyze the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could
be applied. In 1931 he began teaching at Dusseldorf Akademie, but he was
dismissed by the Nazis, who termed his work degenerate. In
1933, Klee went to Switzerland. There he came down with the crippling
collagen disease scleroderma, which forced him to develop a simpler style
and eventually killed him. The late works, characterized by heavy black
lines, are often reflections on death and war, but his last painting,
Still Life (1940), is a serene summation of his life's concerns
as a creator.
Né en Suisse, Klee suit une solide formation de peintre à Munich, la capitale
artistique de l’Allemagne. Ses "Inventions" satiriques et des illustrations
de "Candide" de Voltaire témoignent de cet apprentissage où l’on sent
déjà percer le symbolisme ainsi qu’un fantasmatique débridé et grinçant.
Comme beaucoup de peintres, il parcourt
l’Italie et la Sicile les deux premières années du siècle. Puis à Paris,
il se familiarise avec le Cubisme.
Chez Cézanne
et Van
Gogh, il apprend l’art de la Lumière. A la veille de la première guerre
mondiale il part en Tunisie, ce qui influencera nettement son chromatisme.
Après la guerre, c’est en Allemagne qu’il travaillera, peindra et enseignera
(au Bauhaus
à Weimar, la capitale de la République
de Weimar). Il expose en Allemagne, mais aussi à Paris avec les surréalistes
en 1925. Parallèlement à son œuvre et à ses expositions, il enseigne aux
beaux-Arts à Dusseldorf.
Dans une œuvre onirique et grâcieuse, qui
participe de l’abstraction pure, il adhère au mouvement du surréalisme,
dont il deviendra l’un des principaux théoriciens. Mais dès 1933 la persécution
des Nazis vis à vis des arts "dégénérés", particulièrement des
peintre surréalistes, l’oblige à quitter définitivement l‘Allemagne pour
la Suisse. Il y meurt, désabusé et malade, le 29 Jun 1940.. Ah... et son
violon d'Ingres était... le violon.
LINKS
1914
Seiltanzer
Insula
Dulcamara Südliche
Gärten Tunisian
Gardens Ancient
Sounds Legend
of the Nile The
Golden Fish Threat
of Lightning Captive
Parnassus
Der
Marsch zum Gipfel Jester
Kronenarr
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