PAUL KLEE

DECEMBER 18, 1879 - JUNE 29, 1940

Paul Klee painted like someone translating music into color. Born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, to a family of musicians, he first thought he would become a violinist. But drawing took hold of him, and soon he was studying art in Munich, absorbing both discipline and rebellion in equal measure. Klee’s early travels shaped his eye. In 1914, a trip to Tunisia transformed his understanding of color—he later wrote, “Color has taken possession of me.” From then on, his work became a universe of delicate symbols: arrows, grids, faces, plants, and buildings drifting like notes on a score. Though associated with the Bauhaus, where he taught for a decade, Klee never belonged to a single school. He combined the order of geometry with the spontaneity of dreams, as if the child and the scholar in him were always in dialogue. His later years were marked by political turmoil—labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, he returned to Switzerland in 1933—and by illness, which slowed but never silenced him. Even as his body weakened, his lines stayed lively, his colors full of quiet radiance. Klee died in 1940, leaving behind a body of work that feels like a map of thought itself: playful, precise, and endlessly curious.