Klee, Paul 1879-1940
Swiss artist

Born in M�nchenbuchsee near Bern, he studied at Munich and settled there (1906), and was associated with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in the Blaue Reiter group (1911-12). From 1920 to 1931 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, with his P�dagogisches Skizzenbuch being published in 1925, and then taught in D�sseldorf (1931-33). After he had returned to Bern in 1933, many of his works were confiscated by the Nazis and 17 of them were included in the 1937 'Degenerate Art' exhibition in Munich. His work has been called Surrealist, but in his fantastic, small-scale, mainly abstract pictures he created, with supreme technical skill in many media, a very personal world of free fancy, expressed with a sly wit and subtle colouring and giving the effect of inspired doodling, for example the well-known Twittering Machine in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bibliography: Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (1954)