Klee

PAUL KLEE 1879-1940

Paul Klee ("Clay")
* Born December 18, 1879
* Parents were Hans Klee, a German music teacer who had abandoned his singing career and Maria Frick, who also studied music.
* He was born in Switzerland, but was raised mostly in German.
*Klee began playing the violin wehen he was 7 years old. Although he enjoyed drawing, poetry and writing short stories, he loved the violin most of all. However, he decided on art as his career because he felt that "there was more to be done, more to be caught up with" in the expression of art.
*Klee contacted a disease called Scleroderma ( a rare disease which results in a drying up of the mucous membrands and ends by striking the heart.) He died from it on June 29, 1940, at the age of 60.

Bimbo
*Klee Loved cats. This is the name of his favorite one.

Felix
*This is the name of Klee's son, born in 1907.
*Klee enjoyed attending musical concerts. it was at a musical evening in the winter of 1988-1900 when he first met Lily Stumpf, the daughter of an important Munich doctor.
*Klee married Lily six years later.
*Lily was a piano player, and helped support the family while Klee tried to establish himself as an artist.
*Felix was involved in drama and choreographed some of his father's works that were made into plays.
* When Felix was about 2 yrs old, he got very sick. Paul stayed home to nurse him back to health whil his wife worked and supported the family.

Flag
* "Girl with a Flag" is the painting today that we are focusing on.
*In this painting, he displays a British flag above a young girl.
*There is all kinds of symbolism in this picture --war with Hitler and how important freedom is in every area of our lives including art.
     *Is the flag an ornament on a headband as a sign of patriotism?
     *Is she waving the flag in a victory parade?
     *Does the whole picture represent that the girl was so patriotic that she became a flag?
* Klee once said, "Art does not reproduce what we see --it makes us see."

Lost in Thought
*Self portrait of Klee
*tried to draw what he thought he would look like in deep thought.
*even the image of him is a distortion of reality.

The Artist at the Window
*self-portrait using black and white watercolors. It looks though he used chalk while the watercolors were still wet to paint the color in.
*He paints himself as right-handed, which is unusual, because he was left-handed. He was able to draw and paint with his right hand, or even with both hands at once.
* In a lesson, he once told is students, "Keep exercising your hand, best of all both hands, for the left writes differently. It is less skillful and for this very reason, often more serviceable. The right hand writes more naturally, the left more hieroglyphically. Handwriting is not an exercise in neatness, but in expression -think of the Chinese -and with practice becomes more and more sensitive, intuitive, spiritual.

Abstract Expressionism
*Form of art that Klee used
*When he was a teenager, he could draw beautiful pictures that looked like real scenes in every detail. However, he soon found that drawings things realistically was not enough for him. So, he began to create pictuers for the "garden of his mind and heart."
*Klee worked as though no painter had existed before him, as though it were up to him to invent the art, starting from scratch.
* Klee referred to his works, paintings, drawings, and etchings, as "picture poems."
*He let his inner feelings be his guide. Letting his talent and imagination run free wtih color, lines, and shapes, truing to reach to "the heart of creation."

Bauhaus
*Famous Art School where Klee taught.
* He taught there for 10 yr, until the school had financial troubles.
* Klee left and moved to Dusseldorf, where he became a professor of Fine Arts.

Hitler
* When Nazis came to power, their brutality and Klee's love of freedom of expression Clashed!
* Klee despised what Hilter was doing.
* His open disagreement angered the Nazis who broke into his studio and confiscated his pictures. They hung his pictures in their exibit "degenrate art."
* Klee fled to Switzerland, saving whatever he could of his work. He lived and worked in Switzerland until his death.

8,926
* The number of paintings done by the time he died.
* Kept a diary or log of all his paintings "Here below I cannot be grasped at all. I am just as much at home among the dead or the unborn, I am closer to Creation than most people are, yet still far from close enough."

Nature
* Klee's favorite subject to paint and sketch was nature
* show "Landscape with Yellow Birds" "Fish Magic"

Christmas Tree-
* Show "The Tree House" in Art For Children
* It is shaped as a Christmas Tree. Perhaps because his favorite memory is of a Christmas tree. He referred to Christmas trees as "his work."
* ASK? How would you draw a tree house?

Black and White
* In his early years as an artist, Klee sketched ostly in black and white. After a trip to North Africa, when he was 35, he discovered the beauty of color, and once said "colors and I are one."


* Grandmother taught him basics of drawing
* Christ Child with yellow wings 5 or 6 yers old
* LOVED FREEDOM