Paul Klee

The art of Paul Klee.

Today Paul Klee, who was also a musician, teacher and poet, ranks as one of the 20th century’s most significant artists. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, where the artist spent a half of his life, is a monument of international renown and a personal tribute to Paul Klee himself…

Works in the TATE collection

Masny works of Klee online from the MOMA collection

The Djerassi Collection of work by Swiss Modernist Paul Klee, assembled by Dr. Carl Djerassi and placed in SFMOMA’s care, is seen in full for the first time ever in this exhibition. Artworks in the Collection, most of which are on paper, reveal the spirit of investigation and experimentation Klee brought to his practice as a master of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Spanning the years from 1885 to Klee’s death in 1940, the 140 works on view include watercolors, drawings, etchings, and lithographs…

Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, the second child of Hans Klee, a German music teacher, and a Swiss mother. His training as a painter began in 1898 when he studied drawing and painting in Munich for three years. By 1911, he had returned to that city, where he became involved with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. Klee and Kandinsky became lifelong friends, and the support of the older painter provided much-needed encouragement. Until then, Klee had worked in relative isolation, experimenting with various styles and media, such as making caricatures and Symbolist drawings, and later producing small works on paper mainly in black and white. His work was also influenced by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the abstract translucent color planes of Robert Delaunay…