Paul Klee

Paul Klee: Encyclopædia Britannica | article page
b. Dec. 18, 1879, Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switz.
d. June 29, 1940, Muralto, near Locarno
Swiss painter who was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century.

Though Klee belonged to no movement, he assimilated, and even anticipated, most of the major artistic tendencies of his time in his work. Using both representational and abstract approaches, he produced an immense oeuvre of some 9,000 paintings, drawings, and watercolours in a great variety of styles. His works tend to be small in scale and are remarkable for their delicate nuances of line, colour, and tonality.

In Klee's highly sophisticated art, irony and a sense of the absurd are joined to an intense evocation of the mystery and beauty of nature. Claiming art to be a parable of the Creation, Klee represented everything from human figures and foibles to landscapes and microcosms of the plant and animal kingdoms, all with an eye that mocked as much as it praised; he was one of the great humorists of 20th-century art and its supreme ironist.

Music figures prominently in his work--in his many images of opera and musicians, and to some extent as a model for his compositions. But literature had the greater pull on him; his art is steeped in poetic and mythic allusion, and the titles he gave to his pictures tend to charge them with additional meanings. Klee's work was too personal to found a school or style, but it has had wide and profound influence.
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Paul Klee
Paul Klee(1879-1940), deutsch-schweizerischer Maler und Radierer, der zu den originellsten Vertretern der Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts zählt und auch durch sein kunsttheoretisches Schaffen maßgeblichen Einfluss auf die moderne Kunst ausübte. Klee hatte die deutsche Staatsbürgerschaft, verbrachte jedoch einen großen Teil seines Lebens in der Schweiz. Er wurde 1879 in Münchenbuchsee in der Nähe von Bern geboren und ging 1898 nach München, wo er bei dem einflussreichen Maler und Kunstpädagogen Franz von Stuck studierte. Klee starb 1940 in Muralto (Schweiz). Neben seinem malerischen Werk hinterließ er zahlreiche kunsttheoretische Schriften (Schöpferische Konfession, 1920; Über die Moderne Kunst, 1924, herausgegeben 1945; Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 1925 in der Reihe der Bauhaus-Bücher erschienen; Das bildnerische Denken, 1956 aus seinem Nachlass herausgegeben; Tagebücher 1898-1918, Köln 1968), in denen er sein aus der organischen Natur abgeleitetes künstlerisches Credo formulierte, das die Kunst nicht als Mittel zur Abbildung von Wirklichkeit, sondern als eine Art Schöpfungsakt begriff ("Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar").
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