Art - Paul Klee

Klee is a Swiss painter who was born in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern (Switzerland), in 1879. He grew up in a family of contrasts, his mother was a very sensitive women, but his father, on the contrary, was a embittered and cynical person. Klee was very interested in the Greek Antiquity and played the violin in the Berner Symphonie Orchester when he was ten years old. Paul Klee took lessons at a private school in 1900, he also got lessons from Franz von Stück, together with Wassily Kandinsky. The ambition to become an artist was stronger than becoming a professional musician. He married in 1906, with Lily Stumpf, whom he had met in 1899. Their one and only child was born in 1907.
His work was first exhibited in 1906, some of his etches were to be seen at an exhibition in Munich. Lily Klee was a talented pianist, and earned a living by giving piano-lessons Paul Klee painted and did the housework. But in 1910 was his major success, Klee had a solo-exhibition in Munich, Zürich, Basel and Winterthur.
He met Alfred Kubin and Kandinsky the following year. Klee became good friends with Kandinsky. Paul Klee's style changed drastically, after a visit to Robert Delaunay in 1912 and a journey to Tunisia in 1914.
Klee was able to work as a painter and to serve in the army during the war. He had an office job, because he was in his mid-thirties and to old to fight. Several of his friends were killed in the war, like Franz Marc and Macke.
Klee had more self-confidence after the war, this was also the first time he worked with oil-paint. He went to Weimar in 1921 to give lessons at the Bauhaus, he lived in Weimar together with his friend and colleague
Kandinsky. Klee didn't want to get involved in any of the internal quarrels, between several members of the Bauhaus staff, but he was a very good teacher.
He took a job as a professor at the academy in Düsseldorf to escape the situation at the Bauhaus.
Bern was the place where Paul and Lily Klee lived from 1933, because Germany was taken over by the nazis, who rejected all non-figural art. Klee's health began to fail in Switzerland and his work also began to change, due to his illness. The Swiss art public and critics didn't appreciate the art of Paul Klee, unlike the German public. Klee's friends and admirers supported him and tried to stabilize his weak situation.
Picasso visited Klee in 1937, three years before Klee would die. Paul Klee passed away in Switzerland in 1940, misunderstood by the Swiss public, but later generations of artists and art-lovers rehabilitated the art of Paul Klee.