K: Paul Klee

I passed by an office of a co-worker the other day and noticed a poster hanging on the wall done by Paul Klee. It caught my attention, so I did some web-search for images and was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Paul Klee was a Swiss artist who enjoyed expressing himself through a wide variety of media. According to Ovationtv.com, “The painter and illustrator Paul Klee was at the forefront of modern art, taking what he needed from Cubism, Surrealism, and other avant-garde movements to create drawings and paintings that, while sometimes childlike, suggest a complex universe of music, dreamscapes, and pure emotion.”

Klee loved both art and music. He was from a musical family and played the violin. He drew a great deal of inspiration from the nature of music and represented the feeling of sound in many of his works. He taught at the famous Bauhaus school, but the Nazis in 1931 declared his work “degenerate” along with the works of his peer Kandinsky, co-founder of an avante-garde group Die Blaue Vier. Ovationtv.com also said “In 1933 he left for Switzerland, where he mounted large exhibitions in 1935-36. At this time, Klee began to experience the symptoms of what we now know was scleroderma. Paul Klee died in 1940, leaving over 9,000 works of art. In 2005 a museum dedicated to his work opened in Bern.”

In several websites they pointed out that his work was very bright and colorful until the time of the Nazi intervention. He had to adjust his style to deal with his affliction as well.

I love how complex his brushwork is even though his designs are simple. It gives his work a layered effect. I also think that you can see how so many of the artists of his time had an influence on his painting, but his style remains his own.