Recollecting Paul Klee: condemned by the Nazis as a 'degenerate" painter Paul Klee fled Germany in 1933 to seek refuge in his boyhood home of Switzerland. Swiss News looks back at Klee's life and work, his artistic influences and his final years as a troubled exile in his adopted country.
Paul Klee (1879-1940) experimented with many different artistic styles, from expressionism and surrealism to abstract art and cubism. He painted some 8,926 artworks, 4,000 of which can be found at the Paul Klee Centre in Bern. Though Klee's works have been universally lauded since his death, he did not always face such rave reviews in life.
When it seized power in 1933, Germany's Nazi Party castigated the art of Klee and his compatriot Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (profiled last month in Swiss News), who lived in exile in Davos. Nazi catalogues described an exhibit showcasing a sampling of Klee's 'degenerate' art as "the work of a sick mind".
Klee had hoped to remain in Germany "in spite of the Nazis", but he relocated to Switzerland within 10 months of Hitler's rise to power, Dr. Michael Baumgartner, curator of the Paul Klee Centre in Bern, told Swiss News in an interview.
"Even his house in Dessau [home of the acclaimed Bauhaus school of Art and Architecture where he had taught art] was searched by German police in 1933," Baumgartner said. "They accused Klee of transferring funds and other valuables to Switzerland. It was a pretext, but probably accurate in part, for about 80 of his works had been seized from German museums in Berlin, Hannover and Dusseldorf, giving him good reason to salvage and safeguard whatever he could."
Today some Klee works sell for as much as SFr 8.6 million ($7.5 million).
Portrait of the artist
The son of Swiss Ida Frick and German Hans Klee, he grew up near Bern in the village of Munchenbuchsee. A multitalented youth, Klee might easily have followed in the footsteps of his father, a music teacher. But instead, he decided as a teenager to focus on the visual arts, and went on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and tour throughout Italy and Switzerland.
After settling in Munich, Klee met avant-garde figures such as Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke. He and Macke struck up a friendship and toured Tunisia together with Swiss artist Louis Moillet in 1914. The expressionist Macke's colourful bazaar and street scenes became masterpieces of his final period, and highlighted his luminist approach. Klee had less to show from the North African tour, but Macke's fascination with light and brilliant colour clearly rubbed off on him.
"Colour has taken possession of me," Klee wrote upon his return to Europe. "No longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever. Colour and I are one...
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