Collection: Paul Klee

(Münchenbuchsee 1879 - Muralto 1940)

German painter born in Switzerland, Paul Klee was one of the most original and unclassifiable figures of the twentieth century. His style traverses Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism without truly belonging to any of them: each work is a world unto itself, constructed with irony, formal rigor, and a freedom that seems to come from childhood but conceals a deep reflection on visual language.
Growing up in a family of musicians, Klee remained throughout his life close to music – he played the violin in an orchestra – and transposed that thought into painting: variation, fugue, and polyphony became his compositional principles. From 1921, he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and then in Dessau, where he developed his theories on line, color, and form, collected in the famous Pedagogical Sketchbook. In 1933, the Nazi regime declared him “degenerate art” and forced him to resign from the Academy of Düsseldorf; he returned to Switzerland, where he continued to work until his death, afflicted by a progressive illness that transformed his mark without extinguishing it.
Graphic production occupies a central place in his work. Almost half of his vast output (which includes about 9,000 works) consists of drawings, never conceived as a preparatory phase for a painting, but as autonomous works. Alongside the drawings, Klee created etchings and lithographs that explore with the same intensity the recurring themes of his research: the line used in all possible forms (straight, zig-zag, as an arrow, as a sign and symbol) with often ironic connotation, at times sarcastic, sometimes darker. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern preserves the main core of his work; his works are exhibited in major museums around the world, from the MoMA in New York to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.