Paul Klee by Forty Sandra

Author:Forty, Sandra.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART / European
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2013-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Paul Klee, 1927

Klee loved the work and reveled in the shared thoughts and explorations of other luminaries coming together from many artistic disciplines. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in Germany, Klee and Kandinsky shared a studio, and their families shared a large Gropius-designed faculty house. The two friends shared a love of color and music, which they both suffused into their work.

Klee’s mother, Ida, died in 1921, 15 years after becoming partially paralyzed. Mother and son had become so close during her long years of illness that on the day she died, Klee dreamed of a female ghost floating through his studio.

While teaching at the Bauhaus in 1923, Klee—along with Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky—formed Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). All except Jawlensky were lecturers at the Bauhaus. The following year, they exhibited and lectured in the United States. The American-born Feininger summed up his friend Klee as, “Klee the painter is unthinkable without Klee the musician.”

During these years, Klee was very productive and created some of his most famous works. Most notably, he devised his magic squares. Loosely based on a mathematical grid structure, they are progressive rhythmic chromatic studies of color pigments. Through these works, he was attempting a challenging intellectual problem: trying to interweave art and poetry with mathematics and mysticism, all combined into a personal statement of his own. These challenges absorbed him more and more until he started to drop the number of classes he was teaching. His colleagues, however, some of whom the extra workload fell on, were not as enamored as Klee with his intellectual explorations, and they complained bitterly. Finally, giving in to peer pressure, Klee resigned from his position and moved to Düsseldorf to teach at the state-run Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he stayed for two years.

In 1927, the National Socialist Society for German Culture was formed with the intent of promoting Aryan art and halting the modernist “corruption of art.” Increasing pressure was put on the Bauhaus to close. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, National Socialism gained political control of Germany, and in 1933, the Nazi Party came to power. The Nazis inherently suspected all artists and writers of sedition, particularly those who followed modernist ideas. Such people were condemned by the regime as “degenerate” and unwelcome even in their own homeland. The Bauhaus school felt the force of the Nazis’ displeasure, and a few months after Klee left, the school was forced to close.

Now a state employee, Klee was forced along with everyone else to prove his Aryan antecedents on penalty of losing his job. He wanted to keep his post and went about getting the supporting documents, even though he despised the Nazis. But while he was in the process of sorting out all the paperwork, the Nazis suddenly announced that the documentation had to be accompanied by a declaration of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Klee refused and, as a result, lost his job. Suddenly it was too dangerous for him to remain in Germany.

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