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Tiny picture painter and averagely tall etcher Paul Klee was born in Switzerland with a sense of humour that led to him calling pictures things like 'The Twittering Machine' and a gift for music that had him fiddling with the Bern Municipal Orchestra by the time he was 10. However, he plumped for painting not plucking and studied art in Munich, after which he scraped for spondulix and sketched for love.
By 1907 he was a married dad and scratching a living as an etcher. After meeting cutting edge Kandinsky and August Macke in 1911 he joined the transcendentally inclined Blue Rider School.
In 1914 he and August went to North Africa for a hol' (fancy taking a Macke to the desert) and, just as Monet had done half a century earlier, Paul became radiant with enthusiasm for the intense natural light, not to mention the grid patterns created by those zany Tunisian irrigation ditches.
He returned to Germany a new man, saying that colour had now taken hold of him forever (Paul, it's called a <i>tan</i>). n 1920 he went to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar where he became noted for his art and goofy spontaneous 'freeze poses' based on statues of that city's favourite son Goethe. What a wag he was (Klee not Goethe). After the Bauhaus boys bickered and the Nazis narked him, Paul skidaddled to Switzerland where he got stick from the critics and so sick from measles that he developed a disability and died.
Paul said art 'enabled the invisible to become visible' and was influenced by nocturnal imaginings and primitive symbolism, often incorporating letters and numbers into his work (his notes for the milkman must have been a dream).
Copyright Michael Cox
