Klee taught Bauhaus color while drawing like a child
Paul Klee, 18 December 1879 to 29 June 1940, filtered Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism into a dry-humored, musical draftsmanship. With Wassily Kandinsky he taught at the Bauhaus; his notebooks on form are often ranked with Leonardo's treatise for modern theory.
Music came first. Klee's father taught music at a teachers' seminary near Bern and his mother was a Swiss singer, and the boy began violin at seven and was good enough by 11 that Bern's music association asked him to perform as a special extra member. As a teenager he turned to visual art, partly in rebellion and partly because he thought modern music was in decline, though he stayed devoted to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works. He filled schoolbooks with caricatures, began a diary around 1897 that he kept until 1918, and scraped through his final exams, joking that hitting the exact minimum was difficult and risky.
At the Munich Academy from 1898, under Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck, he drew brilliantly but doubted he would ever learn to paint. A trip through Italy in 1901 and 1902 with Hermann Haller showed him the masters and the colours of the south, and he wrote that a long struggle with colour lay ahead. He married the pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906 and kept house while she taught, and his first solo exhibition opened in Bern in 1910.
The breakthrough came through the Munich avant-garde. In 1911 Alfred Kubin encouraged him to illustrate Voltaire's Candide and became an early collector, and Klee met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky. Seventeen of his graphic works appeared in the second Blue Rider exhibition in 1912. That year's trip to Paris exposed him to Cubism, abstraction and the bold colour of Robert Delaunay, prompting pale watercolour experiments such as In the Quarry of 1913. He later taught at the Bauhaus alongside Kandinsky, and his lectures on form became the Paul Klee Notebooks.
Source: Paul Klee
