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1. Paul Klee’s Life Major Milestones

Early Years in Bern

Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879 in Münchenbuchsee near Bern. His father, Hans Klee, was of German nationality and worked as a music teacher at the cantonal teacher’s college in Hofwil, Bern, where his students found him to be a distinctive and unusual character.³⁴ His mother, Ida Klee, née Frick, was from Basel and had family in the South of France. She was also musically trained. Paul Klee had a sister, Mathilde (1876-1953) who was three years older than him. In 1880 the family moved to Bern. In 1898 Paul Klee graduated from Bern Grammar School, but due to his varied talents he found it difficult to decide on a career. He was not only good at drawing, but was also a talented violinist, and he was deeply interested in literature and the theater.

Artistic Training in Munich and Italy, Sojourns in Bern and Munich

Klee finally embarked on a three-year course at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, followed by six months in Rome with the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller to further expand his artistic training. Looking back he comments: ‘My next task was to employ the skills I had acquired, and to make progress in my art. Bern, the home of my youth, seemed to me the ideal place for such work. […] I had formed many ties in Munich, and one of these led to marriage with my present wife. The fact the she could practice her profession in Munich was one of the important reasons for my returning there for the second time (autumn 1906).’³⁵ Paul Klee’s wife Lily, née Stumpf, was a pianist and supported the family by giving piano lessons. Later this was to prove a crucial factor in allowing Klee to develop himself as an artist. In 1907 their son Felix was born. In 1912 Paul Klee joined ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ (The Blue Rider), a group of artists including Heinrich Campendonk, August Macke, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1924 an art dealer from Braunschweig, Emmy (‘Galka’) Scheyer, along with Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee set up a group called ‘Die Blaue Vier’ (The Blue Four), in order to promote the four artists in the USA.

Fig. 14. Paul Klee, 1892

Fig. 15. Hans Klee, 1880

Fig. 16. Poem by Hans Klee about his children, Mathilde and Paul (from the small volume of poems, ‘Jugend Verse’, p. 43)

Trip to Tunisia, Military Service during World War I, Teaching, Journey to Egypt

In 1914 Klee and two artist friends, August Macke from Bonn and Louis Moilliet from Bern, went on a two-week study trip to Tunisia. The light and color of the region made a big impression on him, and he recorded in his diary the now legendary phrase: ‘Color has taken possession of me […] color and I are one.’³⁶ Klee’s artistic evolution was hampered by three years in the army during the World War I. Fortunately, he was stationed behind the front and came through unscathed, whereas August Macke and Franz Marc were killed in action.

Klee was both matter-of-fact and modest when he looked back on his employment and the twists of fate which followed: ‘In 1920 came my appointment to the staff of the Bauhaus school in Weimar. I taught there until the institution moved to Dessau in 1926. Finally, in 1930, I was asked to accept an appointment to conduct a course in painting at the Prussian Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. This offer coincided with my own desire to confine my teaching entirely to my own field. I therefore accepted and was associated with the Academy from 1931 to 1933.’³⁷

A two-month trip to Egypt in 1928/29 had a similar effect on him to that of his earlier visit to North Africa: the trip to Tunisia had a strong influence on his work between 1914 and 1931; the trip to Egypt influenced his art between 1929 and 1940. Will Grohmann comments: ‘Klee fed off it (the trip to Egypt) right up to his death, because here, more than in Tunis, he felt confronted by the fact that six thousand years of culture were no more than the blink of an eye in terms of world history, a fact that was reflected in the landscape, which seemed to play as big a role in it as humans. […] Klee could see creation, life and death reflected in every monument and every hill. […] Egypt gave him the courage to face ultimate simplicity, to cross the European horizon with its polarities; the Egyptian pictures are Klee’s “West-East divan”.’³⁸ Grohmann also mentions ‘the oneness of life and eternity in Egypt’³⁹, which made a particular impression on Klee.

Dismissal, Return to Bern, Isolation

In 1933 Klee was reviled and denounced as a ‘Jew’ and ‘foreigner’ by the National Socialists, who had just come to power.⁴⁰ On March 17 his house in Dessau was searched while he and Lily were away.⁴¹ On April 21 he was suspended from his post as Professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, and a few months later he was dismissed. He did not try to defend himself against being labeled a ‘Galician Jew’. He wrote to his wife: ‘As far as I’m concerned, it does not seem right to do anything about this kind of crude slander. After all, if it were true that I were a Jew and that I came from Galicia, what difference would it make to my value as a person and to the value of my work? […] I would rather get into difficulties than be one of those miserable people who spend all their time trying to curry favor with the powers that be.’⁴² Klee had to prove his Aryan descent and his Protestant affiliation. For many months he tried to stay in Germany, where he had an excellent reputation as an artist and art teacher, but he finally had to accept that there was no long-term future for his professional career under the Third Reich. Like other contemporary artists, his work was discredited, and in 1937 it was publicly denounced in the touring exhibition entitled ‘Degenerate Art’. Looking back at that fateful year 1933, Paul Klee wrote: ‘The new political climate in Germany affected the field of graphic art, both curbing academic freedom and cutting off all outlets for creative work in the arts. Since my reputation as a painter had in the course of time become international and even intercontinental, I felt that I was in a position to give up teaching and make my livelihood as an independent artist. The question of where to live henceforth was not in doubt. My close ties with Bern had never been broken; I felt keenly drawn to the city that is really my home.’⁴³

Fig. 17. Ida Klee-Frick, 1879

Fig. 18. Struck from the list, 1933, 424

Fig. 19. Scholar, 1933, 286

Just three months after Hitler was elected Chancellor, Klee was suspended from his position as Distinguished Professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Eight months later (on January 1, 1934) his employment contract was terminated. Klee’s art was denounced as degenerate. The artist, like many others, was ‘struck from the list’. The National Socialists feared resistance, and wanted to do away with anything that smacked of intellectual superiority. The painting is a self-portrait. He is frowning angrily, and a thick, black cross is painted across his head.

Re Fig. 18. Struck from the list, 1933, 424 (p. 22)

This is probably also a self-portrait. Klee was an excellent teacher who loved his profession and took it very seriously. His students admired him greatly. He was very disappointed and bitter about his dismissal. This is expressed in the painting: the pensive, sad eyes, the frown, the narrow, pinched mouth. The corners of the wide, wooden frame are black. The future looks bleak.

Re Fig. 19. Scholar, 1933, 286 (p. 23)

This drawing, also from 1933, seems to show a person in a state of rigor mortis. Did Klee have a presentiment of how many soldiers would soon be lying stiffly on the battlefields? And how strange that within a few years his own body would stiffen up due to an incurable disease.

Re Fig. 20. Rigidity, 1933, 187 (p. 25)

After being dismissed from his post by the newly elected Nazis, Paul Klee and his wife had to emigrate to Switzerland. In Germany, Klee had been held in high regard as an artist and teacher, but in December 1933 he returned as an emigrant to his home town of Bern, where he felt very isolated. He felt that no one understood his brand of avant-garde art there. The drawing shows the couple’s reluctance to emigrate. Lily is depicted with bowed head, and Paul with hanging arms and a skeptical, questioning expression as he faces an uncertain future.

Re Fig. 21. Emigrating, 1933, 181 (p. 26)

Fig. 21. Emigrating, 1933, 181

Fig. 22. Paul and Lily Klee, 1930

Fig. 23. Last residence of Paul and Lily Klee, Kistlerweg 6, Bern

Fig. 24. Poster for the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, February 23 to March 24, 1935

On December 24, 1933, Paul Klee emigrated from Düsseldorf to Bern, where Lily had arrived four days earlier. To begin with, they stayed with his father Hans and sister Mathilde at his parents’ house at Obstbergweg 6, and then in early 1934, as an interim measure, they rented a furnished two-room apartment at Kollerweg 6. On June 1, 1934, they moved into a modest three-room apartment at Kistlerweg 6 in the Elfenau area of Bern. They turned the largest room into Klee’s studio, the second-largest became the music room, containing the grand piano and violin, and the smallest room became their bedroom; the kitchen was also the dining room and the attic served as a guest bedroom.⁴⁴ Paul and Lily were welcomed by school friends, acquaintances and collectors such as Hans Bloesch, Dr. Fritz Lotmar, Louis Moilliet, Marie von Sinner, Hanni Bürgi-Bigler and her son Rolf, Hermann and Margrit Rupf, the artist couples Victor and Marguerite Surbek-Frey and Otto and Hildegard Nebel, and the professor of German language and literature, Fritz Strich. The Klees also soon made new friends, such as the art historians Bernard Geiser, Max Huggler and Georg Schmidt, the collectors Hans and Erika Meyer-Benteli, the German musicologist Hans Kayser and the sculptor Max Fueter.⁴⁵ But despite this, the artist felt unexpectedly isolated. Their son Felix was working as an opera director in Germany: from 1933 to 1938 in Ulm and then until 1944 in Wilhelmshafen.

Klee’s break with the past had an effect on his productivity: in the year of his dismissal he produced his highest total of works to date, 482, but in the first year of his emigration he only produced 219.⁴⁶ Paul Klee became very quiet, as he concentrated more and more on his work. In February 1935 he wrote to Wassily Kandinsky: ‘Our health and a few basic material needs are all we require to do our work. We really need nothing more. My work is my main source of optimism, and if it is to be in silence, then that is not necessarily a bad thing.’⁴⁷ Klee’s words reflect his isolation, but also his unassuming, unpretentious and adaptable nature. They also tell us how much his work meant to him. During his Swiss exile, Klee largely retreated into his shell, hiding away in his little studio which was also a vast and beautiful world of art. Max Huggler refers to this as his ‘inner emigration’.⁴⁸

Klee Exhibitions in Switzerland: Attracting Little Interest

As early as 1910, the Bern Museum of Fine Arts put on an exhibition of 56 graphic works by Paul Klee.⁴⁹ Klee’s friend from schooldays, the editor and critic Hans Bloesch, was one of the few who championed the talented artist in public. On the occasion of a second small exhibition of Klee’s work at the Bern Museum of Fine Arts in 1911, Bloesch put together ‘the first ever full review of Paul Klee’s work’.⁵⁰ The Bern public found the artist too avant-garde. Despite Ferdinand Hodler, Bern was still very much wedded to the traditional naturalistic style of art. There was plenty of culture on offer in the city,⁵¹ but very little could be described as progressive. There were no internationally renowned groups of likeminded artists trying to push the boundaries, such as ‘Die Brücke’⁵² (‘The Bridge’) in Dresden and ‘Der Blaue Reiter’⁵³ (‘The Blue Rider’) in Munich. With only a few exceptions, Klee could not find any connection with the artists working in Bern. It’s easy to understand his disappointment when he writes of the ‘bland illusion of the Bernese milieu.’⁵⁴

In February 1935, 14 months after Klee’s return to Bern, Max Huggler welcomed the artist by putting on a major exhibition of 273 works at the Bern Kunsthalle.⁵⁵ Looking back on this event, Huggler wrote: ‘The exhibition […] attracted little interest: we put together treasured items from Klee’s own portfolio covering his various creative periods, but this remarkable show had absolutely no effect on the local art scene, in the same way as the art associations, artists’ groups and other cultural institutions had ignored his presence in Bern. […] His work had no connection with the Swiss artistic tradition, and no one was prepared for the direction he was taking: his work was just there, like an erratic boulder.’⁵⁶ The ‘Welcome Exhibition’ in Bern was subsequently taken over by the Basel Kunsthalle,⁵⁷ where some of the works were lambasted by local art critics. An editor of the ‘National-Zeitung’ wrote: ‘It seems to us that Klee is a uniquely subtle and very sensitive artist, but he is an artist with limited creative powers. We just cannot find artistic value in every one of his ideas and in every variation of his favourite motifs. A lot of his work seems quite insignificant. Some of it has an Arts and Crafts influence and could be used as a design for carpets or textiles. And to the uninitiated, much of his work looks like hieroglyphics, totally incomprehensible. What heightens our skepticism is the similarity of his work to children’s drawings and the like. We don’t see it as a very positive sign when a man in his fifties finds inspiration in such things.’⁵⁸

In 1936 Paul Klee was not accepted for the major ‘National Art Exhibition’ in Bern.⁵⁹ However, in the same year he was shown at the Zurich Kunsthaus as part of the ‘Time Problems in Swiss Painting and Sculpture’ exhibition. Indeed, together with Jean Arp and Le Corbusier, he was hailed as one of the three leading international proponents of Swiss avant-garde art.⁶⁰ But the ‘Luzerner Nachrichten’ published a review which showed little understanding of the artists exhibiting in Zurich: ‘It [the “National Art Exhibition” in Bern] cold-shouldered dreamers like the Surrealists and design engineers like the abstract artists. These “outsiders”, these art revolutionaries, have now been gathered together in a kind of front by the Zurich exhibition.’⁶¹

In 1938 the Association of Modern Swiss Artists, known as the ‘Allianz’ group, honoured Klee with a special place at their exhibition in Basel entitled ‘New Art in Switzerland’.⁶²

In 1940 the Kunsthaus Zurich organized a major exhibition to coincide with Klee’s 60th birthday. His later works from 1935 to 1940 were shown, but they also aroused controversy. After the exhibition, Jakob Welti, cultural editor of the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’, went as far as to say he thought Klee’s art was the work of someone mentally ill!⁶³ Two days later the Bernese lawyer, Fritz Trüssel, president of the museum committee at the Bern Museum of Fine Arts, complained in a letter to the chief editor of the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’, ‘that a publication like yours […] should attempt to dispatch an artist of such range and international standing as Klee with such a hackneyed play on words.’ He stressed that Klee was ‘mentally in good health’ and ‘in no way mentally ill’.⁶⁴

‘And My Sole Remaining Wish Is to Be a Citizen of This City’

In 1934, a few months after moving from Düsseldorf to Bern, Paul Klee enquired about becoming a Swiss citizen. He was informed that he would need a permanent residence permit and ‘[…] that citizens of the German Reich are only eligible for this when they have lived in Switzerland continuously and legally for a period of 5 years’.⁶⁵ To begin with, he and his wife were only given a restricted residence permit, which had to be extended every year. In 1934 no allowance was made for the fact that Klee had lived in Bern for the first 19 years of his life and had later spent extended periods of time there.

Once the mandatory five years had passed, on the very same day that he received his permanent residence permit - April 24, 1939 - the artist applied for Swiss citizenship through his lawyer, Fritz Trüssel (Swiss Federal Archive). He was actively supported in this by his friend Conrad von Mandach, curator of the Bern Museum of Fine Arts, and by the director of the Bern Kunsthalle, Max Huggler.⁶⁶ After Klee had been repeatedly subjected to police questioning, on November 13, 1939, the Canton and Municipality of Bern recommended to the Federal Justice and Police Department that Klee should be granted his federal permit. He received it on December 19, 1939, despite the embarrassing and humiliating reports which were made.⁶⁷ However, in order for the permit to be legally valid, he still had to apply for the so-called ‘Landrecht’ - the right to live in the canton - and for municipal citizenship of the city of Bern. He submitted this application on January 15, 1940, along with a short biography dated January 7, 1940 (see pages 32-35), which finished with the sentence: ‘I have been living here [in Bern] ever since [his emigration from Germany], and my sole remaining wish is to be a citizen of this city.’⁶⁸ On March 12, 1940, Klee provided another piece of required information, and then on March 15, 1940, the Bern Municipal Police Department requested the Municipal Council to grant him citizenship of the city of Bern. Two weeks later, the cultural editor of the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’ branded him as mentally ill (as previously mentioned). Klee decided not to take legal action in this respect, for fear of jeopardizing his ongoing naturalization process.⁶⁹

Fig. 25. Extract from the minutes of the Bern Municipal Council meeting on July 5, 1940 (Bern Municipal Archive)

Fig. 26. (pp. 32-35): Paul Klee’s biography, Bern January 7, 1940 (Bern Police Department)

Biography

I was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee. My father was a music teacher at the cantonal teacher’s college in Hofwil; my mother was Swiss. When I started school in the spring of 1886, we lived on Länggasse in Bern. I attended the first four classes of primary school in that city. Then my parents sent me to the municipal grammar school; I stayed there through the fourth and last class and then attended the school of literature in the same institution. My general education was concluded with the cantonal examination, which I passed in the autumn of 1898.

It seemed that my choice of career should be easy. I was now qualified, thanks to my cantonal certificate, to enter any profession. However I decided to study painting and devote my life to art, however hazardous such a career might be. Such studies were best undertaken in those days - as to some extent they still are today - abroad. The choice lay only between Paris and Germany. I felt more emotionally drawn to Germany. And so I set out for the Bavarian metropolis. At the Academy of Fine Arts they recommended that I first attend Knirr’s preparatory school. There I practiced drawing and painting, and subsequently entered Franz Stuck’s class at the Academy.

After three years studying in Munich, I spent a further year of study and travel in Italy, chiefly in Rome. My next task was to employ the skills I had acquired, and to make progress in my art. Bern, the home of my youth, seemed to me the ideal place for such work, and I still can point to the fruits of this stay: the etchings I did from 1903 to 1906, which even at that time attracted a certain amount of attention.

I had formed many ties in Munich, and one of these led to marriage with my present wife. The fact that she could practice her profession in Munich was one of the important reasons for my returning there for the second time (autumn 1906). As an artist I was slowly achieving recognition, and every step forward in Munich was of importance, for the city was then a center of the art world.

I remained a resident of Munich until 1920, except for an interruption of three years during the World War, when I served on garrison duty in Landshut, Schleissheim and Gersthofen. All through this period my ties with Bern remained unbroken; every year I holidayed for two or three weeks at my parents’ home there.

In 1920 came my appointment to the staff of the Bauhaus school in Weimar. I taught there until the institution moved to Dessau in 1926. Finally, in 1930, I was asked to accept an appointment to conduct a course in painting at the Prussian Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. This offer coincided with my own desire to confine my teaching entirely to my own field. I therefore accepted and was associated with the Academy from 1931 to 1933.

The new political climate in Germany affected the field of graphic art, both curbing academic freedom and cutting off all outlets for creative work in the arts. Since my reputation as a painter had in the course of time become international and even intercontinental, I felt that I was in a position to give up teaching and make my livelihood as an independent artist. The question of where to live henceforth was not in doubt. My close ties with Bern had never been broken; I felt keenly drawn to the city that is really my home. I have been living here ever since, and my sole remaining wish is to be a citizen of this city.

Bern, January 7, 1940

Paul Klee

Fig. 27. Swiss landscape, 1919, 46

On their return to Switzerland in 1934, as Germans, Paul and Lily Klee applied for Swiss citizenship. Klee had to submit to embarrassing questioning by the naturalization authorities. After a visit to Klee, a police official remarked in his report - referring to this painting - that the cows ‘looked stupid’, and ‘Isn’t this painting a direct attack on what some people call “Kuhschweizer” (Swiss cow herders, a pejorative term for the Swiss)?’ Despite such fatuousness, the artist, who had spent more than half his life in Bern, would probably have been granted Swiss citizenship in the end, but he died six days before the meeting of the Bern Citizenship Commission where his case was to be decided.

Fig. 28. Bern old town with the town hall (top)

On June 19, 1940, ten days before his death, he still had to deal with questions from the Bern Citizenship Commission while he was seriously ill in the Clinica Sant’ Agnese in Locarno.⁷⁰ His application for citizenship was then finally put on the agenda for the meeting of the Bern Municipal Council to be held on July 5, 1940 (fig. 25).⁷¹ Paul Klee died six days before this meeting took place. His final wish was never granted - to be a citizen of the city in which he had lived half his life.

Fig. 29. A sick man makes plans, 1939, 611