Paul Klee

Paul Ernst Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland, to a German music teacher father and a Swiss singer mother — a dual inheritance that would resonate throughout a practice in which visual art and musical sensibility remained inseparable. He trained in Munich, where he became associated with Der Blaue Reiter, the movement that gathered some of the most adventurous painters working in early twentieth-century Europe. He died on 29 June 1940 in Muralto, near Locarno, Switzerland, having spent the intervening decades producing a body of work of extraordinary range and invention, much of it during his years teaching at the Bauhaus.

Klee's output spans painting, watercolor, drawing, and works on paper, and resists easy categorization. Among his most celebrated works is Twittering Machine (1922), held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in which bird-like figures mounted on a mechanical crank hover above a luminous color wash — a vision at once playful and unsettling. That same year he produced Senecio (1922), now at the Kunstmuseum Basel, a frontal mask-like head assembled from rectangles of color that distills his interest in primitive form and psychological ambiguity into a single iconic image. Ad Parnassum (1932), held at the Kunstmuseum Bern, is widely regarded as one of his masterpieces: a monumental composition built from mosaic-like color dots that synthesizes pointillist technique, architectural form, and musical allusion. His late works, painted during illness and against the backdrop of political catastrophe, carry a different weight — Insula Dulcamara (1938) and Tod und Feuer (1940), both held at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, transform biomorphic signs and compressed symbols into meditations on myth and mortality. Angelus Novus (1920), now at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, acquired a singular cultural afterlife through its ownership by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who interpreted it as the "angel of history" — an association that has anchored Klee's work within critical theory as much as art history.

The institutional presence of Klee's work is vast. The Zentrum Paul Klee, established in Bern in 2005 when it absorbed the Paul Klee Foundation — itself founded in 1947 by four prominent Bern collectors — holds approximately forty percent of his entire output and functions as the leading scholarly authority on his oeuvre, maintaining a comprehensive catalogue raisonné compiled by its curatorial and research staff. Together with the Kunstmuseum Bern, it forms the largest concentration of Klee's work anywhere in the world. His paintings and works on paper are also held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler and Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Albertina in Vienna, the Musée Berggruen in Berlin, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Kunsthaus Zürich, and numerous other institutions across Europe. Solo exhibitions have been mounted at the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Beyeler, the LaM in Villeneuve-d'Ascq, and the Zentrum Paul Klee, where the long-term presentation Kosmos Klee. La collection opened in 2023. His estate is represented by David Zwirner across its New York, London, and Hong Kong galleries, a relationship first announced in 2019. Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger in Paris, which presented a solo exhibition with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as early as 1950, maintains a historic association with his work. A critical reassessment published in the Brooklyn Rail in 2026, occasioned by an exhibition at The Jewish Museum, New York, situated his late-career production in direct relation to the political upheavals of the 1930s — a reminder that Klee's work continues to generate serious scholarly and critical engagement.