Paul Klee – Bauhaus, the music of color and the walk of the line

Paul Klee is the artist who turned color into music and the line into a living creature. Over four decades, he developed a visual language that is neither entirely abstract nor entirely representational, but moves in the borderland between the two: fish swimming in black night, faces built from colored squares, arrows pointing toward something invisible. His art is both playful and deeply considered, and it is precisely this combination that has made his motifs some of the most sought-after when people look for posters and wall art with both warmth and intellectual weight.

Klee left behind around 9,600 catalogued works – paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints – making him one of the most prolific artists of the 20th century. He taught at the Bauhaus for ten years, wrote one of modernism’s most important textbooks on form, was declared degenerate by the Nazis, and painted his strongest pictures while an incurable illness slowly robbed his hands of their mobility. This page explores his life, major works, color theory, the Swedish connection through Moderna Museet, and how his motifs work in a Swedish home.

Contents
↓ Who was Paul Klee?
↓ Life – from Bern to Locarno
↓ Paul Klee’s most famous works
↓ Technique, color theory, and the line’s walk
↓ The Bauhaus teacher and theorist
↓ Persecution, legacy, and posterity
↓ Paul Klee in Sweden and the Nordic countries
↓ Paul Klee at home – practical guide
↓ Timeline
↓ Related artists and movements
↓ Frequently asked questions about Paul Klee

Who was Paul Klee?

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a Swiss-German painter, graphic artist, and art theorist whose work ranks among the most distinctive of modernism. He trained in Munich, worked in Germany during his most important years, and ended his life in exile in Switzerland. From an art-historical perspective, he cannot be placed in a single category: he participated in the breakthrough of Expressionism through the group Der Blaue Reiter, was celebrated by the Surrealists, taught at the Bauhaus alongside Constructivists, and is now regarded as one of the early leading figures of abstract art, without ever completely abandoning the recognizable figure.

What unites his extraordinarily varied output is a method rather than a style. Klee worked in series of experiments in which each picture tested a hypothesis: what happens if the line is allowed to determine its own course? What happens if color is laid out in grids without outlines? What happens if letters become pictorial elements? The catalogue of works he kept himself from 1911 onward comprises around 9,600 works, carefully numbered year by year, and still serves as the foundation of all Klee research today. No other modernist left behind such a systematically documented working process.

Quick facts: Born December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee outside Bern, Switzerland. Died June 29, 1940, in Muralto near Locarno, aged 60. Catalogue raisonné: approximately 9,600 catalogued works. Teacher at the Bauhaus from 1921-1931, first in Weimar and, from 1926, in Dessau. Professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from autumn 1931, dismissed on April 21, 1933. Most productive year: 1939, with 1,254 recorded works. Auction record: Dancer (1932), US$6,791,965 at Christie's in London in 2011. World's largest collection: Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, opened in 2005, containing around 40 percent of his entire artistic output.

Life - from Bern to Locarno

The musician's son who chose the brush

Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee just outside Bern. His father, Hans Klee, was a German music teacher, and his mother, Ida, a Swiss singer; the boy grew up with a violin in his hands. He was so skilled that at the age of eleven he was offered a place as an extra musician in the Bern city orchestra. Music remained his second language throughout his life - he played Bach and Mozart every morning before going to the easel, and described his paintings using musical terms such as polyphony, rhythm, and key.

Despite his musical talent, he chose visual art and moved to Munich in 1898, where he studied at Heinrich Knirr's private school and then in Franz von Stuck's class at the art academy. The years after his studies were lean. He supported himself partly through graphic work, made a formative trip to Italy in 1901-1902, and married the pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906, who supported the family's finances through her teaching for many years. Their son Felix was born in 1907, and for several years Klee managed the household while his wife worked.

The breakthrough and the 1914 trip to Tunisia

The turning point came in April 1914. Together with his friends August Macke and Louis Moilliet, Klee traveled to Tunisia for two weeks. The light, the chalk-white houses, and the saturated earth tones of Kairouan and Hammamet set something free in him. In his diary, on April 16, he noted: color had taken possession of him; he no longer needed to seek it, it and he were one. He brought home around forty watercolors from the trip to Tunisia, in which façades and gardens had already begun dissolving into transparent fields of color - his first truly personal works.

The illness and final years

In 1935, Klee fell ill with scleroderma, an autoimmune connective tissue disease that gradually hardens the skin and makes swallowing, breathing, and fine motor skills more difficult. Production fell drastically in 1936, when he recorded only 25 works. Thereafter, something unusual happened in art history: instead of falling silent, he transformed his entire visual language. The brushstrokes became broad and black, the format larger, and the motifs reduced to signs. In 1939, he produced 1,254 works - more than in any other year of his life. He died on June 29, 1940, at a clinic in Muralto near Locarno, while his application for Swiss citizenship was still pending.

Paul Klee's most famous works

Senecio (1922)

A round face built from irregular patches of color in ochre, brick red, and sand beige, with two differently sized eyes and a narrow line for a mouth. Senecio – named after the ragwort genus – belongs to Kunstmuseum Basel and is probably Klee's most reproduced image. The work presents his central idea in distilled form: a recognizable motif assembled from purely geometric elements of color, with the facial expression emerging from small deviations in the grid rather than from drawing. The motif works unusually well as a poster because the composition and color palette remain strong even in a small format.

Die Zwitscher-Maschine (1922)

Four birds on a crank, suspended over an emptiness in blue-gray. Die Zwitscher-Maschine, approximately The Twittering Machine in English, is a watercolor and oil transfer acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939 – one of the first Klee works to enter an American museum collection. On the surface, the image is a joke about mechanical birdsong, but it contains Klee's recurring anxiety: nature transformed into a device, song reduced to a sound produced by turning a crank. This very duality between childlike joy and underlying seriousness is typical of him.

Ad Parnassum (1932)

Klee's largest painting, measuring 100 × 126 centimeters, and his most fully realized experiment with pointillist technique. Thousands of tiny dots of color build up a mountain with a gate and a sun, drawn from the ancient Parnassus but painted with the knowledge he acquired during his Bauhaus years. The work is owned by Kunstmuseum Bern and is considered the highlight of his so-called Divisionist period. The title also alludes to Johann Joseph Fux's music-theoretical work Gradus ad Parnassum from 1725 – another of the musical threads running through his entire oeuvre.

Angelus Novus (1920)

A small oil transfer with watercolor, depicting an angel with wide-open eyes and outstretched wings. The work was purchased in 1921 by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who carried it with him into exile in Paris in 1933 and made it an image for his famous idea of the angel of history: a figure driven backward into the future while the wreckage of the past grows before it. After Benjamin's death, the sheet passed to his friend Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem and was donated to the Israel Museum in 1987, where it remains today. Few individual works of twentieth-century art have acquired such an extensive philosophical afterlife.

"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible." – Paul Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 1920

Technique, Colour Theory and the Line's Walk

The Oil Transfer - An Invention of His Own

Around 1919, Klee developed a technique he called Ölfarbezeichnung, oil transfer. A sheet of paper was prepared with black oil paint and placed against a clean sheet; he then drew on top with a needle or a blunt stylus, pressing the paint through and producing a trembling, partly irregular line that could not be achieved with a pen. The result was then coloured with watercolour. Both Angelus Novus and Die Zwitscher-Maschine were made in this way. The method gave him a line that was drawn yet still partly beyond his control - exactly the balance between intention and chance that he sought.

The Colour Square and the Polyphonic Image

After the trip to Tunisia, the square field of colour became one of his most important tools. In works such as Ancient Sound from 1925, squares of ochre, olive green, rust red and black are placed beside one another without contours, giving the image depth solely through the colours' relative tonal values. Klee called such compositions polyphonic, borrowing a term from multi-voiced music: each layer of colour is an independent voice, and the whole emerges through their interplay. This directly explains why his paintings work so well as graphic motifs - the structure carries the image even without a narrative.

The Line That Takes a Walk

Klee's most frequently quoted pedagogical statement opens his Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch from 1925: an active line moving freely, a walk for the sake of walking. The sentence has become a kind of motto for modernist drawing as a whole. In practice, it meant that Klee allowed the line to build the form as it was drawn, rather than tracing a predetermined contour. This method had an enormous influence on the Surrealists, who saw it as a precursor to their own automatic drawing, and later on artists such as Joan Miró and Cy Twombly.

The Bauhaus Teacher and Theorist

Ten Years at the School in Weimar and Dessau

Walter Gropius invited Klee to the Bauhaus in Weimar in the autumn of 1920, and he taught there from January 1921 until spring 1931 - first in the bookbinding and stained-glass workshops, later in the weaving workshop and, above all, in the obligatory theory of form course. When the school moved to Dessau in 1926, the Klee family settled in one of Gropius's newly built masters' houses, next door to Wassily Kandinsky and his wife Nina. The two painters had known each other since the Der Blaue Reiter period in Munich and shared the belief that visual art rested on laws as precise as those of music.

Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch and the Teaching Notes

In 1925, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch was published as number two in the Bauhausbücher series. The small book addresses point, line, plane, and movement with diagrams that look like works of art in their own right, and it remains required reading in undergraduate courses on form and composition to this day. Behind it lies a much larger body of material: Klee's surviving teaching notes comprise nearly 4,000 handwritten pages and constitute the most extensive theoretical record left by any modernist painter. The school's significance for the entire tradition of graphic design is discussed in greater detail on the page about Bauhaus.

Persecution, Legacy, and Afterlife

When the Nazis came to power, Klee was immediately affected. On April 21, 1933, he was dismissed from his professorship at the art academy in Düsseldorf after his studio was searched and his art was branded degenerate. In December of the same year, the family left Germany and returned to Bern. More than one hundred of his works were confiscated from German public collections, and in 1937 a number of them were shown in the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich - the same exhibition that publicly denounced Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Otto Dix.

Paradoxically, this period became his most influential. American painters of the postwar era studied him closely, and his experiments with signs and writing reappear among artists far beyond Europe. Today, most of his estate is administered by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, a building by Renzo Piano that opened in 2005 and houses around 4,000 works along with several thousand archival items from the artist's estate. The museum celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2025. During 2025 and 2026, interest has also been notable internationally: the Jewish Museum in New York is showing Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds with around 100 works through July 26, 2026, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid exhibited Klee alongside Pablo Picasso from the Heinz Berggruen Collection between October 2025 and February 2026.

Paul Klee in Sweden and the Nordic Countries

Sweden has a longer Klee tradition than many people realize. As early as 1961, Moderna Museet in Stockholm presented a major solo exhibition of paintings, drawings, and graphic works – one of the early international initiatives that built the museum's reputation during Pontus Hultén's tenure. Since then, the collection has grown through donations: seven works came from the Carl Gemzell collection, and in 2014 Peggy Bonnier donated two additional works to the museum.

In 2016, Moderna Museet presented the exhibition Klee/Aguéli, which placed Klee's Tunisian watercolors alongside Egyptian and North African works by the Swedish painter Ivan Aguéli. Ahead of the exhibition, the museum's Klee works on paper underwent complete conservation and received new mountings and frames designed to follow the artist's own original presentation principles – Klee was unusually particular about how his sheets were mounted and often signed the mounting itself, not the sheet. Moderna Museet Malmö later presented selections from the collection under the title Paul Klee, Possessed by Color, and Malmö Konsthall has shown his graphic works on several occasions. The connection to the Nordic artistic tradition is indirect but real: an interest in the drawn, the small-scale, and the poetic runs through much of what is described on the page about Nordic art.

Paul Klee at Home – A Practical Guide

Klee's motifs are among the easiest to live with, for two reasons. The first is the format: he almost always worked on a small scale, often smaller than 40 × 50 centimeters, which means that poster-size reproductions remain close to the scale of the originals and do not lose their visual weight. The second is the color palette. The muted ochre, brick red, and gray-blue tones in his grid compositions are very close to the palette that dominates Swedish interiors – painted white wood, linen, unfinished oak – and therefore rarely clash with the furnishings.

The motifs broadly fall into three groups that work differently. The grid compositions in earth tones, such as Senecio and Ancient Sound, suit bedrooms and dining areas where you want calm and structure. The line-based works from the 1920s, with thin, needle-written figures against a light background, are airy and can be hung in groups with graphic motifs and photographic art. The late, roughly drawn images from 1938–1940, with broad black strokes against vivid fields of color, are powerful when displayed alone and can handle large formats. If you want to create a wall with several Klee-inspired prints, it is best to choose from one of the groups at a time – mixing thin needle-writing with thick black characters makes the motifs compete with one another. Our guide to gallery walls explains how to build such a grouping step by step.

Tip: Klee himself mounted almost all his works on paper with wide, light-colored surrounding cardboard and a very narrow frame. Follow his principle: choose a thin frame in black, oak, or brass and leave a generous mat, preferably 6–8 centimeters. The light margin works as a pause between the motif's saturated colors and the wall color, and makes even a small print hold its own across a large surface. Read more in our guide to framing art.

When it comes to light, Klee motifs are forgiving. Since the compositions rarely rely on sharp black-and-white contrasts, they work in both north-facing rooms and evening light, where more high-contrast graphic posters can appear harsh. A practical tip is to place a Klee-inspired image where you spend some time sitting still – at the dining table, beside a reading armchair – since the wealth of detail rewards those who look for a long time. In a room with plenty of textiles and wood, you can dare to increase the color intensity and combine it with colorful motifs; in a strictly furnished room, one image is enough.

Timeline

1879 – Paul Klee is born on December 18 in Münchenbuchsee outside Bern, the son of a German music teacher and a Swiss singer.

1898 – Moves to Munich to study art, first with Heinrich Knirr and, from 1900, in Franz von Stuck's class at the art academy.

1906 – Marries pianist Lily Stumpf and settles in Munich. Their son Felix is born the following year.

1911–1912 – Meets Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke and takes part in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter in Munich.

1914 – The trip to Tunisia in April with Macke and Moilliet becomes his decisive breakthrough in color.

1921 – Begins teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar; moves with the school to Dessau in 1926 and lives next door to Kandinsky.

1925 – Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch is published as volume two of the Bauhausbücher and becomes modernism's most widely read treatise on form.

1931 – Leaves the Bauhaus and takes up a professorship at the art academy in Düsseldorf in the autumn.

1933 – Is dismissed by the new regime on April 21 and leaves Germany for Bern in December.

1935 – Falls ill with scleroderma; production drops to 25 documented works the following year.

1937 – Klee's works are shown in the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich after more than one hundred works have been confiscated from German collections.

1939 – Creates 1,254 works, more than in any other year, using an entirely new drawn visual language.

1940 – Dies on June 29 in Muralto near Locarno, aged 60.

2005 – Zentrum Paul Klee opens in Bern in a building designed by Renzo Piano, housing around 40 percent of his entire body of work.

Related artists and movements

Klee stands at the center of a dense network of connections. Closest to him is Wassily Kandinsky, with whom he shared both the Der Blaue Reiter years and the role of Bauhaus teacher, and through him the entire history of early abstract art. His early works belong to the context of Expressionism, while his automatic drawing method had a decisive influence on Surrealism and especially on Joan Miró. The austere geometric side of his work has points of contact with De Stijl, although Klee never accepted the dogmatism of Neoplasticism. Klee took part in the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter in February 1912 and contributed to the group's almanac.

If you want to explore artists, periods, and movements more broadly, you will find all the fact pages collected in our Knowledge Base, where each subject is covered in as much detail as on this page.

Frequently asked questions about Paul Klee

If you want to bring Klee's sense of form into your own home, you'll find related motifs among our abstract posters, in the selection of Bauhaus posters, and in the collection featuring famous artists. If you need help choosing a style and color palette, we recommend our guide to abstract posters and our Bauhaus guide.