Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss painter of German nationality.

Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland, into a family of musicians.
As a boy Paul learned to play violin. As well as his training in music, he received a thorough classical education in the Literarschule in Bern. Ancient Greek, modern French, classic and contemporary French and German art, and literature were his favorites. Klee graduated from the school in 1898. Through his later schooldays he hesitated between music and art for a career, finally choosing art and the Munich Academy, where he would study it.

Klee arrived in Munich in October 1898 and at first studied privately. The next year he entered the Academy, where he spent 2 years. Feeling unsatisfied with his academic education, Klee left the Academy and traveled to Italy in the first in a series of trips abroad that nourished his visual sensibilities.

His early work was almost exclusively pen-and-ink drawings and etchings, many of them satirical. He showed his work in different exhibitions and joined a Swiss graphic artists’ society. A series of his satirical etchings was exhibited at the Munich Secession in 1906. That same year, Klee married Lily Stumpf, a pianist, and moved to Munich, then an important center of avant-garde art. Here he gained exposure to Modern art.

In 1910-11 Klee had his first major exhibitions in the 3 cities of Switzerland: Bern, Zurich, and Basel. In 1912, he contributed 17 graphic works to the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), the avant-garde artistic society founded by W. Kandinsky and Franz Marc. That same year Klee visited Robert Delaunay in Paris, where he saw the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and met Robert Delaunay. The latter’s influence on Klee’s development is considered the strongest outside his immediate circle of avant-garde Munich painters. Klee’s translation of Delaunay’s essay “On Light” appeared in the Sturm in January 1913.

Klee helped found the Neue Munchner Secession in 1914. Color became central to his art only after a revelatory trip to Tunisia, with his fellow painters August Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. However, he interrupted the voyage and returned home, feeling that he had “suddenly grasped the idea of light and was a painter now”.

During the World War I, Klee was not immediately conscripted, but in March 1916 he was called up for infantry training and then attached to an air force unit where he repaired damaged aircraft, painting their numbers and insignia. Though Klee had few opportunities for artistic work, he managed to do some painting on aircraft canvas.

In 1918 he returned to Munich. The avant-garde circle in Munich had been dispersed; Macke and Franz Marc had been killed while Kandinsky had returned to Russia. Klee stayed in Munich alone and continued to develop his ideas.

In 1920, a major Klee retrospective was held in Munich. Later that year, he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus at Weimar, where his friend W. Kandinsky would also become a faculty member in 1922.
Klee taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar from 1921 to 1926 and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. During his tenure, he was in close contact with other Bauhaus masters, such as Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. In 1924, the Blaue Vier (the Blue Four), consisting of Lyonel Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, was founded. Among his notable exhibitions of this period were his first in the United States in 1924.

Klee’s teaching included lecturing with demonstrations on form and color in relation to nature and also supervising bookbinding, metal and weaving workshops. Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, one of his essays on art theory, was published in Bauhaus in 1925. In the essay Klee defined and analyzed the primary visual elements and the ways in which they could be applied.
His first major show was in Paris the following year, and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1930.

In April 1931, two years before the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, Klee resigned to take up a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. He held the post for only two years before the Nazi campaign against modern artists brought about his dismissal. In 1933, Klee left Germany to return to Bern, Switzerland.

Klee has been variously associated with Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Abstraction, but his pictures are difficult to classify. He generally interpreted new art trends in his own way. He worked in many different media: oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, often combined them into one work. He used canvas, burlap, muslin, linen, gauze, cardboard, metal foils, fabric, wallpaper, and newsprint.
His works often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. He often used geometric forms as well as letters, numbers, and arrows, and combined them with figures of animals and people. Some works were completely abstract.

In the summer of 1935 the symptoms of his fatal illness (later diagnosed as sclerodermia) appeared. But he remained productive to the end. Klee died on June 29, 1940, in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.

Most art critics highly appreciate Klee’s contribution to the development of art in the 20th century. He was extremely inventive, bravely experimented with styles and materials, and the visual effects they gave, ignoring rules and fashion.

A museum dedicated to Paul Klee was built in Bern, Switzerland. Zentrum Paul Klee houses a collection of about 4,000 works by Paul Klee.

Another substantial collection of Klee’s works are displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.