Paul Klee

Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee near Berne in 1879. After a lengthy vacillation between music and painting, Klee opted to study art in Munich. In 1901 he spent several months travelling in Italy with the sculptor Hermann Haller, and experienced a creative crisis. Klee spent the next few years in his parental home in Berne. In 1906 he married Lily Stumpf and moved with her to Munich. A year later their only son Felix was born. He met Kubin in 1910. From 1911 he cultivated friendships with the artists of the "The Blue Rider" group and took part in their exhibitions. In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet. In 1916 Klee was called up for military service, but was not sent to the front. In 1921 Klee took up a teaching position at the Bauhaus. He was part of the exhibition society "The Blue Four" with Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej Jawelensky. Klee left the Bauhaus in 1931 and took a professorship at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. After the seizure of power by the National Socialists he was dismissed without notice from his teaching post in Düsseldorf and moved to Berne at the end of September 1933. Two years later he developed the first signs of an illness that turned out to be scleroderma. Klee died in Locarno-Muralto in 1940.