Paul Klee

The National Socialist Party took power in Germany in January 1933, with Adolf Hitler as its leader. This also had an effect on Paul Klee’s life. His apartment in Dessau was searched in March. It was not until May that he moved definitively to Düsseldorf, where he had been working since 1931. In April he was dismissed without notice from his post at the city’s Academy of Arts. In December he moved to Bern with his wife Lily.

That year he produced a sequence of over 200 pencil drawings, which have been deemed to be an account of the "National Socialist revolution". But Klee did not identify the drawings as a sequence with a title or explicitly relate them to National Socialism. In fact they contain themes of education or training, militarism, suppression and persecution, via anti-Semitism to art and sexuality.

Klee does not represent particular events or portray particular individuals. Instead he attempts to capture the atmosphere that accompanied the political and social changes in Germany. It is not a thematic unity that holds the sequence together, but a stylistic one. The drawings are executed in expressive pencil strokes. They are perhaps not beautiful in the classical sense, but they are all the more expressive for that. Here the line is no longer a way of depicting a motif, but is itself a means of expression. It even seems as if, with his wild, childish lines, Klee is attempting to escape the aesthetic ideas of National Socialism.