Paul Klee (1879-1940) Swiss/German, Original Lithograph in Colors. Signed in plate bottom right. 

Overall: 23 1/4 X 36 in. 

Sight: 17 X 29 1/2 in. 

#2715 . 

Paul Klee was born in December 1879 in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland into a family of musicians, and became proficient at the violin. Drawn to art, he studied from 1898 to 1901 in Munich, first with Heinrich Knirr, then at the Kunstakademie under Franz von Stuck. Primitive art, surrealism, cubism, and children’s art all blended into his small-scale and delicate paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Upon completing his schooling he traveled to Italy to study Early Christian and Byzantine art. After his marriage in 1906 to the pianist Lili Stumpf, Klee settled in Munich, Germany, then an important center for avant-garde art. His friendship with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an expressionist group that contributed much to the development of abstract art. In 1920 he was appointed to the faculty of the Bauhaus, teaching in Weimar from 1921 to 1926 and in Dessau from 1926 to 1931. After exhibitions in New York and Paris from 1924 to 1930, he went to Dusseldorf to teach at the Akademie in 1931, shortly before the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. Forced by the Nazis to leave Germany in 1933, Klee settled in Bern. Seventeen of his works were included in the Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art," Entartete Kunst, in 1937. Major Klee exhibitions took place in Bern and Basel in 1935 and in Zurich in 1940. He died in June 1940, in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.