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Today is the birthday of Swiss-born German artist, Paul Klee. I discovered him when I was 18 and moved from home and began my life as an adult. I shared a five room apartment on Nob Hill with two of my high school buddies (link below) just up the block from the notorious bordello owned by Sally Stanford; however, by that time Sally had gone straight and was the mayor of Sausalito, California.
Back
to the apartment! As each of us had our own bedroom each painted his a
different color. John painted his vermilion (also known as Chinese Red), I think my other roommate, also named John, painted his kelly green while I painted mine black and had a couple of overhead spots, one on a wonderful print of Klee's Senecio and the other on a print by Kandinsky, Comets. Pretty adult, right!
Wassily Kandinsky ~ Comets
Senecio has always been one of my favorite art images, although it was briefly replaced during that same period by a chalk copy of a Modigliani work.
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, on December 18, 1879. He was the second child of German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Klee
(1849–1940) and Swiss singer Ida Marie Klee, born Frick (1855–1921).
His work was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. On meeting Kandinsky, Klee recorded, "I came to feel a deep trust in
him. He is somebody, and has an exceptionally beautiful and lucid
mind."
Klee's artistic breakthrough came in 1914 when he briefly visited Tunisia with August Macke and Louis Moilliet
and was impressed by the quality of the light there. He wrote, "Color
has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I
know that it has hold of me forever... Color and I are one. I am a
painter."
Unlike his taste for adventurous modern experiment in painting, Klee was attracted to older traditions of music;
he appreciated neither composers of the late 19th century, such as Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler, nor contemporary music. Bach and Mozart were for him the greatest composers.
Klee's work has influenced composers such as Miklós Rózsa ~ Concerto for String Orchestra, Argentinian Roberto García Morillo in 1943, with Tres pinturas de Paul Klee. Others include the American composer David Diamond in 1958, with the four-part Opus Welt von Paul Klee (World of Paul Klee). Gunther Schuller composed Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee in the years 1959/60, consisting of Antique Harmonies, Abstract Trio, Little Blue Devil, Twittering Machine, Arab Village, An Eerie Moment, and Pastorale. There have been many, many others (link below).
Architect Renzo Piano constructed the Zentrum Paul Klee
in June 2005. Located in Bern, the museum exhibits about 150 (of 4000
Klee works overall) in a six-month rotation, as it is impossible to show
all of his works at once. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a comprehensive Klee collection.
In 1935, 2 years after moving to Switzerland, Klee developed scleroderma,
an autoimmune disease resulting in hardening of connective tissue. In
his last months he created 50 drawings of angels. One of his last
paintings, Death and Fire, features a skull in the center with the German word for death, "Tod", appearing in the face.
Paul Klee ~ Death and Fire -1940
Paul Klee died in Muralto,
Locarno, Switzerland, on June 29, 1940, without having obtained Swiss
citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was
considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the
Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days
after his death.
Viewfinder links:
Net links:
YouTube links:
Paul Klee ~ A collection of 277 works
Miklós Rózsa ~ Concerto for String Orchestra
Gunther Schuller ~ Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee
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