Paul Klee the Playful Genius. A Journey Through the Life and Art of a Visionary!

Video Description

Please consider subscribing to this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/arthistoryschool?sub_confirmation=1 And supporting this channel on Patreon, https://patreon.com/paulpriestleyart many thanks! Learn about the life of artist Paul Klee in this Paul Klee biography. Paul Klee was born on the 18th of December 1879 in Muchenbuchsee, near Bern in Switzerland. Encouraged by his parents, he started violin classes at age seven and proved himself to be a very talented musician. He moved to Munich in 1898 to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. His first important works, a series of etchings, called ‘Inventions’ were undertaken between 1903–1905 after a visit to Italy. In June 1905 he visited Paris where he saw Impressionist paintings and the work of van Gogh, Cezanne and the Belgian artist, James Ensor. On 15th of September 1906, he married Lily Stumpf. Naturalistic painting didn’t interest him. His aim was for creativity and imagination to determine the outcome of the picture, inspired by the first layers of paint or marks applied to the canvas. Around 1911 he met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky. His friendship with Franz Marc proved crucial because it was Marc that showed Klee how far abstraction and a visionary approach to content could be taken. In 1914 he visited Tunisia with Louis Moilliet and August Macke and it was in Hammamet that Klee claimed in his diary that his breakthrough to painting in colour had occurred. ‘Colour and I are one.’ Hans Goltz organised a large retrospective exhibition of 362 Paul Klee paintings in his Munich gallery in May 1920. This was Klee’s breakthrough, but despite a guaranteed annual income, he felt it too risky to rely on just selling paintings. So, he accepted an offer to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. In 1925 Paul Klee’s pedagogical sketchbook, based on his visual form lectures, was published as a student Bauhaus manual. By the mid-1920s Klee’s reputation had spread far beyond Germany. In 1926 Paul Klee took part in the Surrealist’s first exhibition in Paris and in 1928 he visited Egypt. In March 1930 the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA presented an exhibition of his work, the institution’s first solo show by a living European artist. In 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Klee was denounced as a "Galician Jew" and a "cultural Bolshevik," and his work derided as "subversive" and "insane." In 1936 Paul Klee was diagnosed with progressive scleroderma, a rare autoimmune disease and for over almost a year was almost incapable of working. In April of 1937 17 paintings by Paul Klee were shown at the infamous exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich. The Nazi’s also confiscated over 100 of his works from public collections in Germany. Paul Klee’s late paintings and drawings are strongly influenced by the harsh distortions of Pablo Picasso’s work of the 1920s and ’30s. Paul Klee died in hospital in Locarno, Switzerland 29th of June 1940. In 2005 Zentrum Paul Klee Museum opened as an independent institution and research centre containing around 40% of Paul Klee’s entire output. Interested in DRAWING? Check out my drawing channel: https://youtube.com/paulpriestleyart Would you like me to critique your drawing? Sign up here:- https:patreon.com/paulpriestleyart Want this video in your own language? Check out my video to see how: https://youtu.be/ZnoxutAvyaI For drawing and painting art tutorials designed for beginners - visit my website: - https://paulpriestleyart.com Follow our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PaulPriestleyArtVideos/ Follow our Twitter page: https://twitter.com/PriestleyonArt PATREON: I'd like to thank the following patrons whose support in the making of this video is much appreciated: Dee Ann Havely, Deirdre Feely, Denise Berg, Ivan Gilbert Rappaport, Mary Stewart, Nicolae Opris, S. Ryckman, Tatiana Lostorto, Tina Valentine, Visnja Zeljeznjak, Linda Frazier, Marnie Coutts, Stein Harald Os, Emily Liss, William Scott Griffiths, Dinny Hinds, Patrick Lefebvre, Philip Levene, Alena Sidorkina, Jeff Smith, Ashok Kanagasundram, Olivia McGoldrick, Rahman Yii, Sarah Hirsch, Kevin Coburn, Stacy Schweigler, Jennifer Ranghelli, Deborah Smith, Emily, Carol Tenson, Min A, Colin Parrish, Larry Specht, David Cornwell, Kerri Southern, Yvonne Tsang, Lena Allen, Hüma, Michelle Kunkel, Barbara Perl, Kathy Anderson and Susan Valliant Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing.