The Friday Letter

Dear readers,

Welcome back to the Letter from the Publisher, and if this is your first time here, welcome. Whether you have been with us since our earliest weeks or you just subscribed this week, thank you for making a place for this letter in your Friday.

This October, the letter turns to artists in exile. Over the next five Fridays, we will follow five artists whose careers were reshaped by leaving, looking at what each one lost, what each one found, and how displacement entered the work itself. This week's letter features Paul Klee.

Paul Klee was born in December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, a village outside Bern, to a German father and a Swiss mother. His father, Hans Klee, taught music; his mother, Ida, had trained as a singer, and the boy grew up as gifted on the violin as he was with a pencil, torn for years between the two. Swiss law of the time passed citizenship through the father, so the child raised in Bern was legally German, a detail that seemed purely administrative for most of his life and would return to define its final years.

In 1898 he left for Munich to study art, and the city became his home for more than two decades. He married the pianist Lily Stumpf in 1906, kept house and raised their son while she supported the family with piano lessons, and slowly found his footing among the artists around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, exhibiting with the Blue Rider circle in 1912. The decisive turn came in April 1914, on a short trip to Tunisia with the painters August Macke and Louis Moilliet. Overwhelmed by the North African light, Klee wrote in his diary that color had taken possession of him and that he and color were now one. He came home a painter.

After serving in the German army during the First World War, Klee joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1921, first in Weimar and then in Dessau, where he taught for a decade and lived beside Kandinsky in a pair of the school's masters' houses.

His teaching notes, published as the Pedagogical Sketchbook in 1925, treated line, rhythm, and color as forces that could be studied with the rigor of music, and his small, witty, endlessly inventive paintings made him one of the most admired artists in Germany. In 1931 he left the Bauhaus for a professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy, at the height of his reputation.

Within two years, that reputation became a liability. After the Nazis took power in January 1933, Klee's house in Dessau was searched, he was attacked in the press, and in April he was suspended from his post in Düsseldorf. Late that year, he and Lily left Germany for Bern, the city of his childhood, where he now arrived as a foreigner in his own hometown. In 1937, the regime confiscated more than one hundred of his works from German museums, and several were hung in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, presented to the public as evidence of cultural decay.

Exile in Bern was quiet and isolating. The family lived in a modest apartment, his German income disappeared, and the Swiss art world kept a cautious distance from a painter the Nazis had condemned. In 1935, Klee fell seriously ill with a disease later identified as scleroderma, which gradually hardened his skin and internal organs, and for months he could barely work. His output collapsed to a fraction of its usual pace, and friends feared his career was over.

What followed is one of the most remarkable late flowerings in modern art. As his body weakened, Klee's production surged, and in 1939 alone he cataloged more than 1,200 works. His line grew heavier and blunter, often laid down in thick black bars that read like fragments of writing or scaffolding, and his subjects turned toward fear, loss, and transformation. He drew dozens of angels in those years, awkward and tender figures caught halfway between the human and the divine, and in Death and Fire (1940), a pale, skull-like face sinks into a field of glowing red. Klee seemed to approach exile and illness as conditions to be studied, much as he had once studied color under the Tunisian sun.

Paul Klee, Death and Fire, 1940 via Wikipedia/Public Domain

Through all of it, the question of nationality remained unresolved. Klee applied for Swiss citizenship, and the process dragged on through the late 1930s as officials weighed the application of a man the German press had branded degenerate. He died on June 29, 1940, in a clinic in Muralto near Locarno, before the authorities completed their decision. The artist who spent his childhood in Bern and painted his final, most searching works there died, on paper, a German citizen.

Today his art lives largely where he spent those last years. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, opened in 2005 in a rolling building designed by Renzo Piano, holds around four thousand of his works, the largest collection of his art anywhere in the world. It is a fitting home for an artist whose exile carried him back to his beginnings, and whose hardest years produced some of the most profound work of his life.

Thank you for reading,

Rebecca Publisher,

ArtRKL

The Friday Letter

By Creatives, About Creatives, For Creatives