Paul Klee - Artist Biography

PosterCheckOut.com carries a wide range of poster prints from the artist Paul Klee. An enigmatic artist whose style is somewhat difficult to categorize, Klee worked with a lush and expressive palette and a style that was rather advanced for his time. Among the prints that we carry on our website are "Golden Fish," "Senecio" and "Rose Garden."

Paul Klee: a Biography
Born in Switzerland in 1879, Paul Klee moved to Germany as a young man, where he enrolled at the Munich Academy to study art. At the time, Munich was a hot spot for avant-garde art, and Klee was able to meet and collaborate with other artists there, such as Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Klee joined the Blaue Reiter during his time in Munich, which was an artists' collective that sought to focus on transcendent and spiritual themes.

Klee was an instructor at the Bauhaus in the years after World War I, after which he taught at the Dusseldorf Academy. The Nazis, who criticized his work as "degenerate art," fired Klee from the Academy in 1931. They also later shut down the Bauhaus. Because of his troubles with the Nazis, Klee was forced to move around Germany quite a bit. He eventually wound up settling in Switzerland, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

The defining characteristic of Klee's paintings was his use of symbols. Instead of painting landscapes or people using traditional methods, Klee tried to reduce things to recognizable symbols that both distilled and expanded upon their true essence. He was fascinated with children and the art that they produced, and he was particularly inspired by their habit of reducing the world to signs and symbols. Klee's use of symbols to describe the real world became attractive to the Surrealists, and his work became quite important to the evolution of that movement.