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Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Munchenbuchsee, near Berne, Switzerland. His father, named Hans Klee, was a music teacher. Young Klee started lessons in music and art at the age of 7. He studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. There his teacher was Franz von Stuck, who also taught Wassily Kandinsky. After graduation in 1901, Klee traveled to Italy and then back to Switzerland. He lived in Bern until 1906, then settled in Munich. There he joined Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other avant-garde artists, and became associated with the art movement Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). In Munich Klee married Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf; they had on son.
Klee was impressed by the quality of the light in Mediterranian countries. After his first visits to Italy, he also visited Tunisia in 1914, and Egypt in 1928. These visits greatly influenced Klee's painting making color central to his art. He developed his own style in a loose association with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee used a combination of oil paint with watercolor and ink in his works. He sometimes included music notation, hieroglyphs, and other ornamental elements in his compositions. From 1921-1931 Klee maintained close association with Wassily Kandinsky and had a teaching position at Bauhaus. Later he taught at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. Klee and other avant-garde artists were denounced by the Nazis as "degenerate art" in 1933. His home in Dessau was searched by police and by Nazi paratroopers and Klee was fired from teaching position. He fled to Switzerland the same year. Soon Klee started loosing his eyesight and was later diagnosed with scleroderma. He died on June 29, 1940, in Muralto-Locarno, Switzerland.
Paul Klee was one of the most lyrical and whimsical artists of his time. He produced more than eight thousand works of art. Half of his heritage was saved from being liquidated under the Washington Convention, over four thousand works now belong to Paul Klee Centre in Berne, Switzerland. A painting by Paul Klee was recently sold for $7,500,000 at an auction.
