Paul Klee

Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Munchenbuchsee, near Bern, Switzerland. Though he lived most of his life in Switzerland and is often called Swiss, he held German citizenship by descent through his father and never obtained Swiss citizenship in his lifetime; his application was approved only days after his death. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1898, studying under Heinrich Knirr and then the leading Munich painter Franz von Stuck, and traveled to Italy in 1901 and 1902 to study Renaissance masters.

He exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1912 and developed a deeply personal language of line, sign, and color that moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration. From 1921 to 1931 he taught at the Bauhaus, first in Weimar and then in Dessau, where his lectures on form and design became foundational documents of modern art pedagogy. In 1931 he moved to the Dusseldorf Academy as a professor.

In 1933 the Nazis dismissed him from his post and branded his work degenerate; he commemorated the moment in a self-portrait titled Struck from the List. He emigrated to Bern late that year, and works such as his Twittering Machine, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, were confiscated from German museums in the 1937 degenerate-art purge. Klee continued to work prolifically through illness in his final years and died on 29 June 1940 in Muralto, in the Swiss canton of Ticino.

Critics and art historians treat Klee as a singular synthesizer who bridged abstraction and figuration and joined rigorous formal theory to a childlike, sign-based economy of means. Tate frames him as a pioneering modernist and one of the most inventive talents of the Bauhaus, valued as much for his teaching and theory as for his paintings. Britannica ranks his theoretical notebooks so highly that it compares their importance for modern art to that of Leonardo's treatise on painting for the Renaissance. The art historian T. J. Clark wrote a substantial critical reassessment of Klee on the occasion of the 2013 Tate Modern retrospective in the London Review of Books, and the MoMA curator Carolyn Lanchner authored the standard study of his reception in America, where MoMA's early championing established his reputation. The recurring theme in the literature is that Klee made the act of drawing and the logic of pictorial signs into subjects in their own right, a stance captured in his own statement that art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.

Klee's market is shaped by scale and documentation rather than scarcity. His auction high is Tanzerin (Dancer), a 1932 oil on canvas, which sold for GBP 4,185,250, about USD 6.8 million, at Christie's in London in June 2011, against an estimate of GBP 2 million to GBP 3 million. Because his catalogued output exceeds 9,000 works and spans oils, watercolors, drawings, and prints across a wide range of sizes and price points, the market is unusually deep and active for a modernist of his stature, with strong demand concentrated on the major oils of his Bauhaus and late periods and a far larger volume of works on paper trading well below the headline figures.

Klee offers something rare among canonical modernists: a complete and authoritative record. The nine-volume catalogue raisonne, published by the Paul Klee Foundation and Thames & Hudson between 1998 and 2004, documents more than 9,000 works and is built on the meticulous handwritten oeuvre catalogue Klee kept from 1911 until his death, which makes provenance and attribution unusually traceable. The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, opened in 2005 in a Renzo Piano building and holding roughly 40 percent of his output, is the central steward of the estate and archive. For a collector, that documentation lowers attribution risk relative to many artists of the period, while the breadth of the market means values vary widely by medium, period, and quality, so the headline oils and the far larger body of works on paper should be read as distinct segments rather than a single price line.