art, more than two thousand of which he created following the appearance of symptoms that would later be diagnosed as scleroderma. His desire to continually simplify his technique would serve him in his later years, as the symptoms of scleroderma began to limit his movement. orn in 1 79 near ern, Switzerland, into a family of musicians, Klee first studied to become a violinist. He initially drew only in black and white, but a trip to Tunisia in 1914 awakened his sense of color and light. Klee also used elements of music, letters, numbers, and hieroglyphiclike symbols in his work, and was intrigued by the art of the mentally ill. In 1906, he married the pianist Lili Stumpf, and the couple moved to Munich. In 1916, he joined the erman army, painting camouflage on planes. Klee lectured at the auhaus from 1921 to 1931 and at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf until the Nazis dismissed him in 1933, when he refused to pledge allegiance to the party, and the estapo searched his home. He then fled Nazi ermany for Switzerland. The Nazis declared Klee’s art “degenerate,” as they did most Modern art, including the works of Pablo Picasso, oan Mir , and Salvador Dali, which they deemed counter to Nazi ideals. The Nazis seized more than a hundred of Klee’s works from public collections. Their so-called “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937 in Munich, meant to ridicule art they considered “un- erman,” included 17 works by Klee. After fleeing to Switzerland, Klee had his first exhibition in London and was visited by wellknown artists, including Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky. His star rose in the nited States, where he earned kudos from artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as from art dealers, collectors, and museum directors. In 1936, the first symptoms of Klee’s scleroderma heart irregularities, fatigue, weakness, chronic pneumonia, hardening of the skin, and gastrointestinal problems became pronounced. Although he produced only 25 works of art that year, he rebounded as the disease stabilized. He also found new ways to create, using different styles and materials, creating 264 works the following year and more than twelve hundred pieces in 1939. Klee’s scleroderma was likely diffuse systemic sclerosis, the most serious form of the disease. (There were no treatments for it at that time, and the condition went undiagnosed until after his death.) His art provided refuge and a way to express his struggles with the illness. In his book, “Paul Klee and His Illness” (Karger, 2010), the author, Hans Suter, M.D., noted, “For Klee, drawing and painting were his personal form of meditation. It seems to me that this ability to sink into deep thought
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A line is a dot that went for a walk ...
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