Author Description

Comprehensive in scope and elegant in design, Paul Klee: Bauhaus Master is a landmark publication resulting from several years of work in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, and based on a recent critical publication on Klee's "pedagogical legacy." The book contextualizes a selection of 137 works--including paintings, watercolors and drawings, made between 1899 and 1940--with nearly 100 handwritten notes selected from classes Klee gave at the Bauhaus, alongside an extensive array of archival objects and documents ranging from archival photographs to the artist's herbaria through to his reading, sketchbooks and publications. Demonstrating the unity of Klee's art and pedagogy--the unity of his hand and mind--Bauhaus Master presents an artist thinking with and through his materials and image-making practices, endlessly testing both. Paul Klee (1879-1940) was born in Switzerland and studied at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts. Klee participated in several exhibitions between 1911 and 1913, but the breakthrough in his career was a 1914 trip to Tunis with August Macke and Louis Moillet, after which he painted his first abstract work. From 1919 he was represented by influential dealer Hans Goltz. Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931; when the ascent of Nazism forced the closure of the Bauhaus, Klee emigrated to Switzerland. Although still working, he was in ill health until his death in 1940.