Paul Klee
A new centre has opened in Bern to celebrate Paul Klee (1879-1940), one of the greats in the pantheon of modern art.
Klee described himself as "intangible" - a perhaps fitting epithet for a man who was seen at times as both bourgeois and bohemian, and who went down in history as a Swiss artist, even though he was German.
Klee was born and died in Switzerland, but his formative years were spent in Germany, where he became famous as an artist of the avantgarde.
swissinfo takes a journey through the life, times and works of Paul Klee.
Paul Klee the man
A man made in Switzerland
The artist Paul Klee may have died a German but the man had "made in Switzerland" stamped all over him.
The Bernese artist who was not Swiss
Paul Klee died before becoming a Swiss citizen, but it's probably thanks to the delay that his estate remained in Bern and could later be transferred to the new centre.
Family ties: Klee's grandson speaks
Klee’s only grandson, Alexander, was born in Bulgaria in 1940, the year of his grandfather’s death.
Paul Klee the artist
Klee and the Bauhaus
When Klee arrived at the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany in 1921 to take up a teaching post as "Meister", he was already a famous avant-garde artist.
A rational romantic
Paul Klee defined his style as "cold Romanticism" in the catalogue of his first major solo exhibition in 1914.
The physical and emotional impact of colour
Paul Klee’s interest in colour was two-sided: empirical and emotional.
