Klee's awakening to color occurred on a trip to Tunis in 1914, a year after he had met Delaunay and been made aware of new theories of color use. Thereafter his whimsical and fantastic images were rendered with a luminous and subtle color sense. Characteristic of his witty, often grotesque, pieces are The Twittering Machine (1922, Mus. of Modern Art, New York City) and Fish Magic (1925, Phila. Mus. of Art). Other works reveal the strong, rhythmic patterns of a relentless terror, as in Revolutions of the Viaducts (1937, Hamburg). World famous by 1929, Klee taught at the Bauhaus (1922-31) and at the Düsseldorf academy (1931-33) until the Nazis, who judged his work degenerate, forced him to resign. In his series of Pedagogical Sketchbooks (tr. 1944) and lecture notes entitled The Thinking Eye (tr. 1961), Klee sought to define his intuitive approach to artistic creation. His last ten years were spent in Switzerland, and nearly 2,600 of his works are in the Klee Foundation, Bern.
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The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.
Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press