Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a Swiss painter and a German painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague , the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Expressionism turning into abstract art. I love Paul Klee's passion for color, as we live in a world that for millennia has engaged in color-shaming (racist people do that mostly), and that fail to appreciate the fact that we are one of the rare species on earth whose eyesight can absorb a larger spectrum of colors compared to other ones, or even compared to blind people. And it is important to celebrate colors, colors are in our minds, and we are color as he says, regardless of whether we are color blind or not and I believe that reflection of "I am color" comes into existence when he shifts his vision from selected colors, that is the height of German expressionism (warm colors) into the world of Abstractism, all colors take a windward and are just as meaningful and add to the warmth of colors, in fact colder colors such as the contrast between them, particularly black, yellow, red, white and blue are what fill the canvases and provide that sensation of abstraction, but also the game of shapes that inspire his paintings and marks the passage from Matisse's fauvism and Picasso's synthetic cubism onto "abstract linear cubism".
I got interested in this book viewing the documentary, "Paul Klee, The Silence of the Angel." A terrific film that referred numerous times to the journals. But when the library got the journals in for me, they turned out to be very dense, and I'm not interested enough in Klee to make a deep study of them. They might be an education and inspiration for any serious artist with an intellectual bent.