“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.”

~ Paul Klee #Botd 1879

Klee’s lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance.

Klee and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany.

“First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.”
~ Paul Klee

“The main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be, or at least become, an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.”
~ Paul Klee

Paul Klee, 1905: Aged Phoenix (Invention 9) / Greiser Phönix, etching

“The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.”

Paul Klee, 1905: 'Hero with Wings / Held mit Flügel', etching

“Looking back at the end of the year created a little more serious mood than before. To bring children in the world is no trifling matter!”
~ Paul Klee, 1908

Portrait of his young son Felix Klee, drawing in ink wash on paper

Paul Klee, 1911: 'Self-portrait', ink on paper

Paul Klee, 1912-13

Paul Klee, Tunisia, April 1914

“Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever.. .Color and I are one. I am a painter.”
~ Paul Klee, diary, 16 April 1014

photo of Paul Klee as soldier, 1916 World War 1. - quote of Klee, diary 1915: 'The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.'

Paul Klee, 1917: 'With the Rainbow', watercolor on paper on cardboard; - quote of Klee, 1919: '..I thought I had come into the clear in art when for the first time I was able to apply an abstract style to nature.'

Paul Klee, 1920: 'Lovers', gouache and graphite on paper mounted on black paper mounted on cardboard; Moma New York

Paul Klee, 1922: 'Begrüssung Greeting', watercolor, pen and ink on paper; - quote of Paul Klee, 1925:' The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?'

Paul Klee, 1923: 'Der Verliebte / The Lover', lithography on paper with red plate

Paul Klee, 1926: 'The Balloon', oil on black board; - quote of Paul Klee, mid-1920's: 'It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions'

Paul Klee, 1928: 'Purple, green, orange and white abstraction of a dog howling at the moon', oil-painting on canvas; Minneapolis Institute of Art Minnesota

Paul Klee, 1931: 'Angel-hat / Engelshut'

In 1933 Klee was singled out by a Nazi newspaper (and fired from his teacher job): 'Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher...He tells everyone he's a thoroughbred Arab, but he's a typical Galician Jew'

Paul Klee, 1938: 'Heroic Roses', oil-painting on stained canvas; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany

Paul Klee, 1939: 'Engel, übervoll / Angel, over-full', quote of curator Tobias Burg about the many Angels Klee made in his last two years, knowing that he was deathly ill: 'There are no bleak or discouraged works, but extremely smart and witty angels'

Paul Klee, 1940: 'Tod und Feuer / Death and Fire', oil-painting on paper; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland

"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk."
~ Paul Klee

"Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet."
~ Paul Klee

"One eye sees, the other feels."
~ Paul Klee

"Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view."
~ Paul Klee

"Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter."
~ Paul Klee

"From the root, the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Overwhelmed and activated by the force of the current, he conveys his vision into his work. ... And the beauty at the crown is not his own; it has merely passed through him."
~ Paul Klee

"I paint in order not to cry."
~ Paul Klee

"All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!"
~ Paul Klee

"There is no substitute for intuition."
~ Paul Klee

"To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke."

"It is a great difficulty and a great necessity to have to start with the smallest."

~ Paul Klee

"Everything vanishes around me, and works are born as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will."
~ Paul Klee

"The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen."

"Art makes something a lot more visible or audible."

~ Paul Klee

"Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin."
~ Paul Klee

The words on his tombstone, Klee's credo, placed there by his son Felix, say, "I cannot be grasped in the here and now, for my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, but still not close enough."

Klee died in Muralto, Switzerland, in 1940 without having obtained Swiss citizenship, despite his birth in that country. His art work was considered too revolutionary, even degenerate, by the Swiss authorities, but eventually they accepted his request six days after his death.

“I am God
So much of the divine
is heaped in me
that I cannot die.
My head burns to the point of bursting.
One of the worlds
hidden in it
wants to be born.
But now I must suffer
to bring it forth.”
~ The Diaries of Paul Klee