PAUL KLEESURREALIST PAINTER

KLEE’S PATH TO BECOMING AN ARTIST• Born in Switzerland in 1879. • Loved music and dreamed of becoming a musician. • Often drew with chalk and began to love art as well as music. • As a teenager, decided he enjoyed drawing more than playing the violin. • Went to school at the Munich Academy in Germany to study his art, but did

not think he was a very good painter and struggled at school. • Throughout his life, Klee met many great painters, including Wassily

Kandinsky, and each helped him improve a little.• Klee’s early works were colorless, mostly pen-and-ink drawings and etchings

(early 1900s). He thought that color was just decoration and not essential.

(From Artsmarts4Kids.com) (My Room, 1896)

• Klee visited Tunisia in 1914 and was deeply affected by the color and light there. His artistic style changed forever as he embraced color.

• Wrote in his diary that “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.”

• Most of his paintings were very small and used a lot of color.

• Klee’s style was a blend of surrealism, cubism, and expressionism – abstract paintings. (Red Balloon, 1922)

• He also loved the drawings of kids and tried to mix that energy and simplicity into his own work. (Castle and Sun)

(from ArtSmarts4Kids.com)

WHAT IS SURREALISM?• Movement in art and literature that began in the 1920s

• Surrealist works often show surprising or unexpected things.

• May feature an artist’s dreams or show things that could not possibly happen.

• Expression of the unconscious

CUBISM AND EXPRESSIONISM• Cubism: art movement in which objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstract form;

instead of showing objects from one viewpoint, the artist shows the subject from many viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. (Think Pablo Picasso) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism)

• Expressionism: modernist art movement that showed the world from a subjective perspective, “distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.” Artists tried to express meaning or emotional experience, rather than reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism)

Klee worked in many different media— oil paint, watercolor, ink, pastel, etching and others – often combining them into one work. (From Wikipedia)

KLEE PAINTED MANY GEOMETRIC GRID PAINTINGS

• During World War I, Klee was drafted as a soldier and painted camouflage on German planes.

• After the war, he taught at the Bauhaus School then at the Dusseldorf Academy.

• In the years leading up to World War II, he was targeted by the Nazis and had to leave his teaching job.

• When Klee died in 1940, he had painted nearly 9000 works.

(From ArtSmarts4Kids.com)

PAUL KLEE’S LATER YEARS

GAME: DID PAUL KLEE PAINT THIS PAINTING?

OUR PROJECT: CHALK PASTEL GEOMETRIC GRID PAINTINGS IN THE STYLE OF PAUL

KLEE• Now YOU get to make abstract geometric grid paintings like Paul Klee’s!

• What FEELING do you want to convey? • Happiness? Calm? Sadness?

• Location: Being at the beach, or out in the rain, or in the desert, or swimming in the ocean, or watching the sun rise?

• Choose 5 to 8 colors that will convey that FEELING (including different shades of the same color)

• Quickly draw your grid design• Use pencil to make grids of rectangles and squares that fill up the page

• Add some triangles inside your squares and rectangles if you want

• Add color• Think about balancing colors throughout your work and moving the colors around

• Write your name and title in the white border after removing masking tape