I first came across Paul Klee while I was studying art at school in London. I was 15 and read a book featuring lots of painters from the early 20th century, Kandinsky and Franz Marc among them. It was Klee I kept coming back to, though. His paintings struck me as almost childlike, like someone discovering their surroundings for the first time. Perhaps that was the way I was feeling, too.
There are so many emotions in his work. Sometimes it’s dreamlike or idyllic, sometimes full of anger and passion. I love its seeming simplicity, the way he manages to make the complicated clear and straightforward. And then there’s his mastery of colour.
Klee was born in Switzerland in 1879 and studied in Munich, where be became involved with a group of expressionists. Kandinsky was a good friend, and he was influenced by the cubist work of Picasso and Braque. But it was when he travelled to Tunisia in 1914 that everything changed. The paintings suddenly heat up. He starts using reds, oranges, greens, placing them alongside these intense north African blues. Some of the paintings he made in Egypt almost burn. And they get more and more abstract.
As he got older, life became harder. In 1933, the Nazis declared his work “degenerate” and he was forced to return to Switzerland. His colours disintegrate, like his health was disintegrating. The paintings become a lot more abrasive: bolder lines, darker shapes.