“I cannot be grasped in the here and now,” the artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) once wrote. Not any old declaration, Klee so fully wanted this phrase—part promise, part repudiation of blame to both fans and detractors alike—to stand as a testament to his work, that he penned the line for his tombstone.
But of all of the most beloved artists from the turn of the century, there is something that makes Klee a little harder to pin down. So understanding why he warrants the honor of being today’s Google Doodle might need a little explaining. Klee never settled for one style.
Born to a German father who was a music teacher and a Swiss mother who was a trained singer in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, his parents pushed him toward a career as a musician. But Klee, even then wanting to forge his own path, chose art. The lessons he took from music, however, would remain important to Klee’s practice as he explored (and later taught, as an instructor at the Bauhaus) the idea of what musical concepts like rhythm could mean when applied to art.
It was these thoughts that endeared Klee to the artists Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke, whom he met in 1911 and soon joined ranks with, under the name Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Riders). But unlike his compatriots searching for a characteristic look through which to express their ideas, Klee spent his career jumping between visual styles. As such, the sum of his work ended up being not only less easy to define than many artists of his time, but also, as the artist himself noted, perhaps a little harder to understand Here are six representative works that elucidate some of the ideas he worked with, and the ways he tried to give them physical form.
Paul Klee, Flower Myth, 1918. From his expressionist period, this watercolor painted over a chalk ground on paper exemplifies the artist’s exploration with symbols. Here we see the sun, moon and his first use of birds rendered in what he fully embraced as a childish way, representing his awe of natural wonders from the earth and up to the stars.