paul klee

Nov 16, 2011

The Nazis hated Paul Klee. That was enough to pique my children’s interest in this artist. Anything or anyone hated by the Nazis is elevated to hero-status pretty quickly around here.

Paul Klee was a musician…a violinist to be exact (another huge interest-piquing bit of info since we have two violinists and two wanna-be violinists)…but he decided to study art instead. He went to Germany to study, but after the Nazis came to power he had to flee because they decreed that modern art was degenerate or corrupt and banned it. He was forced to return to Switzerland.

Klee loved modern art because he felt art should be about ideas, beliefs, and feelings, not about people, places, or things. He wanted his art to evoke emotion and filled it with symbols and writing fragments to suggest a more magical world.

Here is one of his works, The Golden Fish

He wanted all the focus to be on the golden fish in the middle, but the entire painting is filled with sea life. He used watercolors and oil paints. We used oil pastels and watercolors as we don’t own any oil paints.

Here is Keziah’s

and Fisher’s

For those of you out there wishing to learn what it is like to be an artist, I loved My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev, both by Chaim Potok. These were the first books that helped me see into the soul of an artist and what it can be like to need so desperately to create something that you are not you without the art. I am certainly not that kind of artist, but I have a daughter who is very much an artist and these books helped me understand the artists behind the art and some of the struggles and triumphs they experience.