Paul Klee at the Thyssen: The Master of Line Scores and Color Symbols
Those who come to discover Paul Klee at Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum should know that he was one of the most singular and enigmatic figures in modern European art. Born to musicians —a father who taught music and a mother who was a singer— he drew Bach and Mozart from his beloved old Testore violin for more than thirty years. It was as though the very bars, rhythms and polyphonies slipped from his bow and took root in his surfaces, transforming themselves into flowing lines, luminous colours and subtle plays of light and shadow.
Introduction to Paul Klee. From the Light of Tunis to Nile Rhythms
Klee travelled more than Miró and Feininger. In Italy he searched for essential laws linking art and nature through shared structures, falling in love with Renaissance architecture as he recognised in it compositional principles close to his own. In Paris, Robert Delaunay’s series of Windows revealed to him how autonomous forms could lead to a stunning abstract art, which he would later reinterpret in his own compositions. On his legendary journey to Tunisia he embraced a new compositional style, pictorial architecture, captivated by the geometric simplicity of the buildings of Kairouan. On the island of Porquerolles, in the French Mediterranean, he brought sailing boats into his paintings, setting angular forms against curves in order to suggest the gentle rocking of the vessels. During his travels in Egypt he sensed the rhythms along the banks of the Nile and translated them into pictorial staves across his paintings. When the terrible illness scleroderma stiffened his fingers, the indomitable artist refused to yield; he went on painting with thick, dark lines. Paul Klee died in his retreat at Muralto (Switzerland), one might say, with a paintbrush still in his hand.
Paul Klee “At a Glance”
Paul Klee (Münchenbuchsee, 1879 – Muralto, 1940) trained in Munich under Franz von Stuck and Heinrich Knirr. In his early artistic years he stood out above all as a draughtsman. For a time he believed his true calling would be illustration and graphic design. It was not until his journey to Tunisia in 1914 that colour assumed a decisive role in his work, an experience he himself described as a revelation.
Klee was associated with the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter alongside Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Macke and others. From 1920 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, where he carried out intense pedagogical and theoretical work. Between 1931 and 1933 he held a post at the Düsseldorf Academy, and went into exile in Switzerland after the Nazis added his name to the long list of so‑called “degenerate artists”.
Paul Klee, through my eyes
To me, Paul Klee as a person is the artist with the intense gaze, absorbed in his “pictorial scores”, the same human being who could wear white trousers without a trace of pretension, perfectly “pinned down” by Gabriele Münter in her portrait Man in the Armchair. I admire Klee the artist, who recovered an innocent way of looking in order to see things “as if for the first time”, anticipating Surrealism, practising a Cubism of his own, foreshadowing Dada, inventing musical hieroglyphs and giving Expressionism a deeply personal turn in works that, moreover, always emerged from his own intuitive inner logic.
I am moved by the yellowed photographs of Paul with Lily and Felix, radiant with love and emotional stability. Lily Klee (Stumpf), a concert pianist, Paul’s wife and lifelong companion. Lily Klee, playing the background music to her husband’s pictorial scores. And Felix, the cat‑loving son who dreamt of becoming what his father never was: a graphic designer.
I grieve for Klee’s suffering and revere his persistence in fighting, through his art, against an incurable and paralysing illness. He sought relief in Muralto, in the beautiful canton of Ticino, where he was visited by his faithful friend, the painter Louis Moilliet, and exchanged letters with the writer Hermann Hesse, who lived nearby in Montagnola. Hesse bore witness that Klee’s moving lines and colours helped him endure his own bitter hours, and Klee, when he read Hesse’s woven tales of life in Ticino, found comfort for his isolation and for the stubborn obstacles the Swiss authorities put in the way of granting him citizenship. The works of Hesse and, above all, of Klee have taught me to look at the beauty of nature also “as if for the first time”. And for all this, and a little more, I have written this blog about Paul Klee. I can only hope that those who read it will understand him and love him as much as I do.
Historical context and Klee’s time
Klee lived through a period marked by profound cultural upheaval:
- The early twentieth‑century artistic avant‑gardes.
- The First World War and its spiritual aftermath.
- The rise of Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism and Abstraction
- The development of new sciences (psychology, physics) that reshaped how reality was perceived.
- The Nazi persecution of modern art.
Klee’s work was a complex response to these changes: he absorbed the various pictorial currents and the experiences gathered on his travels, and transmuted them into small, intimate paintings —deeply introspective, intellectual and poetic— aimed at exploring the invisible side of the human condition.
Paul Klee and Music: From the Testore Violin to Fugues in Color
Paul Klee was a musician who chose painting without ever giving up his old Testore violin. From his youth, music was his beloved, and it became even more so after he met Lily and began playing Bach and Mozart duets with her.
Inevitably, Klee’s painting became steeped in musical space. During his years teaching at the Bauhaus, he composed canvases structured like fugues and explained visual rhythm by translating bars of Bach into graphic patterns on squared paper, so that his students could “see the music and hear the painting”. It is hardly surprising that, in time, many composers returned the gesture:
· Sándor Veress: Homenaje a Paul Klee
· Francis Poulenc: El trabajo de la pintura, Nº 5 Paul Kle
· Eugenio Toussaint: 5 miniaturas de Paul Klee
· Takashi Kako: Rich Harbor
· Adolf Gullberg: Pictures by Paul Klee; nº 2 Tänzerin
Technique and artistic conception
· Instead of “copying the world”, Paul Klee’s art brought to light what the world concealed. His paintings were tiny laboratories in which he tested how a line, a stain or a sign could reveal realities that went beyond appearances.
· Immersed in this “creative laboratory”, Klee combined watercolour, oil, ink, tempera, oil transfer, sgraffito and collage on a wide range of supports. He laid one glaze over another and altered the density of his colours so that the painted surfaces began to resemble sculpted skins.
· Many of his works grew out of an initial stroke that was allowed to be altered by accidental discoveries. Klee followed the movement of the line without forcing a predetermined path, and over these underlying structures he scattered signs, arrows, small number‑sequences or fragments of writing, so that calculation and play could coexist, ironically, within the same image.
Klee’s very particular way of applying his techniques means that his painting never fits neatly into the labels of Cubism, Surrealism or Expressionism, even though it often flies over all of them. His work inhabits an intermediate space, hard to classify, where each painting feels like a fresh experiment, always probing nuances that lie well beyond the obvious.
We have come back to where we began: Klee at the Thyssen. Before us lies the description of an impossible little city, built from architectural blocks, musical bars and memories of childhood games, a city that only truly reveals itself when we set it spinning in our mind with the tip of a finger.
Analysis of “Revolving House” (1921) Lyrical Constructivism at the Thyssen-Bornemisza
· In 1921 Paul Klee is teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He enjoys emotional stability (thanks to Lily) and a period of intense creative happiness. In his teaching notebooks he systematises his ideas about line, colour and form, crystallising them into cities, signs and imaginary architectures.
· The political climate of the Weimar Republic is complex. Inflation is eroding wages. Cultural openings and experiments with new ways of living are in the air, while a latent, aggressive nationalism is already pushing to the surface. Klee proposes a reconstruction from scratch through an innocent city, drawn with the deliberate simplicity of a child’s picture.
· Lyrical Constructivism / Bauhaus: Klee’s Revolving House is built from simple volumes with sharp outlines. It is a carousel waiting for the viewer’s hand to set it spinning.
In Revolving House, Klee sets up a small wooden city on the table: simple blocks, crisp outlines and, at the centre, a secret point that invites the hand to give it a gentle push. This is not a “correct” view of a street, but a self‑contained world laid out in a circle, with house‑petals or game pieces turning around a silent core. It is enough to imagine that tiny gesture —touching the heart of the painting— for everything to begin spinning in our minds, as when a child sets a toy carousel in motion.
If you look quietly, the scene works almost like a Mozart rondo: the same essential little house, almost childlike, returns again and again, but never in exactly the same way, shifting orientation, height and visual weight. The single viewpoint dissolves; in its place, Klee offers a small exercise in mental rotation in which the visitor decides where to stand, how long the spin lasts and what tempo to impose on this city that, rather than being pinned to the paper, lets itself be carried along by the rhythm of whoever contemplates it.
Analysis of Omega 5 (1927): Pictorial Polyphony and the Shadow of Exile
· In 1927 Paul Klee is at the height of his Dessau Bauhaus years. He is thinking intensely about how to apply the idea of “polyphony” to painting: how to let several themes, rhythms and ways of reading coexist within a single work. Omega 5 is one of the clearest examples of this research.
· On the surface, the Weimar Republic is enjoying its “golden years”. Berlin and Dessau are hotspots of modernity and excess, yet beneath this glitter lies a cancer of tensions that will spread through society by the decade’s end. Klee withdraws into his inner discipline as a creator to shield himself from the latent threat of nationalism, though he is far from blind to the increasing ideological pressures bearing down on the Bauhaus. Omega 5 becomes a kind of stage set in which those forces are evoked and abstracted.
· Economic recovery after hyperinflation: the Dawes Plan stabilises the currency, consumption grows and Germany attracts the attention of the international art market. Klee’s works travel to exhibitions in the United States, yet he carries on working on intimate creations in which rigour and fantasy are held together in a fragile balance.
In Omega 5 (Imitation Objects), Klee switches off the bright playfulness of Revolving House and shuts us inside a resonant chamber. Against a ground of deep reds and surfaces worked like ancient tapestries, rounded, sliced forms float —half onions, half small sonorous bronzes— recalling bells, drums or percussion bowls. The carefully drawn inner rings suggest centrifugal vibrations expanding outward, like ripples on water.
The alternative title, Trap, offers a telling clue: this painting is a mesh of signs, hieroglyphs, lines and rhythmic grids into which the eye enters and loses itself, caught by shapes that force it to drift among pulses of colour. There is no story to unravel; only notes and rhythms on which to float. The dark, almost violet red turns the surface into a sounding box: the viewer has the sensation of looking into the body of an instrument or up into the vault of an acoustic cave, where every form vibrates like the strike of a drumstick or a distant echo.
Coda. Miró, Feininger and Klee: A Trilogy of Modern Art at the Thyssen Museum
Here our trilogy on Miró, Feininger and Klee at Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum almost comes to an end, for it closes with a shared perspective on three very different artists who nonetheless responded to similar historical shocks with pictorial languages that were intimately and uniquely their own.
A. The essential idea of art
Joan Miró wanted to return painting to a state of almost primitive purity: to “murder” conventional representation and replace it with instantaneous creative impulses, drawn from the mind of a child or of a young peasant gazing up at the stars.
Lyonel Feininger moved towards a crystalline utopia: his towns and figures merge into spiritual buildings in which architecture and characters fuse into colour and shafts of light.
Paul Klee, for his part, turned painting into a laboratory of the invisible: he is not interested in reproducing what we already see, but in revealing the hidden forces, rhythms and tensions that hold reality together beneath the surface.
B. Politics and the wounds of their time
For Miró, politics provokes visceral convulsions: confronted with Fascism and the Spanish Civil War, his figures grow menacing, his colours tighten, his line hardens, and the apparent naivety that once suffused his work turns into a series of painted howls.
Feininger, after being branded by the Nazis as an exponent of “degenerate art”, goes into exile in an unrecognisable New York and slips into a kind of voluntary anonymity, even as his painting clings to the dream of rebuilding Gothic cathedrals as spiritual skyscrapers.
Klee, likewise stigmatised as a degenerate artist, withdraws to Switzerland. His art sinks deeper into a reflective, intimate mysticism that seeks refuge from Nazi barbarism in enigmatic creations, now simple, now symbolic.
C. Idea and technique: three ways of binding them together
Miró respects technique and experiments with humble supports and unexpected materials, but —like Klee— ultimately subjects it to instinct, to controlled chance, to that “magic spark” that erupts unannounced amid the creative process.
Feininger, trained in the discipline of drawing and caricature, seeks a constructive balance: rigorous craftsmanship is the foundation on which the spiritual idea can rise.
Klee turns technique into a kind of poetic pedagogy: he theorizes about color, point and line not to lock painting into formulas, but to free the imagination through a personal language that is both solid and lucid.
D. Group or solitary bird?
Miró moves among the Surrealists, signs manifestos, shares cafés and magazines, but his true territory is the studio at Mont-roig and a stubborn independence from political upheavals.
Feininger embodies the communal master: at the Bauhaus his presence brings together teaching, collective work and an idea of art built on sharing.
Klee also teaches at the Bauhaus yet withdraws quietly into symbolic universes. He is a solitary figure in the midst of the group. His colleagues nickname him “the Buddha”.
E. The musical bond
In Miró, music appears as an almost shamanic rhythm: his signs and stains move like ritual dances, bound to the earth, to day and night, to the breathing of nature.
In Feininger, music takes the form of architectural polyphony: his churches and cities resemble Bach fugues translated into planes of colour; interlaced voices and transparencies rising in orderly fashion towards the sky.
In Klee, the bond with music is explicit: a violinist from an early age, he paints scores of lines and colours where superimposed notes mimic fugues or floating rondos.
It is time to take our leave of the paintings by Miró, Feininger and Klee at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum: three masters who transformed quavers, verses and rhythmic figures into symbols and atmospheres painted in ways that are intimate, unique and unrepeatable.
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