Portrait of Paul Klee.
— Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz
EXCERPT
It seems unworthy of me to undertake anything against such crude attacks. For even if it were true that I am a Jew and came from Galicia that would not affect my values as a person or my achievement by an iota.
—Paul Klee, letter to his wife, April 6, 1933
WORKS BURNED
Monographs about Klee
SUMMARY
From 1921, German-Swiss painter and graphic artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) taught at the Bauhaus—the school of art, architecture, and design founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. In 1931, shortly before the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure, Klee moved to Düsseldorf to teach at the Düsseldorf Academy. The Nazis deemed his art "degenerate," and monographs about Klee were banished and burned.
Seventeen of Klee's paintings were later displayed at the Nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937. Klee himself had left Germany in 1933 and settled in Bern, Switzerland.
