The Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function.
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.
Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer.
Gunta Stölzl was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school's weaving workshop, where she created enormous change as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She was one of a small number of female teachers on the Bauhaus' staff and the first to hold the title of "Master".
Kaspar Zehnder is a Swiss conductor and flutist. He studied classical languages at the Lyceum in Bern and music at the University of the Arts Bern. His music teachers included Heidi Indermühle (flute), Ewald Körner (conducting), Agathe Rytz-Jaggi (piano) and Peter Streiff and Arthur Furer. He further took conducting master classes with Ralf Weikert, Werner-Andreas Albert and Horst Stein. He also studied chamber music and was a member of the Mozart European Academy, where his main mentor was Aurèle Nicolet.
Pedagogical Sketchbook is a book by Paul Klee. It is based on his extensive lectures on visual form at Bauhaus Staatliche Art School where he was a teacher in between 1921-1931. Originally handwritten – as a pile of working notes he used in his lectures – it was eventually edited by Walter Gropius, designed by László Moholy-Nagy and published in as a Bauhaus student manual under the original title: Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch. It was translated into English by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who also wrote an introduction for it.
The idea of founding a theory of painting after the model of music theory was suggested by Goethe in 1807 and gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of the 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee.
Twittering Machine is a 1922 watercolor and pen and ink oil transfer on paper by Swiss-German painter Paul Klee. Like other artworks by Klee, it blends biology and machinery, depicting a loosely sketched group of birds on a wire or branch connected to a hand-crank. Interpretations of the work vary widely: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a depiction of the helplessness of the artist, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical pursuits. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.
Catherine Gfeller is a Swiss artist. She currently lives and works in Paris and Southern France after having lived in New York from 1995 to 1999.
Gertrud Grunow was a German musician and educationalist who formulated theories on the relationships between sound, colour and movement and was a specialist in vocal pedagogy. She taught courses in the "theory of harmonisation" at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she was the school's first woman teacher and the only woman teacher during the school's Weimar years.
Death and Fire, known in German as Tod und Feuer, is a 1940 expressionist painting by Paul Klee.
Camel (in rhythmic landscape with trees) (German: Kamel (in rhythmischer baumlandschaft)) is a painting by Swiss artist Paul Klee, made in 1920, in the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Nina Zimmer is a German art historian who is director of the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Museum of Fine Arts Bern.
Limits of Reason is a 1927 painting by Paul Klee (1879-1940). It is in the permanent collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne—Pinakothek of modern art—in central Munich's Kunstareal.
Ad Parnassum is a pointillist painting by Swiss-born artist Paul Klee. The painting is currently in the Kunstmuseum Bern.
Lily Klee was a German piano teacher, wife of painter Paul Klee, and mother to theatrical director Felix Klee.
Cat and Bird is a painting by Swiss German painter Paul Klee, created in 1928. It was made when Klee was a teacher at the Bauhaus Dessau. The painting depicts the wide face of a stylized cat with a small bird perched on its forehead. It is held in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
