In the fall of 1920 Paul Klee received a telegram from Walter Gropius inviting him to teach at the Bauhaus. Klee's decision to join the avantgarde school of German design then based in Weimar, Germany, was to have profound implications for his art. By the first of the new year Klee was installed at the school, working in a studio spacious enough to house his twelve easels.
During the years Klee taught at the Bauhaus he developed the theoretical foundations of his art. In his role as pedagogue he faced new challenges. "When I came to be a teacher," he later wrote, "I had to account explicitly for what I had been used to doing unconsciously." As one critic observed, Klee's "theory of art is the outgrowth of the practice, not the other way around."
Klee, whose official title was Forrnmeister or master of forms, used the cube as a prop while lecturing on the nature of space. "What he wanted to give his students," one observer wrote, "were basic clarities and points of departure." Klee's detached manner earned him the nickname "the Buddha of the Bauhaus."
In Pedagogical Sketch Book, the second of the Bauhaus manuals edited by Gropius and designed by Moholy-Nagy, Klee developed a primer for his students. Based on his extensive 1921 lecture notes on visual form, Klee divided his artistic sketchbook, first published in 1925, into sections on the line and dimensions and symbols of movement such as the spinning top, the pendulum and the arrow. The artist's world, it has been pointed out, was not static; it was in the process of becoming. In Klee's vernacular, an active line moves freely. It is "a walk for a walk's sake, without aim." Klee's textbook and his friend Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926, became Bauhaus classics.
Felix Klee, the painter's son, was only fourteen when he started studying at the Bauhaus. He knew his father's lectures were not for nonbelievers. "He had only a small circle of enthusiastic followers," Felix Klee wrote, "...those who could understand him. Not everyone could." Paul Klee put it best when he said, "I am not graspable in this world."
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