BEAT ARTIST: Klee's
Kettledrummer
(1940) is an enigmatic figure who seems to pound a mournful dirge
The 1930s were not kind to paul Klee. When the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, the celebrated Bauhaus painter was denounced as a "typical Galician Jew" no matter that he was neither. His deceptively childlike yet technically sophisticated work was branded "degenerate," "subversive" and "insane." Within months he was suspended from his teaching job at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, and he reluctantly left Germany for Bern, where he had grown up. Then, in 1936, he was diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disease which causes internal paralysis including the constriction of blood vessels and hardening...
