He Served In Military During WW1
When World War I started, Klee felt aloof from it at first, as he humorously noted, "This war has long been in me. Because of this, internally, I have no concern about it." On March 5, 1916, Klee was enlisted as a Landsturmsoldat (a soldier in Prussia or Imperial Germany's reserve troops). He started to feel the effects of the combat deaths of his pals Franz Marc and August Macke. He drew various pen and ink lithographs on war themes as a way to express his grief, including Death for the Idea (1915). He was assigned as a soldier behind the front once his military training program, which had started on March 11th, 1916, was complete.
On August 20, Klee relocated to Oberschleissheim, where he performed skilled manual labor, such as repairing aircraft camouflage, and accompanied aircraft transporters. He was transferred to the Royal Bavarian Flying School in Gersthofen on January 17, 1917, where he worked as a clerk for the treasurer until the end of the war (54 years later, it became the USASA Field Station Augsburg). This enabled him to continue painting while staying in a modest room apart from the barracks.
Throughout the entire war, he kept painting and was able to participate in a number of exhibitions. By 1917, Klee was considered the greatest of the new German artists and his works were selling briskly. His Ab ovo (1917) is notable in particular for its intricate craftsmanship. It uses watercolor on paper and gauze with a chalk background, creating a complex texture of triangular, round, and crescent shapes. Warning of the Ships (1918), a colored drawing with symbolic motifs on a background of muted hue, demonstrates his range of experimentation by fusing color and line.
