He Wanted To Be A Musician

To begin the list of interesting facts about Paul Klee, we want to mention his dream of becoming a musician when he was young. Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Switzerland. His parents were musicians, both of them. Klee was raised in a creative family, like many well-known great artists. But unlike most of his colleagues, Klee's parents were musically inclined rather than being professionals in painting, drawing, or sculpture. Particularly, his mother was a vocalist, while his father taught music.

At first, Klee did as his parents had done. He picked up a passion for classical music when he was a small child, and some of his favorite pieces were by Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He started playing the violin when he was 7 years old, and by the time he was in his 20s, he had spent time as a violinist for the Bern Symphony Orchestra.

Despite being on a promising path, Klee decided to pursue art instead of music around the turn of the century, though music would continue to be a significant inspiration for the majority of his career. These paintings that explicitly allude to music reflect his continuing commitment to his initial craft. For instance, Klee reimagines a musical score as an arrangement of visual symbols like vegetation, a crescent moon, and stars in In the Style of Bach (1919). However, when Klee started looking into color theory, he found that there was a deeper link between the two fields than only the structural similarities.

When he was a teenager, Klee decided against pursuing music as a career because he "didn't find the concept of going in for music creatively particularly interesting in view of the collapse in the history of musical achievement." Instead, he turned to the visual arts.