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Ernst Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in a small village near Bern, the capital of Switzerland. His father, the son of an organist and from the same region of Germany as Bach, had intended to be a singer, but ended up a schoolmaster instead. Frustrated by not doing what he wanted, Hans Klee was notably edgy and sarcastic, which took a continuous toll on his son since he lived almost to the end of Paul’s own life. Paul’s mother, Ida Frick, a Swiss from Basel, had ancestors from southern France and, according to rumors, from North Africa; she was trained as a musician in the conservatory in Stuttgart, but never worked.

A few months following their son’s birth, the family moved to Bern. Paul was an imaginative little boy, attracted by the bizarre; he would run to his mother “when the evil spirits that I had drawn (three to four years) suddenly acquired real presence.” He also told his mother “that little devils had peeked in through the window.”⁷ Paul had an uncle who owned a restaurant, where the marble tabletops seemed full of grotesque faces and the veining of the stone assumed the forms of contorted figures, and he was so mesmerized that he made drawings of this lively world. At age three, he had a dream in which he saw what he believed to be the sexual organs of the family’s maid, which consisted of four infantile penises arranged like a cow’s udder; he never forgot the image.

It was normal at the time for little boys to wear skirts, but this was one little boy who was particularly eager that they look just right. Klee would remember, “I developed very early an aesthetic sensibility; while I was still wearing skirts I was made to put on underwear that was too long for me, so that even I could see the grey flannel with the wavy red trimmings. When the doorbell rang I hid to keep the visitor from seeing me in this state (two or three years).” Subsequently, he “was sorry I was not a girl myself so I could wear ravishing lace-trimmed panties (three to four years).”⁸ Paul liked playing with his older sister’s dolls at that same age.

He was even closer to his doting maternal grandmother, Anna Frick, than to his mother. Frau Frick gave him a box of brightly hued chalks, and he made lively, playful drawings of stick figures and animals, which, while typical of children’s art, were remarkably controlled and articulate. Paul gave his grandmother most of these drawings, and she encouraged him to make art however he wanted. She also drew, and together they would pore over the luminous, commercially produced religious prints that she considered great art. Paul marveled at the intensity of these reproductions.

Frau Frick’s death devastated him. He subsequently wrote, “After my grandmother’s death when I was five years old, the artist in me was orphaned.”⁹

Mathilde Klee, the artist’s sister, remembered: “My brother was left handed, incidentally; except for his writing he did everything (including painting and drawing) with his left hand. One of our aunts thought ‘this left-hand nonsense ought to be knocked out of him.’ My grandmother flared up: ‘Absolutely not! The child will use the hand that he feels he can use better.’”¹⁰ His grandmother was his protector as well as his inspiration; she was also the source of a physical and emotional comfort he later described in his childhood recollections: “She used a particularly soft kind of toilet-paper on me, so-called silk paper!”¹¹

THE CHILD WHO REGARDED the loss of his grandmother as his artistic orphanhood reacted to death in his own way. He was already aware of being different because he did not believe in God, while “other little boys were always saying, parrot like, that God was constantly watching us.” When another child’s grandmother died in their barrack-like apartment house, and the other boys in the building said that “she was now an angel, I wasn’t the least convinced.” He was equally matter-of-fact after Anna Frick died and he and other family members went to view her body in the hospital. Although he was not allowed to go close, Paul was aware that the corpse bore “no resemblance” to the woman he had adored. He learned “that the dead could terrify us,” but he shed no tears, believing that crying was “reserved for adults.”¹²

In grade school, Paul made imaginary advertisements for the school newspaper, showing things for sale, and signed them “Luap Elk”—his name spelled backward and shortened, with the “Ernst” dropped. He filled sketchbooks with vivid imagery that betrayed rare dexterity, and knew even then that he wanted to be a painter. But he was almost as obsessed with playing music as with drawing. His mother had had him start to learn violin at age seven. At ten he went with her to a performance of Il Trovatore, and the next year he joined the Bern Musical Orchestra.

After attending a ballet performance at age eleven or twelve, Klee was inspired to make some “pornographic drawings … a woman with a belly full of children;” another in which “a rather plump elf” bends down to pick up a strawberry and reveals his bottom as “the deep valley between swelling hills;” and one of a woman in an obscenely low-cut dress. Klee was “scared to death” when his mother found them and scolded him for being immoral. It was a time of setbacks; after he met a nine-year-old girl, “a delicate beauty” named Helene, from Neuchâtel, and pulled her violently toward him and began kissing her, she fought him off and told him, “You’re bad.”¹³

FOR MOST PEOPLE, adolescence puts the brakes on the disinhibition of childhood. Yet Klee never—either in his teenage years or later on—thought to conceal what was childlike, or possibly mad, in his character; he simply expressed his fervor in his art. A pencil drawing he made when he was seventeen reveals how overcome he was by trees on a riverbank. It was as if Klee lived inside nature, and the viewer joins the artist in being subsumed by a dense profusion of branches and leaves. The grass along the river’s edge is thick and high, its lushness intensified by its reflection in the water.

We feel Klee’s immense tenderness toward his subject; he draws like someone seduced. Still an adolescent, he rendered foliage with the emotional fervor with which certain nineteenth-century writers describe young love and evoke the torrents of springtime and of seasonal renewal. Even when he was the most influential teacher at the Bauhaus, Klee would not be so much a modernist or a theorist of any sort as a romantic and a naturalist.

Trees would be a recurring theme for the rest of the artist’s life. He would draw gardens and forests, sometimes painting leaves abstractly with broad brushstrokes, on other occasions evoking branches by using a ruler to make schematic patterns of thin lines. The fealty to the riches of the cosmos that vividly imprinted itself on his consciousness when he was a child would only grow stronger. The advanced students at the Bauhaus who worked with him in his studio were given, as their first task, an assignment to draw trees.