In January and February 1933, Lily Klee was with Galka Scheyer in a sanatorium in the town of Braunlage, in the Harz Mountains. On March 17, shortly after she returned to Dessau, she and Klee were at home when Nazi Party storm troopers arrived. The police supervised the storm troopers as they rifled through Klee’s art and papers and the family’s possessions, searching everything, although what they hoped to find was unclear.
On April 1, the Klees moved to Dusseldorf. Three weeks later, Klee was suspended from the Dusseldorf Art Academy as part of a general putsch against modernism that also took the form of Gestapo investigations at the Berlin Bauhaus. The Nazis believed that most new art and architecture was counter to the interests of the German state. Klee spent two weeks packing up his studio, and the Klees moved back to Bern.
In Bern, the Klees first lived in two furnished rooms. Then, in June 1934, they found an apartment on the second floor of a three-family house in the suburbs. It was small and simple, but sufficient, with a music room, a room that could serve as a studio for Klee, a bedroom, a kitchen in an alcove—not nearly as nice as what they had had at the Bauhaus, but adequate for Klee to prepare his favorite recipes—and a bathroom. He and Lily were content that they had hot water and central heating.
This apartment had a view of the Alps. Lily Klee wrote Galka Scheyer that they were “like 2 happy children. … Somehow living with limitations makes one feel more fortunate.”248 However, having become a German citizen when he moved to Munich as a young man, Klee was unable to gain Swiss citizenship.
TO HIS PARENTS’ DISMAY, Felix Klee remained in Germany. He and Phroska were beginning to enjoy successful careers onstage, and Felix did not want to give them up, even if in order to succeed in the German theater he had to denounce his father.
The Third Reich considered Klee’s work a travesty. “The Nazis sequestered 102 Klees in German museums” in 1937, and included 17 Klees in the famous “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in Munich.249 In the catalogue, the exhibition organizers compared Klee’s paintings “to work produced by schizophrenic inpatients” and declared it to be evidence of “confusion of a psychological instable character.”250 Felix still did not leave Germany or protest the official verdict.
IN 1934, KLEE HAD CONTRACTED MEASLES. As a result, he developed scleroderma, a disease of the mucous membrane, which slowly began to kill him. It did not, however, prevent him from producing an extraordinary body of late work, with the themes of war and death now replacing birth and the splendors of nature as the dominant subject matter.
On hearing the news that Klee had died in July 1940, less than a year after his sixtieth birthday, his old Bauhaus colleague Oskar Schlemmer wrote in his diary, “What a visual and spiritual combination he made to the world of the artist. And what wisdom!”251 Schlemmer then pondered the question of what this would mean for the fate of abstract art in general—especially given how inhospitable much of Europe was becoming to modernism. Schlemmer wondered if, with Klee gone, the movement would have leaders and find refuge.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER KLEE’S DEATH, the American magazine Time, which represented mainstream thought in the United States, published an article, “Fish of the Heart,” in which the artist’s work was characterized as “little childlike scrawls” and “artistic babbling and cooing.” The unsigned critique opined: “In this world of screwball art the most consistently screwy was Paul Klee’s. An absolute individualist, whose work resembled nobody else’s, Klee painted ‘animals of the soul, birds of the intellect, fish of the heart, plants of the dream.’ ”252
The article informed its readers that “Walter Gropius invited Klee to teach drawing at his famous Bauhaus technical art school in Weimar.” Collectors began acquiring “his infantile drawings” and “U.S. modern art connoisseurs bought his ectoplasmic scratchings at $750 a canvas.”253 This was a direct reference to the canvases Edward Warburg had bought, although it erroneously reduced their prices by $50 apiece.
The article in Time was in effect a report on the paintings in two shows in private New York galleries—Willard and Buchholz—that had been organized following Klee’s death. The magazine described the work and its maker. “All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before. It was also posthumous in another sense. To the red-cheeked, goose-stepping Nazis who after 1933 scrubbed individualism from Germany’s art galleries, Paul Klee has been the most degenerate of degenerate artists. Some day history will have to decide whether Hitler was right—about Artist Klee.”254