Paul Klee
Took a line for a walk, taught at the Bauhaus, and made nearly ten thousand works.
Paul Klee was born near Bern in 1879 to a German father and Swiss mother, trained as a musician as much as a painter, and found his colour on a trip to Tunisia in 1914. He exhibited with the Blaue Reiter, taught at the Bauhaus for a decade alongside Kandinsky, and produced a body of nearly ten thousand works, most of them small, in watercolour, oil transfer, gouache and pen on paper mounted on card. Dismissed by the Nazis in 1933 and included in Degenerate Art, he returned to Switzerland, developed scleroderma, and produced the enormous late series of thick black-line works before his death in 1940.
Klee kept a meticulous handwritten oeuvre catalogue from 1911 onwards, numbering and titling nearly everything, and this is the single most useful document in the field; the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern holds the archive and the catalogue raisonne. He usually mounted his works on card and inscribed the title and number on the mount, so the original mount is part of the work and must never be discarded. Almost everything is on paper and is severely light-sensitive. Forgeries and misattributions are common.
If you own a work by Paul Klee
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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