More Than a Famous Painter
Paul Klee is one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century, and that fame can make his Bauhaus role difficult to see clearly. The temptation is to treat his time at the school as a biographical episode — a stretch of years between more important periods of painting — or to assume that his appointment was primarily decorative: a famous artist lending prestige to a young institution. Neither reading holds up against the record.
Klee taught at the Bauhaus for eleven years, from his appointment in December 1920 to his resignation on April 1, 1931. During that time he delivered compulsory form theory courses, directed three successive workshops, contributed color and design instruction to the weaving program, taught life drawing and free painting, and produced approximately 3,900 pages of pedagogical notes. This is not the profile of a visiting celebrity. It is the profile of someone who took teaching seriously as a discipline in its own right and used the Bauhaus as a sustained laboratory for ideas about how abstraction works.
Formlehre
Klee began teaching on May 13, 1921, and by November of that year he had assumed responsibility for the compulsory Formlehre — the form theory component of the Vorkurs, initially developed under Johannes Itten. His lectures, recorded in his 1921–22 manuscript Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre (Contributions to a Pictorial Theory of Form), laid out an approach to abstraction that was fundamentally different from what a design student might encounter in a conventional curriculum.
Where other teachers might begin with elements — “here is a point, here is a line, here is what you can do with them” — Klee began with processes. A point is not just a thing; it is something that moved and stopped. A line is not just a mark; it is a point that kept moving. A plane is a line that expanded. Form, in Klee’s teaching, was always the result of a process of generation. He treated abstraction as something dynamic — something that grew, branched, oscillated, and changed — rather than as a static arrangement of geometric elements.
This approach drew heavily on his study of natural forms. Plants, crystals, water patterns, anatomical structures — Klee observed them not for their appearance but for the processes that produced them. His teaching asked students to think about growth, rhythm, balance, and polyphony (a term he borrowed from music to describe how multiple formal elements could operate simultaneously without canceling each other out). The goal was not to imitate nature but to understand the generative principles that underlay it and apply those principles to composition.
Workshops and the Sketchbook
Klee’s workshop assignments shifted over the years. He led the bookbinding workshop in 1921, the metal workshop in 1922, and the glass-painting workshop from 1922 or 1923 through 1925. After the school moved to Dessau, he continued design-theory lectures and contributed color and planimetric instruction to the weaving workshop from 1927 to 1930, where his students included Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl. He also taught life drawing and free painting from 1927 to 1930 and offered a fourth-semester formal course from 1927 to 1929.
The workshop roles mattered because they kept Klee’s theoretical teaching connected to specific material practices. Form theory was not an abstraction delivered in a lecture hall; it was tested against the constraints of glass, metal, and thread. Students in the weaving workshop, for instance, applied Klee’s color orders and planimetric structures to textile designs that had to function as physical objects — woven, not merely drawn.
In 1925, Klee published the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook) as Bauhaus Book No. 2. The book condensed his Weimar lectures into a compact visual argument about the genesis of form through point, line, plane, and motion. It was widely distributed and became one of the most recognizable Bauhaus publications. But the Sketchbook was a distillation, not the full picture. The full teaching notes — the Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre, running to approximately 3,900 pages and now held at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern — represent one of the most extensive surviving records of any teacher’s pedagogy from the period.
Klee and Kandinsky
Klee and Wassily Kandinsky are often grouped together as the Bauhaus’s two great painter-teachers, and they did overlap substantially. Kandinsky arrived in 1922, a year after Klee, and from 1927 the two co-led free painting classes. But their pedagogical approaches were distinct in ways that mattered for students.
Kandinsky’s teaching was systematic and elemental. He worked with basic geometric forms and primary colors, assigning fixed correspondences — yellow to triangle, red to square, blue to circle — and analyzing the psychological effects of points, lines, and planes as discrete components. His 1926 publication Point and Line to Plane laid out this system with deliberate rigor.
Klee’s approach was more organic, more process-driven, and less interested in fixed correspondences. Where Kandinsky asked students to analyze elements, Klee asked them to trace how forms came into being. The two approaches were complementary rather than competing, and having both available to students gave the Bauhaus a richer and more varied engagement with abstraction than either teacher could have provided alone.
The distinction was not merely stylistic. It reflected different ideas about what abstraction was for. Kandinsky treated it as a language with analyzable units. Klee treated it as a way of thinking about growth, change, and the relationship between structure and life. Both were rigorous; neither was decorative.
Departure
Klee resigned on April 1, 1931, citing overload. He had been teaching demanding courses across multiple departments for a decade, and the institution was changing around him in ways that reflected broader political pressures. His departure, along with Gunta Stölzl’s in the same year, marked the end of the Bauhaus’s most productive period for workshop-based pedagogy.
What Klee left behind — in the form of notes, diagrams, lectures, and student exercises — amounts to one of the most complete records of Bauhaus teaching in existence. His manuscripts document not just what he taught but how he thought about the relationship between art, form, and the natural world. They are among the most important primary sources for understanding what the Bauhaus actually did in its classrooms, as opposed to what its manifestos said it intended to do.