Paul Klee

Known for: poetic abstraction; Twittering Machine (1922)

Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931 while developing a personal pictorial language of signs, symbols, and notational marks that drew on children's drawing, music theory — he was also a trained violinist — and his travels in Tunisia, where the color and light transformed his approach to painting. He produced more than 9,000 works in his lifetime across watercolor, oil, and drawing, many of them small. His theoretical writings, collected in the Pedagogical Sketchbook and The Thinking Eye, remain central texts in art education.