Paul Klee - The Beginnings of a Smile - Google Art Project

The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic directions such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its many international incarnations, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. In the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts. The most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s. After World War Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. The Bauhaus style, however, also known as the International Style, was marked by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. Bauhaus is characterized by simplified forms, rationality, and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was also a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.