Paul Klee for children: why the "adult" artist who painted like a child still fascinates the little ones

Paul Klee is the artist par excellence who speaks to children. This is precisely his power: his art, far from being simple, plays and communicates with the spontaneity of children and the freshness of the colors they use in their drawings.

At the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, children not only visit but also curate exhibitions and reproduce his works.

The center collaborates with the Creaviva association, which organizes many activities for children: every day, the museum's art educators accompany children on the journey to creating a personal and unique work of art. Interactive exhibitions and numerous workshops for both adults and children are also organized.

Paul Klee and his childlike aesthetics: the return to expressive purity

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century, who developed a unique pictorial language that revolutionized the concept of modern art. Among the most distinctive features of his artistic production, there is what is commonly referred to as "childhood aesthetics," a stylistic choice that is anything but casual and rooted in profound theoretical reflection and careful observation of the world of childhood.

Klee's aesthetic development found one of its main sources in the direct observation of the drawings of his son Felix, born in 1907. Klee did not simply gaze with paternal tenderness at the child's creations, but studied them with the attentive eye of an artist and art theorist. In these childish drawings, he recognized something that adult art had lost: spontaneity, expressive immediacy, and freedom from academic conventions.

Felix unwittingly became the subject of a years-long artistic study. Klee collected his son's drawings, analyzed them, and drew inspiration from them for his own works. This systematic observation allowed him to understand how children approached the representation of the world directly, unmediated by preconceived patterns.

The art of children

Children, according to the artist, possess an innate ability to grasp the essence of things and translate it into visual form without the filters of adult rationality.

This belief fits perfectly into the cultural climate of the early twentieth century, when many avant-garde artists were seeking new forms of expression that departed from traditional canons. The influence of children's art in Klee's work is evident through several distinctive stylistic features. His lines often appear deliberately naive and spontaneous, with lines that seem drawn with the immediacy of a child's drawing. Colors are used with a freedom reminiscent of a child's approach, where expressiveness prevails over plausibility.

The composition of his works often reflects the logic of a child's world, where proportions follow the emotional significance of the elements rather than the rules of traditional perspective. Objects can appear floating in space, and figures can be depicted simultaneously in profile and full-frontal, creating a narrative dimension reminiscent of children's visual stories.

Some examples are: Senecio, a portrait of a human face reduced to simple geometric shapes and flat colors, which resembles a child's drawn mask, yet possesses great expressive power; Cat and Bird, which depicts a cat seen frontally, with large eyes, a simple head, and a small bird on its forehead, depicted in bright colors; and Red Balloon, which depicts an abstract landscape dominated by a red balloon. The work has a sense of lightness and simplicity, as if conceived from a child's perspective.

Klee's influence on contemporary art movements

Klee's approach to children's aesthetics had a significant impact on the artistic movements of his time and beyond. Klee's appreciation of children's art paved the way for a broader reconsideration of the concept of creativity, influencing not only the visual arts but also the psychology of art and art pedagogy. His belief that children possessed a form of creative wisdom lost to adults anticipated many modern theories of cognitive and artistic development.

Today, nearly a century later, Klee's example continues to be a source of inspiration for artists and educators who believe in the value of spontaneous creativity and the importance of preserving the spark of wonder that characterizes a child's view of the world. His works remind us that art, in its purest form, is a universal language that transcends cultural and generational barriers, finding its expressive power in the simplicity and authenticity of human emotion.