Klee Family Correspondence Online
The project aims to use the technically and structurally advanced work and publication tools of the Digital Humanities produce a text-critical and art-historically annotated edition of the extensive exchange of letters between Lily Klee and her son Felix Klee.
Lily Klee, née Stumpf (1876-1946), first met now famous painter of classical modernity Paul Klee (1879-1940) at a musical soirée in Munich on 8 December 1899. To this day, very little is known about the couple’s demeanour in their private, professional or social environment.
Lily Klee’s significance for her husband has largely been underestimated or even outright ignored in scholarly literature. For a long time, research on Klee and especially the publication of his collected letters has focussed on men. Only in recent years, gender-specific reappraisals have increasingly gained attention.
Nowadays we are more aware of the limits of the artistic individual „Klee“ and look further into the life and work of the modern artist’s wife.
Essential answers can be found in the unpublished correspondence between Lily Klee and her son, Felix Klee (1907-1990). Approximately 2300 letters have survived and more than 1000 of them have been transcribed so far. The entire collection is being edited and researched as part of a larger project on the letters and photographies of Lily Klee.
The Klee Estate Administration Paul Klee (Hinterkappelen) under the direction of Stefan Frey and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern act as cooperating partners.
The Heidelberg University Library is in charge of the digital provision of the letters and uses the workflow program DWork for the web presentation. The transcription and editing work is carried out in XML format according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
