Paul Klee’s work were sources of inspiration and awe for a whole range of American

artists and painters alike. Above all, Klee’s openness and versatility offered the artists a
different way to express themselves on canvas, away from the classic artistic language of
cubism and surrealism offered by their contemporaries. Klee became the ultimate anti-
dogmatic artist that created a new kind of pictorial language based on the primal,
unconscious, childlike mentality. He inspiring American artists to look beyond the
conventional towards the genesis of art.

Klee inspired a host of famed American abstractionists, from Jackson Pollock and Adolph
Gottlieb to Norman Lewis and Robert Motherwell.

Klee teach students at the Black Mountain College more than ten years . Some students
discussed Klee’s work and his process-based approach to art .Some of them would
eventually become America’s foremost abstractionists.One of those young artists was
Kenneth Noland. He first learned of Klee at Black Mountain through reproductions of
Klee’s work and writings. There, Noland developed a style of geometric abstraction he
dubbed “Mondrian-Bauhaus,” .

Klee enumerated his new approach to painting in a revolutionary essay called “Creative
Confession” (1920). Its thesis rang loud and clear in one now-famous sentence: “Art does
not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” The essay caught the eye of Walter
Gropius, an artist who’d recently opened a radical art school in Weimar, Germany.
Dubbed Bauhaus, its teaching philosophy brought together art and craft, and emphasized
the importance of both form and function.

By the 1940s, Klee’s writings—including “Creative Confession” and “Pedagogical

Sketchbook”—also became more available to American artists, thanks to their translation
into English for the first time. These were passed around schools such as Black Mountain
and Columbia University, where the art historian Meyer Schapiro taught young painters
like Motherwell using Klee’s model.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-paul-klee-influenced-generation-
american-artists-pollock-motherwell
https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-802-spring2018/2018/05/06/inspiration-
and-influence-in-the-age-of-paul-klee/
Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop
towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them,
musical notes and chords that would visually "sing" together.
Kandinsky's curious gift of colour-hearing, which he successfully
translated onto canvas as "visual music", to use the term coined by the
art critic Roger Fry in 1912, gave the world another way of appreciating
art that would be inherited by many more poets, abstract artists and
psychedelic rockers throughout the rest of the disharmonic 20th
century.

Before World War I, American modernists were aware of Wassily

Kandinsky’s abstractions and indeed, his influence seems to have made
itself apparent pervasively, and seems to have been subsumed as an
integral part of the essence of the structure of Abstract Expressionist
philosophy.

Kandinsky’s influences were to have an impact on the New York School

in both a general way, and also in a more direct sense, with artists like
Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock being
strong proponents of the former’s work.

Hofmann, whose own theories on aesthetic meaning and art would

seemingly parallel Kandinsky’s in relation to the need for an “inner
vision” in art.Using nature as a metaphoric model they directed the
viewer to more interiorized, personal landscapes and remembrances;
they attempted, respectively, to infuse their works with a meaning that
would extend beyond the physicality of paint and surface organization.