David Zwirner is pleased to present Psychic Improvisation, an exhibition of work by Paul Klee, on view at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. Organized in collaboration with Alain and Doris Klee, with additional support from the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, this is the gallery’s third solo exhibition of the revered modernist’s work, following 1939, at David Zwirner New York in 2019, and Late Klee, at David Zwirner London in 2020. While those exhibitions focused on Klee’s work from the middle to late 1930s, this presentation explores his singular use of color and line, offering a concise yet instructive overview of the artist’s practice from the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1947, after the death of Paul Klee’s widow, four prominent collectors in Bern established the Paul Klee Foundation, which was housed in the Kunstmuseum Bern until 2004. On the occasion of a large donation of works from the Klee Family, the foundation was absorbed into a new museum dedicated to the artist. In 2005, the Zentrum Paul Klee opened as an independent institution and research center with a building designed by Renzo Piano. Klee’s work is in the permanent collections of countless major museums around the world.
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Image: Paul Klee, ein Doppel-Schreier (A double screamer), 1939 (detail)
Paul Klee in seinem Atelier, Bauhaus Weimar, 1923. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Felix Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
Paul Klee in seinem Atelier, Bauhaus Weimar, 1923. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Felix Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
A pioneering modernist of unrivaled creative output, Paul Klee (1879–1940) counts among the truly defining artists of the twentieth century, exploring and expanding the terrain of avant-garde art through work that ranges from stunning colorist grids to evocative graphic productions.
He was associated with some of the most important art movements of the twentieth century, including expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, yet his practice remained highly individualistic and distinct; it was never encapsulated by the concerns of a movement or reducible to the modernist binary of abstraction and figuration.
Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, August 1929. Photo by Nina Kandinsky, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, August 1929. Photo by Nina Kandinsky, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
Left to right: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee on the roof of the Bauhaus in Weimar, December 1926. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
Left to right: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee on the roof of the Bauhaus in Weimar, December 1926. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
This exhibition features a range of key works that visualize the artist’s immense skill as a colorist and a draftsman. Several works from the early 1920s—around the time Klee began teaching as a “form master” at the newly founded Bauhaus—feature vibrantly colored grid-like fields whose appearances vacillate between landscape and pure abstraction.
“[Color] penetrates so deeply and so gently into me. I feel it and it gives me confidence in myself without effort. Color has got me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it.… Color and I are one.”
—Paul Klee in his diary
Klee’s Friedhof (Cemetery) (1920) pictured in his studio, second row from the top, second artwork from the left. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Paul Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
Klee’s Friedhof (Cemetery) (1920) pictured in his studio, second row from the top, second artwork from the left. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Paul Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
In these works, Klee breaks up the picture planes into cubist-style arrangements of geometric fragments and forms. Trees and crosses rendered in dark pigment appear as pictographic signs and contrast with the artist’s sensitive application of reds, greens, yellows, and blues, which delicately fill the quadrilinear and triangular forms that structure the compositions. White highlights further enhance the tonal range of the works and give the paintings an overall sense of light emanating from behind their surface—like stained glass.
Paul Klee, Wald-einsiedelei (Hermitage in the woods), 1921 (detail)
Paul Klee, Wald-einsiedelei (Hermitage in the woods), 1921 (detail)
“Indeed few living painters have been the object of so much speculation. For a work by Klee is scarcely subject to methods of criticism which follow ordinary formulae. His pictures cannot be judged as representations of the ordinary visual world.… Their appeal is primarily to the sentiment, to the subjective imagination.”
—Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the catalogue for Klee’s 1930 solo exhibition
Installation view, Paul Klee: Psychic Improvisation, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Paul Klee: Psychic Improvisation, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Complementing Klee’s high-modernist style are drawings and paintings that highlight the artist’s unique and varied approach to the human figure. In works such as Der Schutzmann vor seinem Haus (The policeman in front of his house), the titular figure appears as a mechanomorphic assembly of shapes and lines with watercolor spreading out from the graphic forms in a bright medley of soft pigments that diffuse into the paper support.
Paul Klee, Der Schutzmann vor seinem Haus (The policeman in front of his house), 1923 (detail)
Paul Klee, Der Schutzmann vor seinem Haus (The policeman in front of his house), 1923 (detail)
Paul Klee, Adam and Little Eve, 1921. The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Paul Klee, Adam and Little Eve, 1921. The Berggruen Klee Collection, 1987. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
“Klee was the key encounter of my life.”
—Joan Miró, artist
Created during the tumult of the interwar years in Europe, the works in this exhibition testify to Klee’s status as a pioneering figure in the history of modern art, while the formal sophistication and deeply personal nature of the works underscore why his art continues to resonate with viewers and artists today.
Paul Klee in seinem Atelier, Bauhaus Weimar, 1924. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Felix Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
Paul Klee in seinem Atelier, Bauhaus Weimar, 1924. © Klee-Nachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Photo by Felix Klee, courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Bildarchiv
“I adore that Klee presented the accessible and what you will never know. He proffered not knowing as an invitation to (and commemoration of) great mystery, that of his creation and your own experience and existence. He draws and paints an intermittently inscrutable come-on to ‘see’ him and, maybe in the process, you.”
—Jenny Holzer, artist
“Klee was the first artist to point out that for the painter the meaning of abstraction lay in the opposite direction to the intellectual effort of abstracting: it is not an end, but the beginning. Every painter starts with elements—lines, colors, forms—which are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them.”
—Bridget Riley, artist
Paul Klee, physiognomische Genesis (Physiognomic genesis), 1929 (detail)
Paul Klee, physiognomische Genesis (Physiognomic genesis), 1929 (detail)
Installation view of Paul Klee’s physiognomische Genesis (Physiognomic genesis) (1929), on view in Paul Klee: The Last Years, Hayward Gallery, London, 1974–1975
Installation view of Paul Klee’s physiognomische Genesis (Physiognomic genesis) (1929), on view in Paul Klee: The Last Years, Hayward Gallery, London, 1974–1975
The early 1930s were a transitional time for Klee. In 1931, he left his position at the Bauhaus, Dessau, and moved to Düsseldorf, where he served as a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy. After two years, however, in response to the suppression of avant-garde art practices by the newly empowered Nazi Party, Klee left the country and returned to his native town of Bern, Switzerland, residing there for the remainder of his life.
Despite heightened political tensions, Klee saw continued institutional success during this time. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented an exhibition of Klee’s work in March of 1930, the institution’s first solo show of a living European artist.
A number of the works on view in this exhibition have been featured in many of the canonical retrospectives of Klee’s work, both during his lifetime and subsequently. These include extensive presentations at the Schlossmuseum Braunschweig (1926); Kunsthalle Bern (1940); The Tate Gallery in the National Gallery, London (1945–1946); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1957); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (1969–1970); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England (1983); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1991); The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2011); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); and many more. Additionally, many of the works have appeared in numerous surveys and focused presentations at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.
Paul Klee in his studio, Kistlerweg 6, Bern, 1939. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee. Photo by Felix Klee
Paul Klee in his studio, Kistlerweg 6, Bern, 1939. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee. Photo by Felix Klee
Paul Klee with Hermann and Margrit Rupf, both generous patrons and early proponents of avant-garde art in Switzerland, and the artist Albert Schnyder and his wife, in Les Bois, 1935. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee. Photo by Lily Klee
Paul Klee with Hermann and Margrit Rupf, both generous patrons and early proponents of avant-garde art in Switzerland, and the artist Albert Schnyder and his wife, in Les Bois, 1935. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee. Photo by Lily Klee
Lily and Paul Klee with Ida Bienert, a German collector and patron, in Dresden, 1930. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee
Lily and Paul Klee with Ida Bienert, a German collector and patron, in Dresden, 1930. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee
Paul Klee with Gertrud and Will Grohmann, a German art critic and art historian who specialized in German expressionism and abstract art, in their car in Bern, 1935. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee
Paul Klee with Gertrud and Will Grohmann, a German art critic and art historian who specialized in German expressionism and abstract art, in their car in Bern, 1935. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Familie Klee
One can
never ac
cuse Klee
of taking
himself
overseri
ously no
matter
how sure
precise
labored
he was
—An excerpt from a poem by Richard Tuttle
From 1935 until his death in 1940, Klee continually struggled with illness, which at times affected his ability to make art. Yet toward the end of the 1930s, against the backdrop of immense sociopolitical turmoil and the outbreak of war, Klee worked with a vigor and inventiveness that rivaled even the most productive periods of his youth.
Paul Klee, neue Orden (New medals), 1938 (detail)
Paul Klee, neue Orden (New medals), 1938 (detail)
“Klee seems to have derived a paradoxical vitality from the conscious, profound process of coming to terms with disease and the approach of death, a vitality that significantly transformed his art.… Out of the physical and emotional suffering of his exile he took his art through a final metamorphosis, achieved one last pinnacle. Like only Matisse and Picasso among modern artists, Klee created a late work of singular rank.”
—Matthias Bärmann, author
Some representations from this period are more diaristic and at times caricaturish—accomplished with an economy of means that makes them evocative and ambiguous. Another standout composition exemplifying Klee’s colorism from the artist’s late period, ein Doppel-Schreier (A double screamer) embodies a dual sense of humor and terror, in the form of two abutting heads—rendered in red and orange tones—with mouths agape and terrified expressions, set against a deep lapis blue ground.
Paul Klee, Klopfen Teppich Orient (Beat carpet orient), 1939 (detail)
Paul Klee, Klopfen Teppich Orient (Beat carpet orient), 1939 (detail)
In the later works, Klee used pencil, colored paste, tempera, chalk, adhesive, grease, oil, and watercolor, among other means, to create both graphic arrangements and more dreamlike or metaphorical figures and forms that often reflect the strain of working in his final years. Color—which Klee had previously used sparingly—became stronger and was used to invest figurative shapes with greater force.
Installation view, Paul Klee: Psychic Improvisation, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
Installation view, Paul Klee: Psychic Improvisation, David Zwirner, New York, 2024
“I am beginning to see a way to provide a place for my line.… With new strength … I may dare to enter my prime realm of psychic improvisation again. Bound only very indirectly to an impression of nature, I may again dare to give form to what burdens the soul.”
—Paul Klee
Paul Klee, 1929. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Paul Klee, 1929. © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
