Paul Klee, widely considered to be the father of abstract painting, never once set foot in America. When a gallerist entreated him to visit New York in 1937, he famously brushed off the invite: “I would love to, but as you can see, there is so much work to do that I am afraid I shall never find the time.”
But Klee’s disinterest didn’t prevent his art, or the irreverent ideas that informed it, from traveling across the pond in the mid-20th century—and indelibly shifting the course of American art in the process. Klee’s inventive canvases and his original approach to painting (illuminated in his extensive writings) inspired a host of famed American abstractionists, from Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb to Norman Lewis and Robert Motherwell.
Even the era’s toughest critics hailed Klee as an crucial influence in the States. “Almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee,” Clement Greenberg proclaimed in 1957. Harold Rosenberg chimed in with a similar view in 1969: “Klee spun off enough pictorial clues to keep New York studios on the trail for the next twenty years.”
Yet Klee’s impact in the U.S. has been under-explored—until now. “Ten Americans: After Paul Klee,” a new exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., presents Klee’s canvases alongside those of 10 mid-20th century American artists whose work clearly resonates with their Swiss predecessor’s.
“Compared to other European figures whose influence on American art has been investigated extensively, like [Pablo] Picasso and [Henri] Matisse, Klee has not had the same in-depth study,” said Elsa Smithgall, co-curator of the exhibition. “This show is overdue. It was time to show Klee’s work in direct dialogue with American art.”