"A line is a dot that went for a walk" – Paul Klee
Aiming to advance the legacy of the artist, the Paul Klee Family recently joined forces with David Zwirner to promote the work of Paul Klee through Zwirner’s respected galleries in New York, London and Hong Kong, with scholarly publications and by participation in the world’s top art fairs.
A master of modern art, Klee was one of the most influential artists of his generation. A teacher at the Bauhaus for ten years, he developed an idiosyncratic style of drawing and painting that was inspired by Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism, as well as Outsider Art and the naïveté of children’s drawings.
Branded a degenerate by the Nazis, the Swiss-born, German artist was forced out of a teaching position in Dusseldorf in 1933 and returned to Switzerland, where most of the ten works in this exhibition at TEFAF New York Spring—the first presentation since the gallery began representing the artist’s estate in April—were created.
Trained as a violinist, Klee used color and line like musical notes. Employing simple materials, he developed modes of abstraction in revolutionary ways. For example, the earliest piece in the show, the 1931 watercolor Ballett scene (Ballet Scene), poetically portrays the structured movement of dancers in delicate, abstract forms.
Klee experimented with a variety of graphic techniques, including one in which he would apply pigmented paste to paper and then scrape it away with a knife to create a broad line to define the subject’s form. He used this procedure in the 1933 painting on paper Zwei Frauen im Wald (Two Women in the Woods), where he highlighted details of the women with colored chalk, and the 1938 piece Maske "nach dem Verlust" (Mask: After the Loss), which depicts a face emerging from the primal mud that forms the flesh-colored ground.