Life as a journey: the exhibition Mapping Klee gives an overview of Paul Klee’s work using the different stages of his life and travels

05.09.2020-24.01.2021

Paul Klee loved travelling. He was always in search of what struck him as exotic and strange. As if on a map, Mapping Klee marks out the artist’s life and his journey from Bern via Munich, Weimar, Dessau and into his exile in Bern. The exhibition leads to the most formative travel destinations such as Tunisia and Egypt, and brings visitors to the places where Klee was inspired and where he worked. Aside from Klee’s works, personal letters, postcards, photographs and diary entries are on show. The exhibition Mapping Klee is the first one to be complemented by an array of digital educational material: a Digitorial® and podcasts allow art-lovers to immerse themselves in Paul Klee’s universe even before they visit the Museum.

For its 15-year anniversary, the Zentrum Paul Klee is using Paul Klee’s travels to give a comprehensive overview of his work and his lively artistic career. Klee travelled to recover from his work as a teacher at the Bauhaus, for artistic education and self-discovery, to establish and deepen his contacts in the art scene, and above all for inspiration:

‘And the colour does it. That’s what I always look for: to awaken sounds which slumber within me. A small or large adventure in colour. ’ Paul Klee, 1927

Klee is particularly distinguished by the way in which he has processed what he has seen in his work. On his travels he picked up forms and structures, observations of flora and fauna, architectural and cultural monuments, and let them flow into his artistic cosmos. He did this mostly in an abstracted form, freed from the concrete place or phenomenon.

The exhibition is divided into various chapters, borrowing from the stage of Klee’s life and travels. Each chapter tells, with reference to works and personal documents, the story of a place that left traces in Klee’s work and artistic development. This reveals the themes that preoccupied him at different stages of his life: for example his engagement with the architectural principles of order and composition on his early trip to Italy (1901—1902) or his fascination with mysterious ideographs and hieroglyphs during his stay in Egypt (1928—1929). They mark his development from clueless student to one of the most important artists of the modern age.

Munich 1879—1921 and the Bauhaus period 1921—1931
Paul Klee is born in Munchenbuchsee near Bern in 1879. After graduating from grammar school in 1898 he moves to Munich to study art. In Munich, at the beginning of his career, Paul Klee makes contact with the avant-garde art scene around Gabriele Munter, Marianne von Werefkin, Alexei von Jawlensky, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, and becomes a member of the artistic group ‘Der Blaue Reiter’. Like his contemporaries, Klee seeks a way out of the classical, naturalistic tradition, and finds solutions in nonacademic art. Later, between 1921 and 1931, he teaches form and colour theory at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Klee is at the peak of his career, and is seen as one of the most important artists of his time. At the same time, holidays and study tours to Italy, Paris and North Africa have a formative role in the artist’s life.

From Italy and France to Tunisia (1914) and Egypt (1928)
In 1901, with Herman Haller, Klee visits famous cultural sites in Pisa, Rome, Naples, Pompeii and Florence, where he discovers the Old Masters and the architecture of the Renaissance. In the latter he discerns universal laws of composition which he plans to apply in his art. During his time at the Bauhaus he also travels to Sicily, Elba, Tuscany and the North of the country. Impressions of the barren landscape are recorded in his works. He is interested in the rhythm and structure of buildings and the question of how external form and internal structure are related to one another.

Klee also pays several visits Paris, aside from Munich the most significant centre of art in Europe in the early 20th century. He uses his travels to visit museums and galleries and to make and deepen contacts. He sees Cubist works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and visits the artists Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay in their studios.

In 1914, Klee makes his most famous journey to Tunisia. He travels with his artist friends August Macke and Louis Moilliet and gives an account of the experience as a breakthrough in his painting: ‘Colour has me [...]. I am a painter!’ he writes in his diary on 16 April 1914.

A second trip to North Africa in 1928 takes him to Egypt, inspiring him to make severely geometrical compositions and use reduced forms.

Exile in Bern 1933—1940: Journeys into fantasy
In 1931, Paul Klee is appointed professor at Dusseldorf Academy of Art. As early as 1933, as a supposed Jew and ‘degenerate’ artist he is dismissed without notice, leaves Germany and seeks refuge in Switzerland. While he does have a small circle of supporters in Bern, as a German citizen he is still treated as foreigner. His freedom of travel and movement is increasingly restricted by the medical condition of scleroderma. None the less, the last years of his life are among his most productive. Klee’s late work leads to places of fantasy that recall fairy-tales and sages or the fantastical tales of Romanticism - mysterious islands, imaginary countries or fictional cities with onomatopoeic names. In the works of that time he often engages ironically with existential questions. Even if these are fantasy journeys, the things that he has seen and experienced as well as everyday impressions form the starting point for his imagination and flow into Klee’s works as subjects, forms and moods.

The ‘travels’ of the works
The exhibition is extended by a documentary section in which the ‘travels’ of the paintings after the artist’s death are marked out using exemplary case studies. One station, for example, is devoted to the most important German collection of Klee in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf. In the 1970s and 1980s these works went on an unprecedented world tour and were exhibited globally, with many exhibitions being held under difficult political conditions associated with great logistical challenges. Other stations document the Klee exhibition Equilibrio Instavel in Brazil, visited by over 500,000 people, and Paul Klee’s enormous popularity in Japan. Part of the exhibition is also devoted to the over 100 works by Klee that have been identified as lost or missing since the Second World War.

From Bern into the whole world with Paul Klee and Annemarie Schwarzenbach
The Zentrum Paul Klee is focused on travel. The exhibition Aufbruch ohne Ziel. Annemarie Schwarzenbach als Fotografin (18.09.20—03.01.21) is being shown in parallel with Mapping Klee. Visitors can see the world of the 1930s through the lens of the much-travelled Swiss author and journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach. She is one of the most glittering figures of modern Swiss cultural history. For the first time in Switzerland an exhibition is being devoted to her body of photographic work, some 7,000 pictures in all, produced on long journeys through Europe, Asia, Africa and the USA.

Anniversary at the Zentrum Paul Klee
The Zentrum Paul Klee is celebrating the 15 years of its existence with an open day. On 6 September 2020, from 10.00 a.m. until 5.00 p.m., it invites visitors to explore the galleries, to go travelling with Paul Klee and ask the staff for their best stories from 15 years of the Zentrum Paul Klee. A look behind the scenes is planned, as well as guided tours with curator Martin Waldmeier, an artistic treasure trail for families as well as the chance to run creatively wild in the studios of the Creaviva Children’s Museum. In the context of the FRUCHTLAND agricultural project the in-house beekeeper Stefan Wyss explains the Dark Bees, and the scientific advisers Karin Ruchti and Harald Menzi demonstrate the importance of sweet grasses such as maize and millet for an ecologically sustainable agriculture. The 2.5-hectare field behind the Zentrum Paul Klee is planted with a different crop every year.