MUNICH.- With ‘Construction of Mystery’ the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen are dedicating their first ever major special exhibition to the work of Paul Klee, featuring around 150 works. The exhibition revolves around Klee’s productive years at the Bauhaus and the conflicts within modernism in the 1920s. The show presents Klee as a ‘thinking artist’ who systematically explores the boundaries of the rational in his work, and transcends them to approach the mysterious and enigmatic.

The organizers have managed to secure some 130 high-calibre loans from prominent public and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Japan – for an exhibition which will not travel and is on show for a limited time in Munich only. Many of the works have rarely gone on show in Germany or are going on display here for the first time in decades.

The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen’s extensive Munich collection includes masterpieces like ‘Full Moon’ (1919), ‘Growth of the Night Plants’ (1922), ‘Adventurer’s Ship’ (1927) and ‘The Light and More Besides’ (1931) and forms the starting point for today’s ‘Construction of Mystery’.

The 1920s, when Klee was one of the leading masters teaching at the Bauhaus, form the central focus of the exhibition. ‘Construction of Mystery’ traces the ways in which Klee productively responded to the new challenges of the mechanized, rationalized world and their impact on artistic creativity during his time in Weimar and Dessau. While the school’s directors Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer promoted a close relationship between technology and art, Klee emphasized the importance of playfulness, intuition, and artistic genius. In a text entitled ‘Exact Experiments in the Realm of Art’, he went as far as calling for a ‘construction of mystery’ in art. The exhibition reveals the ways in which Klee dedicated himself to the paradoxical connection between reason and mystery in his own work.

During his time at the Bauhaus, Klee repeatedly returned to particular motifs, including mountains, constellations, ladders, and architectures, as well as concepts such as those of climbing or soaring. Based on Klee’s self-portraits, the exhibition traces these guiding principles and ideas throughout his entire oeuvre. The constant variations and developments of Klee’s pictorial world reveal the formal consistency and continuity of his artistic process.

The exhibition features loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, Zentrum Paul Klee and the Klee Estate, Bern, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum Berggruen, Berlin, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, as well as from numerous other collections. The exhibition design deliberately evokes the architecture of the Dessau Master’s House where Paul Klee lived and worked.

Curator: Dr. Oliver Kase