BASEL.- From October 1, 2017, to January 21, 2018, the Fondation Beyeler will be presenting a major exhibition of the work of Paul Klee, one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. The exhibition undertakes the first-ever detailed exploration of Kleeʼs relationship to abstraction, one of the central achievements of modern art.

Paul Klee was one of the many European artists who took up the challenge of abstraction. Throughout his oeuvre, from his early beginnings to his late period, we find examples of the renunciation of the figurative and the emergence of abstract pictorial worlds. Nature, architecture, music and written signs are the main recurring themes. The exhibition, comprising 110 works from twelve countries, brings this hitherto neglected aspect of Kleeʼs work into focus.

The exhibition is organized as a retrospective, presenting the groups of works that illustrate the main stages in Kleeʼs development as a painter. It begins, in the first of the seven rooms, with Kleeʼs apprenticeship as a painter in Munich in the 1910s, followed by the celebrated journey to Tunisia in 1914, and continues through World War I, and the Bauhaus decade from 1921 to 1931, with the wellknown “chessboard” pictures, the layered watercolors, and works that respond to the experiments of the 1930s with geometric abstraction. The next section features a selection of the pictures painted after Kleeʼs travels in Italy and Egypt in the later 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, the exhibition examines the “sign” pictures of Kleeʼs late period, and the prefiguration, in his conception of painting, of developments in the art of the postwar era.

For this major exhibition, the Fondation Beyeler has obtained the loan of valuable works from no less than thirty-five internationally renowned museums and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Albertina, Vienna; the Berggruen Collection, Berlin; the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; the Rosengart Collection, Lucerne; the Kunstmuseum Basel; and the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. The exhibition also contains fifty-two works from private collections in Europe and overseas that are rarely, if ever, accessible to the public. Thirteen paintings are from the Zentrum Paul Klee, and ten works are from the Fondation Beyelerʼs own collection.

Among the highlights of the exhibition are the “chessboard” pictures Blossoming Tree , 1925, 119, from the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Flowering, 1934, 199, from the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, and the group of layered watercolors. Further outstanding works include the “striated” composition Fire in the Evening , 1929, 95,
from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pointillist painting Clarification , 1932, 66, from the Metropolitan Museum, New York; and the rarely exhibited At Anchor , 1932, 22.

With a total of twenty works, Klee is the best-represented artist after Pablo Picasso in the Beyeler collection. Klee held a special significance for Ernst Beyeler, who regarded him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. One of the first exhibitions at the Galerie Beyeler in Bäumleingasse, held in 1952, was devoted to Paul Klee, and was followed by further shows illuminating various aspects of Kleeʼs oeuvre. In all, some 570 works by Klee passed through Beyelerʼs hands. Beyelerʼs chief passion as a collector was for Klee’s late work, which he valued especially “for its quality of color and expressive power.” Over the years, he managed to assemble a collection of exceptionally high quality, including key works such as Rising Star , 1931, 230, and Si gns in Yellow , 1937, 210, both of which will be on display in the exhibition.

Dr. Anna Szech, the exhibition’s curator, explains: “It was surprising and exciting to discover a new aspect in Klee’s work, which is otherwise so thoroughly researched. Focusing on Klee’s largely unacknowledged contribution to abstraction, we show that he deserves a prominent place in the history of twentieth-century abstract painting, in addition to his other achievements as an artist.”

Sam Keller, Director of the Fondation Beyeler, adds: “Next to Picasso, Paul Klee is the bestrepresented artist in the collection. As the Fondation Beyeler celebrates its twentieth anniversary, I am pleased that we have been able to honor this crucial modern artist with a comprehensive exhibition of a kind that has never been seen before.”

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition deserves particular mention. Contributions from the art historians and Klee specialists Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Regine Prange are flanked by essays by guest authors from other professional fields who have kindly agreed to share with us their thoughts on Klee in connection with their own areas of expertise. The Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis discusses Kleeʼs ideas about music; the American artist Jenny Holzer investigates the signs in Klee’s pictures; and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor writes about the architectural elements in Klee’s work.