Paul Klee and His Travels

29 June - 18 August 2002

Hours: 9:30a.m.- 5:00 p.m.
Entry is permitted thirty minutes before the galleries are closed.
Closed: Closed on Mondays

Admission: charged

The painter Paul Klee was born in Berne in 1879 and died in the same city in 1940. His name is so familiar around the world that he needs no introduction. Particularly in Japan, Klee has been known and admired from early on, so that there are as many Klee enthusiasts in this country as there are in his native Switzerland.

Why is Klee admired by so many people? His paintings have countless charms: rhythmically flowing lines, rich, beautiful colors, diverse pictorial conceptions, carefree images like pictures made by children, deep shadows where joy and sorrow intermingle, and cheerful, fairytale worlds. But the pictures interwoven with these charms have hidden behind them the artist’s meticulous formal calculations, based on his deep contemplation and intuition, and they are brimming with an exalted spirituality. These aspects make Klee’s world infinitely profound. Surely everyone would agree that this artist, who amused and delighted the viewer while creating powerful paintings at the same time, should be considered as one of the representative master of the twentieth century.

In producing these most appealing paintings, Klee turned to a large number of motifs. The music he enjoyed playing on the violin and the theater stage, as well as the scenes he saw during his repeated journeys, his fondness for the Orient, and his fantasies about the world of the dead all provided important stimuli for his paintings.

In order to take part in and understand Klee’s richly varied world, we decided in the present exhibition to focus on the theme of travel, as seen in several of his motifs. From his teens, Klee often enjoyed walking around his hometown of Berne and took short trekking trips through the nearby Alpine mountain regions. The exhibition starts with these excursions and also examines his trips to such countries as Italy, France, northern Germany, Tunisia, and Egypt. The entire show has been built around not only works whose motifs he took directly from his trips, but also many others that were inspired by his travels but crafted through his imagination. Included as well are his paintings of imaginary journeys to distant foreign lands and to the world of the dead. We have divided Klee’s oeuvre into six sections according to the order of his actual trips, through which we hope to examine the relationship between his travels and his works.

The exhibition features a wide range of works, including sketches Klee did during his travels, watercolors, works that he composed subsequently based on themes from his trips, and works that emerged many years later out of the memories he had kept within him. Approximately 250 works are displayed, as well as numerous postcards, materials he took on his trips, and photographs of his destinations. We hope that by seeing how travel stimulated Klee and how a trip could be reborn in his paintings, viewers will thoroughly enjoy Klee’s vibrant world - a world that is sometimes happy, sometimes sad, and always has a wealth of content.

Finally, we received the cooperation of a great many people in organizing this exhibition. We would especially like to express our sincere appreciation to the Paul Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern and Alexander Klee, the artist’s grandson, who gave us their full and unstinting support. Additionally, we also received tremendous cooperation from those whose names appear on the acknowledgments page of the catalogue. We trust that the realization of this most exceptional exhibition is the best expression of our gratitude to them all.