KLEE AND AMERICA at THE MENIL COLLECTION

Written by Jessica Farrell Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:15

HOUSTON, TX - The Menil Collection presents Klee and America, an exhibition that addresses the enthusiastic reception for Paul Klee in the United States, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, when the artist’s fortunes were collapsing under fascism in Europe.

The exhibition features more than 80 paintings and drawings by Klee, on loan from private and public collections in the United States and abroad. Josef Helfenstein, director of The Menil Collection, curated the exhibition and co-edited its catalogue with Elizabeth Hutton Turner, senior curator at The Phillips Collection.  “The influence of Paul Klee in America has never been fully investigated,” noted Helfenstein.  “This exhibition seeks to document and analyze the reception and study of Klee, and to restore an influential but often overlooked chapter in the history of modern art.”  On View at The Menil Collection October 6, 2006 – January 28, 2007.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was by the 1910s one of the leading figures within the European modernist movement.  His acclaim in Europe was quickly paralleled in the United States, where both private collectors and major museums sought out his works.  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s American collectors pursued Klee’s art with increasing vigor.

Though Klee gained a foothold in America through exhibition and promotion in the early 1920s, significant critical discourse or context in this country was slow to come.  Celebrated in Paris as one of the fathers of Dada and Surrealism, in America Klee was described in 1924 by critic Henry McBride in the New York Herald as “that strange meteor from Switzerland.”  If asked in January 1930, Klee would have predicted with good reason that the future of his success lay in Europe: René Crevel had recently published a monograph in France, and many important German museums had begun acquiring important examples of his work.  However, as Helfenstein writes in the exhibition catalogue, “just as Klee was receiving his most significant international recognition to date, political and socioeconomic developments in Germany were emerging that would steadily undermine and eventually destroy his standing as an artist.”  Klee was among those targeted in Hitler’s campaign against Entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”).  He was removed from his teaching post in 1933, and the market for his work in Germany and Austria collapsed.  Fortunately, as Helfenstein writes, “even as Klee’s critical foundation crumbled in Europe, his reputation began spreading quickly in America.”

aMore so than any other modern master’s, the fortunes of Paul Klee parallel America’s coming of age in the modern world.  Diego Rivera easily recognized an analogous sensibility at once ancient and childlike that united Klee with the “New World.”  Perhaps it was Klee’s lack of a single style or the sheer range of his experiments that made him so compelling, as Marcel Duchamp once suggested. Certainly Klee appealed to young Americans wanting to free themselves from the limitations of geometric abstraction and surrealist narrative. Without doubt Klee’s cryptic marks—the possibilities he raised concerning almost every type of composition and every formal problem imaginable—had a liberating influence upon the Abstract Expressionist generation of the 1940s and 1950s.  Ultimately this was the moment when the audience was with Klee, when they, too, dared to believe in the universal language of art.

Klee and America draws together some of the finest examples of Klee’s work that have remained in the United States, loaned from both major museums and private collections.  Many of these pieces have rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.  The works have been carefully selected for their American provenances, which include major collectors like Katherine Dreier and Walter and Louise Arensberg; artists such as Alexander Calder, Mark Tobey, and Andy Warhol; author Ernest Hemingway; and architects Walter Gropius and Philip Johnson.

The Menil Collection is a natural venue for this groundbreaking exhibition. Works by Klee have long figured in the Surrealist galleries of the museum, and Menil director Helfenstein served from 1988-2000 as chief curator of the Kunstmuseum Bern’s Paul Klee Foundation, where he was the project head of the nine-volume catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Elizabeth Hutton Turner, containing essays by Micheal Baumgartner, Charles W. Haxthausen, Jenny Anger, and other leading international Klee scholars.

The Menil Collection, located within Houston’s Museum District.  Visit : www.menil.org