Zentrum Paul Klee Bern Founded by Maurice E. and Martha Müller and the heirs of Paul Klee
Exhibitions 07.07.2016 – 30.10.2016

Paul Klee. I am a Painter

How did Paul Klee move from drawing to painting? In his much-quoted diary entry of 1914, ‹Colour possesses me. (...) I am a painter.›, Klee expresses a degree of pride in his personal development.

"The conviction that painting is the right profession grows stronger and stronger in me."
Paul Klee, Diary, N. 93, March 1900

"What a fascinating fate it is to master painting today (as it once was to master music)."
Paul Klee, Diary, Nr. 1121, May 1918

"I am a painter", Paul Klee wrote in his diary in 1914 at the end of his journey to Tunisia. In spite of his great talent as a draftsman, his way to painting and colour was a long and experimental process of self-examination. The exhibition of the collection allows us to experience this exciting development, and shows works from all phases of the artist’s career: from his apprentice years in Munich to the grandiose paintings of his last period. The exhibition shows a large number of significant watercolour, drawings in coloured paste and oil paintings from the holdings of the Zentrum Paul Klee as well as a selection of his innovative painting utensils. Klee liked to experiment with a great variety of artistic media and combine them, and wasn’t just a visionary in his pictorial language.

Early oil paintings

"Sometimes, I now paint tentatively in oil. But I do not get beyond technical experiments. Certainly I'm very much at the beginning or before the beginning!"
Paul Klee, Diary, Nr. 439, July 1902

In October 1898 Klee – born in 1879 – moved to Munich. As he could barely show any knowledge of the depiction of the human body, he was turned down by the Academy, and first attended Heinrich Knirr’s private school. Studying with the painter Walter Ziegler he picked up a brush for the first time and tried his hand at oil painting. He usually painted on cardboard or on canvas stretched on cardboard. His rather gloomy style recalls that of the Dachau Group or the painting of Adolf Hölzel at this time. His talent is particularly apparent in the portrait of his sister Mathilde. In 1900 he was accepted at the Academy as a pupil of Franz von Stuck, the star of the Munich art scene. Overall, Klee felt insecure in oil painting, and still "very much at the beginning, or before the beginning", as he himself recorded.

Reverse glass paintings

"Besides, I moved with the utmost zeal on the smoothest surface, on glass, simplified, threw off ballast, until little or none remained."
Paul Klee, Diary, Nr. 779, November 1906

Klee engaged with the technique of reverse glass painting like few other artists of his day. Between 1905 and 1916 he made 64 reverse glass paintings. He engaged intensively with the technique and used it to try out new forms of representation and expressive possibilities. In terms of theme and motif the extraordinary group of works encompasses a wide range, from depictions of landscapes and animals via portraits to satirical themes. Klee carried out equally diverse experiments with glass, the new picture support: from works reduced to chiaroscuro to depictions with a colourful background, from scored drawings to very painterly works. The collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee contains 42 of the reverse glass paintings in storage. These extremely fragile works have now been extensively restored, and reframed in line with Klee’s ideas.

Watercolour

"I am now trying to construct the tonality of the most recent watercolour on the basis of two colours, no longer purely emotionally."
Paul Klee to Lily Klee, 16.4.1921

Klee applied many of his techniques in an unusual and experimental way. The same holds for his watercolour. In his early works he reduced watercolours to shades of grey tones. He was insecure in his treatment of colour, and first wanted to acquire the techniques of chiaroscuro painting. It was not until 1910 that Klee engaged with brightly-coloured watercolours. He used them like Japanese India ink painting in transparent layers beside and, above all, over one another. He applied the very watery paint on to paper that had been sprayed with water. Some of his best known watercolour were produced during and after his journey across Tunisia in 1914. It was here, probably thanks to the special light and colours of Tunisia, that Klee first acquired confidence in the use of paint. During his time at the Bauhaus in the 1920s he became a master of watercolour technique. He layered the watercolour paint in subtle nuances and shades of light and dark into polyphonic compositions.

Oil paintings 1912–1920

Ten years after his training, Klee still felt insecure in the use of paint. Through his preoccupation with line and chiaroscuro as well as techniques such as reverse glass painting and watercolour he at last started engaging with oil paint again. It was not until after the Tunisian journey that he produced any results that convinced even him. His painting was now brightly-coloured, with a tendency towards abstraction. Flat, pictorial colour fields form the background to drawings – people, animals, nature, architecture –, with the help of which he calls imaginative narratives to life.

Fabric picture supports

Klee used an extraordinarily large number of picture supports: the palette includes various kinds of paper, cardboard and wood as well as a collection of different fabrics, canvas, jute, silk, cotton, nettle cloth in the form of handkerchiefs, shirt cloth, damask, aeroplane linen, calico and gauze, which Klee glued to a second, larger picture support. This consisted either of a rigid material or a fabric stretched on a stretcher. The edge of the larger picture support, different in colour, contributed to the framing effect. He left the support materials, glued on to one another, partly unprimed and painted directly on them. If he applied a layer of priming, he employed several possible ways of treating the surface: thick, thin, smoothed, impasto, roughened, scratched, sgraffito-style. With or without priming Klee used the structure of the fabric to compose the surface.

Texture

"At the moment my work has less to do with paintings that are to be completed than with experiments with various new priming. [...] Some of them are grounds with a lot of sand, but treated appropriately (in the technical painting experiment workshop)."
Paul Klee to Lily Klee, 11.3.1932

The surfaces of Klee’s works are rarely smooth, but have a relief-like appearance. On the one hand traces of the painting subsurface, the various textiles that Klee painted on, remain clearly visible. In particular the jute material often used by Klee can leave a highly structured surface. On the other hand Klee often painted the picture supports in various layers, so that the surface looks three-dimensional. Over a priming he puts the actual layer of painting in watercolour, oil or coloured plaster. In the varied texture of these surfaces are the traces of different painting utensils such as palette knives, spatulas, stamps or brushes. He scored the layer of painting, smoothed, planed and scratched off paint and applied materials such as sand or textiles. In some works, using similar work processes, he simulated traces of ageing to achieve the effect of an old carpet, for example.

Spray technique

Klee used the spray technique sporadically before 1920, but it only became an important medium of composition from 1925. For Klee this method was a further enrichment of his repertoire. The watercolour was drawn over a sieve with a brush and thus reached the picture support below in fine droplets. To form contours or interesting textures, fine grids or perforated sheets of metal are employed. Klee used this technique on the one hand to create cloudy, atmospheric background compositions for drawings, and on the other hand also for the actual pictorial composition through the use of stencils, with which he created multi- layered transparent networks of figures and forms. Klee also liked to apply this technique to papers and fabrics primed with light or dark paint.

Coloured paste

"impasto coloured pastes (waxed) cotton glued to cardboard; panel"
Paul Klee’s entry in the handwritten oeuvre catalogue for "Soldier", 1938, 110

Fom the 1920s Klee often used paste as a bonding agent for whole-surface priming. From 1930 he carried out new experiments, mixing paste with the actual paint. For example, he enriched watercolour, pastel and oil paints with paste to change the character of the paint. This was followed by works with a viscous coloured paste that strongly covered the surface, in which he presumably stirred in only try pigments. Klee mostly applied this paint with a knife, which he used as a spatula. In many other works the proportion of plaster was high compared to that of the pigments. In this way the paint remained moist for a long time, and could be worked further, so that the artist could redistribute the paint with a tool (knife, wooden needle) or his finger on the paper. The colour is concentrated on the edge of the traces. He created very interesting structures that are still very different from a painting painted with a brush. In his late work, on the other hand, he applied viscous coloured paste with the brush.

Paul Klee’s last studio

On 1 June 1934 Paul and Lily Klee moved into a three-room apartment at 6 Kistlerweg in Bern’s Elfenau district. It was to be Klee’s last living and working place. Living conditions were modest: the sitting-room became Klee’s studio, as it had a window and a door leading on to a balcony. Lily Klee described the apartment as small, but bright and with modern furniture. There was Bauhaus wallpaper in a shade of ochre on the walls in the studio room. It was here, where the works of Klee’s last, so extensive period of work were made. Because of his illness, from 1935 on, Klee mostly worked sitting, not standing at the easel. Many of the painting utensils used have been preserved.
The house at 6 Kistlerweg in Bern was renovated and partly rebuilt in the winter of 2003/2004. Displayed in the exhibition is a reconstruction of the studio on a 1:1 scale, with original doors.

Late paintings

After his return to Bern in 1933, Klee had to overcome a work crisis. He also suffered from an illness that impeded him sporadically. None the less, after 1936 Klee had a particularly creative and productive phase. He masterfully connects painting and drawing using a great variety of techniques and materials. In his paintings brightly-coloured planes confront black structures of lines. Highly expressive colours are combined with fantastical narratives that allow diverse associations. He concentrated motif, technique and painterly devices such as colour, form and line on the depiction of a particular content. Generally he addressed universal questions of human life from the everyday to fundamental questions: Where do I come from? What am I doing here? Where am I going?

Double-sided paintings

Klee often worked on both sides of his works. He did this with around 550 works. This considerable number makes Klee an artist who treated the front and back of the work more than almost any other. Klee’s reverse-side paintings were not produced for reasons of economy as in the work of other artists. Neither should they be seen only as failed compositions or sketches. Instead they are part of his working process. In some paintings Klee painted not just the front side several times, but also the reverse side. In all likelihood it only became clear to him during the working process which side would be the final version. Sometimes he painted over the rejected painting on the reverse. In some case he referred the two paintings to one another in terms of motif, content or composition. In Klee’s paintings the reverse-side paintings are often only revealed by restoration or art-historical investigations.

Cut-up works

"Principle: ‘What I don't like, I cut away with the scissors’."
Paul Klee, Diary, Nr. 892, January/February 1911

Particularly from the journey to Tunisia until the early 1920s, Klee often returned to his watercolours and oil paintings. He turned them round, painted over them, cut them up, truncated them and added individual parts together to make a new whole. Often the scissors were deployed for the reworking of the paintings. For example, the paintings "Cemetery" und "Girl at the Window" are two parts from seven pieces of one painting. From the individual parts Klee made autonomous works that bore no connection with one another. "Wreaths for M" and "Garden Rhythm" emerged from a single picture support that Klee cut up not retrospectively but during the working process.

Picture priming – multi-layered

Klee achieved a considerable proportion of the effect by means of a multi-layered construction. This begins with the selection of a picture support, which can be anything from cardboard or plywood to a great variety of fabrics. Klee sometimes glued additional textiles to rigid picture supports such as cardboard or wood. In a next step he primed part of his works with plaster or chalk. Klee painted the untreated picture support or the priming with oil, watercolour or coloured paste or in mixtures of those techniques. Usually this extensive working process is deliberately visible and apparent in the completed work. The structure of the jute fabric or a piece of gauze is preserved by applying the paints through scumbling, and not in such a way as to cover the surface. In other works he applies viscous paint and uses it to create a surface structure.

Close-up shots

The two lateral walls show macro-photographs of Paul Klee’s works. They show in detail the diversity of the techniques, materials and textures in his art. Some of the photographs are of works represented in the exhibition.