Zentrum Paul Klee Bern Founded by Maurice E. and Martha Müller and the heirs of Paul Klee
Exhibitions 08.05.2021 – 29.08.2021

Paul Klee. I Want to Know Nothing

Like many avant-garde artists in the early 20th century, Paul Klee tried to find new expressive forms in painting, and addressed the question of ‘primal beginnings in art’. He hoped to find these through the study and collection of children’s drawings, Art Brut, and prehistoric and non-European art.

For the first time, using works by the artist as well as private documents and objects, this exhibition will critically illuminate the many diverse sources that strengthened Klee in his artistic quest for supposedly ‘unspoiled immediacy’. The exhibition will also shed critical light on the ideological underpinnings of modernity, particularly the notion of a “primal” form of art.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe was wrought with political and economic crises that brought about social and cultural upheavals. These changes were also manifest in the arts, which broke with the prevailing political, social, and aesthetic norms. As a budding artist, Paul Klee radically questioned what had been taught at European art academies to that time. He set out in search of forms of artistic expression that did not conform to the prevailing Western conceptions of art. The circles around the Blue Rider, the Dadas, and the Surrealists, with whom Klee associated in the 1910s and 1920s, also began to collect and study children’s drawings, artworks by people with psychiatric disorders, and art from non-European and prehistoric cultures. In publications and exhibitions, they juxtaposed these objects of artistic production with their own work.

Above all, avant-garde artists like Klee were intrigued by anything that did not conform to Western norms. This fascination with the “Other” and the resultant development of new, abstracted pictorial worlds must be understood within the broader context of a colonialist and racist Zeitgeist. The European avant-garde emphasized that it deliberately chose a simplified, “primitive” pictorial language. Yet it denied that children, individuals with psychiatric disorders, prehistoric cultures, and Indigenous peoples were capable of such conscious decisions. Using Klee’s works and materials from the archive, this exhibition critically examines modernism’s ideological paradigm. In particular, it illuminates conceptions of the so-called “primordial origins of art” from that period and, along with them, the Western construct of primitivism. This exhibition provides insight into current research on the subject and, in doing so, raises new questions for the future.

This exhibition is dedicated to Alexander Klee (1940–2021).

The exhibition is a cooperation with the LaM, Lille Métropole Musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut in Villeneuve-d’Ascq.

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