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13/2/2015

Paul Klee

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

The exhibition is devoted to Paul Klee’s diverse and changing relationship with his home city. It shows his work and activities as well as his relationship with school-friends and fellow-artists in his Berne years between 1890 and 1907.

One particular focus of the exhibition is on Klee’s Berne collectors and the exhibitions he had in Kunsthalle Berne during his lifetime. The reconstruction of the studio in the three-room flat in Kistlerweg conveys the atmosphere of his working situation in his involuntary Berne exile in Switzerland between 1934 and 1940. The large-format masterpieces he produced there form the high point of the exhibition. A chronological selection of works also grants an insight into the whole of Klee’s oeuvre.

Views of Berne While he was still a schoolboy Paul Klee filled his sketchbooks with landscapes and city views taken from calendar pages. Later he drew outdoors on outings and hikes that took him to the Bernese Oberland, Lucerne or as far as Lugano. Relatives of Klee’s had a hotel in Beatenberg, where he stayed regularly and used the opportunity to sketch the magnificent view. In Berne he liked to visit the nearby Dählhölzli Forest and the Elfenau, and walked along the Aare. He also recorded the city of Berne several times: the Zytglogge Tower, the monastery or views of the Old City from the Rose Garden. In 1909 and 1910 he created various views of the Mattequartier in Berne and experimented with distortion and alienation of the subject. At the same time he liked to draw and paint in the quarry at Ostermundigen, since he was acquainted with Alfred Bürgi, whose company leased the quarry.

The Klee family
Paul Klee was born on 18 December 1879 in Münchenbuchsee near Berne, the son of Hans Wilhelm Klee (1849–1940), a German-born music teacher, and Ida Maria Frick (1855–1921), a singer and pianist. The following year, even though Hans Klee went on working at the teacher training college in Hofwil, the family moved to Berne. Klee grew up there surrounded by music, along with his sister Mathilde (1876–1953), three years his senior. From 1880 the Klee family lived first on Aarbergergasse, then at Hallerstrasse 32 and 26 in the Länggass neighborhood, and from 1889–1897 at Marienstrasse 8 in the Kirchenfeld neighborhood. In 1897 they bought a newly-built terraced house at Obstbergweg 6, which remained the focus of the family for many years. From 1899 Klee’s mother was paralysed and unable to pursue her profession. While Klee began his art studies in Munich in the same year, Mathilde remained unmarried and looked after her mother until her death. In 1906 Klee married the pianist Lily Stumpf, whom he had met seven years previously in Munich, and moved with her to that city. Over the next few years he regularly spent the summer holidays in the parental home with his wife and his son Felix (1907–1990).

Berne collectors
Klee’s first and perhaps most loyal collectors were in Berne. They included Hanni Bürgi (1880–1938), the wife of the building contractor Alfred Bürgi. She devoted herself not only to her family, but to music, literature and the visual arts. Klee met her through her singing lessons with his father, and a lifelong friendship was formed. After her husband’s early death, in spite of criticism from her family, she remained a passionate collector, buying a total of around fifty works by Klee. She was also involved in the Berne art scene. Her son Rolf (1906–1967) continued the collection, and also supported Klee in legal matters. Klee and his wife Lily were quickly accepted into Hanni Bürgi’s circle of friends and acquaintances after Klee’s return to Berne in 1933.
As early as 1914 the haberdasher und art critic Hermann Rupf (1880–1962) and his wife Margrit (1887–1961) bought their first group of works consisting of three drawings. Over the next few years Rupf regularly continued to buy works from Klee. In Klee’s Berne exile Hermann and Margrit Rupf became important figures in the life of the artist, who was largely isolated in Switzerland. Along with Rolf Bürgi, Hermann Rupf provided advice for Lily Klee after the death of her husband. After Lily’s death in 1946 Hermann Rupf and Rolf Bürgi founded the Klee Society which became the Paul Klee Foundation a year later. In 1954 the couple set up the Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation, which includes about 300 significant works of classic modern art – including 17 works by Klee.

Berne exhibitions
In 1910 Klee was able to show his works in an exhibition in his home town for the first time. 56 of his works were shown in Kunstmuseum Berne. After that the exhibition travelled on to Zurich, Winterthur and Basle. Press reactions were very muted, or marked by a lack of understanding of Klee’s work. Kunsthalle Berne showed a total of eight exhibitions of Klee’s works. Hermann Rupf wrote of the 1921 exhibition in the Berner Tagwacht: “On this occasion we may once again spare ourselves the task of listing all the fabulous qualities of his enormous talent, because to a certain extent Klee belongs to us, the Bernese, and certainly we will often have the opportunity in the future to assess his works.” In 1931, also in Kunsthalle Berne, 108 works were shown, predominantly belonging to major Berne collectors, including Hanni Bürgi, Hermann Rupf and Victor Surbek. In 1935 Klee was able to show over 270 works in the Kunsthalle – focusing on the last five years of his work. On this occasion small sculptures by the artist’s boyhood friend Hermann Haller were shown alongside Klee’s pictures. Late in 1940 Kunsthalle Berne held its first memorial exhibition for Paul Klee, featuring 233 posthumous works.

Klees Berne friends
Klee was more closely connected to Berne through long-lasting friendships than he was to anywhere else. After studying in Munich and subsequently travelling to Italy, in 1902 Klee met up with his school friends Hans Bloesch, Fritz Lotmar and Louis Moillet in Berne. By now Fritz Lotmar (1878–1964) was studying medicine and Klee was a competent partner in discussions of art, literature and philosophy. They played together in a string quartet. Lotmar also looked after Klee during his serious illness from 1935 on.
He was also connected with Hans Bloesch (1878–1945), later the librarian and senior librarian at Berne City and College Library, through their time together at grammar school, when they had produced the satirical school newspaper Die Wanze (the bug). Later they worked together on two book projects, to which Klee contributed illustrations while Bloesch produced the texts: between 1902 and 1905 they developed Das Buch (the book) with poems by Bloesch and grotesque illustrations by Klee. With the verse epic Der Musterbürger (the model citizen) they lampooned Berne’s federal bureaucracy. Between 1902 and 1906 Bloesch edited the magazine Berner Fremdenblatt, for which Klee wrote reviews of concerts and theatrical performances. Bloesch also edited – between 1910 and 1913 – the magazine Die Alpen (the alps), to which Klee contributed exhibition reports from Munich.
Klee had particularly strong links with his school friend Louis Moilliet (1880–1962), who was himself a painter and had trained as an artist in Worpswede, Düsseldorf and Weimar. In 1903 the friends met up in Berne again and worked together, attended courses in anatomy and travelled to Paris. Although they were artistically very different, they travelled together, along with August Macke, on the famous trip to Tunisia in 1914.
Marguerite Frey-Surbek (1886–1981) was one of Klee’s first students. He gave her private lessons every week for two years from 1904. When he saw works by her in 1906 in an exhibition in Kunstmuseum Berne, he was amazed by her progress as a painter, and said: “She is learning to paint, and from me! It’s incredible, because I don’t know how to do it myself. But I know a lot about it!!!” Klee himself struggled several more years with the use of paint, although he had produced respectable results as a draughtsman, even in his one opinion.
Zurich-born Petra Petitpierre (1905–1959) studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau with Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky from 1929. The next year she switched to Klee’s free painting class and in 1931 followed him to the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf. In 1934 she married the architect Hugo Petitpierre and moved to Murten. From now on she was only able to devote a small amount of her time to her own artistic work. It was only after meeting up with Klee again in 1937 that she resumed her work. After Klee’s death she restored many of his paintings, and helped to take care of his estate.

Klee’s studio at Kistlerweg 6
When the National Socialists came to power Klee was suspended of his teaching position in Düsseldorf. At the end of December that same year Paul and Lily Klee moved to Berne. For a short time they lived in Obstbergweg in Klee’s parents’ house, then in an attic apartment at Kollerweg 6. It was not until June 1934 that Klee installed his studio in the sitting room of the modest apartment. Here he produced an impressive and extensive late body of work consisting of almost 3,000 pieces. The flat was preserved in its original state until 2005, before being slightly renovated. On the initiative of Osamu Okuda and Walther Fuchs the window and door frames as well as the hinges in the sitting room were secured and integrated into a reconstruction of the studio that is true to the original.

Klee’s legacy (from 15/09/15–17/01/16)
It was not only in Klee’s many years of work teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar and the Art Academy in Düsseldorf that he had an influence on other artists; in Berne, too, many artists took an interest in his work. From the mid-1910s the Berlin-born painter and poet Otto Nebel (1892–1971) was part of the circle around Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery Der Sturm. Through his wife, who worked as an assistant at the Bauhaus, and his time at the Bauhaus in 1924–25, he met the Bauhaus teachers Kandinsky, Muche and Klee. Having emigrated to Switzerland in 1933, Nebel lived in Berne from 1935, and was in regular contact with Klee. He and his wife supported the Klees, for example when they were looking for a place to live.
Bruno Wurster (1939–2003) came into contact with music, visual art and particularly with Klee’s work at a young age, in his parents’ house. Wurster’s family was friends with Felix Klee’s family, which was how Bruno Wurster became a playmate of Alexander (born 1940), the son of Felix. Wurster’s early work shows traces of his engagement with Paul Klee’s work. Later in life he increasingly developed an autonomous body of work in constant dialogue with the abstract art and artists of his time.
Between 1958 and 1965 Peter Somm (born 1940) studied medicine, and worked as an anaesthetist until 1999. He taught himself painting from a young age. While he was still a student he engaged with the work of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, and later withthat of the Concrete Artists.

Image: Paul Klee

Press Contact:
Eva Pauline Bossow, evapauline.bossow@zpk.org

Opening: 14 February 2015

Zentrum Paul Klee
Monument im Fruchtland 3
Postfach, CH-3000 Bern 31

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