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Fundacion Juan March opens Paul Klee. Master of the Bauhaus

Fundacion Juan March presents Paul Klee. Master of the Bauhaus an exhibition on view March 22, 2013 – June 30, 2013.

Paul Klee Viento de la rosa
Paul Klee Viento de la rosa, 1922

The exhibition is the result of several years of work in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, and it is based on what may well be —after the publication of the artist’s catalogue raisonné— the most significant and relevant research project on Klee of a “structural” nature conducted in the last decades: the critical edition of his pädagogischer Nachlass. Paul Klee: Master of the Bauhaus presents a selection of 137 works comprising paintings, watercolors and drawings executed between 1899 and 1940, alongside nearly a hundred manuscripts chosen from among his lecture notes, which represent each one of the twenty-four chapters into which Klee’s texts are divided.

Furthermore it presents objects and documents that range from contemporary photographs to the artist’s herbariums, encompassing some of his reading materials, documentary sources for his thinking, his writing, his drawing notebooks, and his publications. It is a multifaceted collection of material that enables one to adequately contextualize his life and work at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau and helps clarify the mutual influences between his theory and his artistic practice throughout his life.

Under the so-called “pedagogical legacy” of Paul Klee exists a collection of texts which is as fascinating as it is heterogeneous: nearly four thousand manuscript pages in which Klee recorded his reflections and theoretical and practical investigations. They are full of striking diagrams, schematic illustrations, tables, color spectrums, constructions and drawings. These notes and illustrations center on the notion of pictorial form, its regular features, governing principles and genesis; on geometry, planes and volumes; on movement; on natural and artificial structures; on configuration in the plastic arts; on rhythm and on color. This Nachlass is, in short, a series of meditations on the life of forms, without which one cannot definitively understand Klee’s own theory or his artwork—two areas that (as is obvious in the case of an artist) echo each other mutually. www.march.es

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