A Collector’s Eye on Paul Klee

The paintings, owned by a prominent private collector, are supplemented by selected works drawn from the Zentrum Paul Klee’s own extensive collection, which help contextualise the works on loan and allow their quality and significance to shine through.

The private collection was built up a work at a time over three decades. It reflects not only Klee the artist, but also the gradual and steadily deepening interest and understanding of the collector himself, and as such is an unashamedly individual vision of Klee’s oeuvre. The collector’s intensely personal perspective represents the focus of the exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee. To inject a sense of drama into the proceedings, the works will hang side-by-side like pearls in a necklace, allowing them to release their creative energy through reciprocity. Each picture is accompanied by a small number of precisely selected drawings, diagrams, watercolours and manuscripts by Klee that serve to emphasise both the variety of motifs and techniques that appear in the works of the private collection, and the various periods from which the works stem.

The exhibition furthermore explores the relationships that a collector and curator of a self-owned «Musée imaginaire» enters into, and the emphases that he sets, painstakingly pursues and secures by means of the concertedly focused presence of the works in all their complexity. The result is, for the duration of the exhibition, a museum within a museum at the Zentrum Paul Klee – one that expresses the personal preferences and quality consciousness of a collector and, in a very real sense, illustrates the diversity and meaningfulness of the role of collectors in the history of the avant-garde to the present day.