Paul Klee
One of my favorite moments of our two week trip to Italy was totally fortuitous. A museum in Rome called Memmo in Palazzo Ruspoli was having a retrospective on my all time favorite painter, Paul Klee.
I recall the first time I saw Klee's work. The MOMA did a show on Klee probably fifteen years ago. The Gotham Gal and I went and I was just taken with his work. It's a bit like Picasso and Kandinsky, but somehow it has more emotional power (for me anyway) than their works. Klee's paintings talk to me.
I am particularly fond of the work he did in the last twenty years of his life during his time at Bauhaus and during his exile in Switzerland. The range of Klee's work is really impressive. He paints in so many styles that it's really impossible to categorize him. But at the same time, when you see his work, you know it immediately.
As I was doing some digging around collecting stuff for this post, I found out that the MOMA has show on Klee right now. Cool, I'll have to get up there to see it.
Not my fave but definately Ellen has been a fan of his.
Posted by: howard lindzon | January 02, 2007 at 09:53 PM
Many of the greats saw the world slightly differently than most of us do, yet there is a little bit of them in all of us who appreciate their work.
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | January 02, 2007 at 11:26 PM
Funny, because we had 2 Paul Klee area rugs when we lived in a shoe-box in the sky in Chicago. We'd never heard of him--we bought the rugs in 1996--but loved the design. I'm not even sure which paintings were used for the rugs...we still have one of them and gave the other away.
Posted by: erin | January 02, 2007 at 11:46 PM
not that familiar with him but very powerful works. one of our greatest memories is seeing the wonderful works of klimt in vienna before they were sold.
so much wonderful art in so many private domains - i suspect the modern-day wealthy are somewhat less generous in sharing their private collections with the public, when compared to past generations of those fortunate enought to amass wonderful private collections.
interesting how seeing works of art one really enjoys really sears into one's memory even more so (for us at least) than a moment of music in time - hopper at the tate in london the other year, klimt in vienna, koons in nyc, da vinci in nyc, francis bacon in sheffield, even(!) ...
Posted by: carl rahn griffith | January 03, 2007 at 07:16 AM
There is a whole museum devoted to Klee in Bern, Switzerland. He's one of my favorites too but seeing him unedited in a place where there was so much wall space available was a bit of an overdoes.
http://www.paulkleezentrum.ch/ww/en/pub/web_root.cfm
Posted by: Tom Evslin | January 03, 2007 at 11:08 AM