PAUL KLEE - Insula dulcamara, 1938 - Oil and colored glue painted on paper on burlap 88 x 176 cm - © Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne

Forty-seven years after the last major French retrospective, the exhibition presented by the Center Pompidou aims to reread for the first time all of Klee's work in terms of correspondence with the romantic concept of irony . Starting from a negative and pessimistic observation as to the status of the art of his time and which he considers as a vain imitation, Klee very early adopts an independent and detached attitude allowing him to reverse this situation.

"I serve beauty by drawing its enemies (caricature, satire)", he wrote in his journal in 1901. This retrospective brings together around two hundred and thirty works, from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, the largest international collections and private collections. Alongside major works rarely loaned, including the magnificent canvas Main road and secondary roads or even Island Dulcamara, masterpiece of the last period, the visitor can admire the mythical Angelus Novus. Never exhibited in France, this oil transfer owes its special aura to the text that Walter Benjamin dedicated to him in his Theses on the concept of history. THE'Angelus Novus finds, for the first time since the 1930s, the second work owned by the German philosopher: The Presentation of the Miracle. The exhibition also presents little-known works by Klee, like the sets of sculptures, drawings and paintings under glass, executed during his youth. More than half of the works presented have never before been shown in France.

To know more : https://www.centrepompidou.fr