'Klee and America': Forever Young

A sense of surprise defines "Klee and America," the latest special exhibition at the Phillips Collection. Surprise and a reunion of old friends.

Of course, the Swiss-born German painter's aesthetic -- an eccentric marriage of playful line and jazz-like color harmonies -- has always been a perfect fit for the museum, whose mantra, as expressed by the title of a recent publication, could be called "Art Beyond Isms." No surprise there. Its founder, Duncan Phillips, owned 13 of Klee's works and displayed them continuously in the intimately sized Klee Room from 1948 to 1982. That's the first bit of good news: This baker's dozen is together again, and never looked better.

This brings me to the show's biggest surprise, which is just how ageless Klee's art feels. Having grown up in Washington, I remember the Klee Room well. But while I since have sprouted gray hairs on my chin, those pictures look as fresh as the day I first saw them.

"Magic boxes," curator Elizabeth Hutton Turner calls Klee's art, in an evocation of the jack-in-the-box that springs open with endless delight, before the eternal wonder of a child's eyes. It makes perfect sense, then, that the museum has chosen, as a companion exhibition, "When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child." The small-focus exhibition not only features childhood drawings by Klee and his art-world rival, Pablo Picasso, along with examples of their mature work, but drawings by contemporary children from Washington and around the world.

Picasso famously said that, while he could draw "like Raphael" as a boy, it took him many years to learn to draw like a child. And to be sure, there's a sense of spontaneous improvisation to Klee's works that make them formally akin to children's art. It's not, however, his pictures' childlike qualities that impress most deeply -- or not solely that, at any rate -- but their ability to transform us, as it were, into children ourselves, with a capacity for delight, despite repetition.

Although the show contains, as Phillips Collection Director Jay Gates put it, "one extraordinary and iconic object after another," Klee's works -- even the familiar ones -- startle. How? In their power to establish universal connections through the use of an idiosyncratic, even arcane visual vocabulary.

That eclecticism, which freely mixed what Turner calls both "ancient and childlike" sensibilities, is likely among the things about Klee's art that resonated with the American spirit. For it is the relationship between Klee and America -- not just Duncan Phillips, but other collectors, museums and artists -- that is the subject of this show.

Pay attention to the wall labels, notes Turner, for they hold their own surprises in their listings of each work's provenance. There you'll find that Klee's work was owned by artists Alexander Calder and Mark Tobey, among others. In each case, the appeal, and legacy, is obvious.

This is the show's context: the rise of Klee's popularity in and impact on America. It was a country in which, during his lifetime (1879-1940), Klee, unlike some other European artists, never demonstrated any special interest, and which, up until the end of the 1920s, returned the favor by largely ignoring him. It was America, however, that could be said to have come to Klee's rescue in the 1930s, when the work of the artist fell into disfavor with the Nazis, forcing him to move to Switzerland. During that decade until the artist's death, Klee's work was avidly exhibited -- and collected -- stateside, starting with a one-man show in 1930 at the Museum of Modern Art. (Oddly enough, one of my favorite paintings, MOMA's "The Twittering Machine," is not on view at the Phillips, although you'll find it in the accompanying catalogue.)

Organized by the theme of patronage, rather than in strictly chronological or stylistic terms, "Klee and America" doesn't feel like a run-of-the-mill museum exhibition. The tale it tells, which involves politics and changing tastes, can be a little difficult to digest. Exactly how Duncan Phillips, for instance, originally no fan of abstraction, came to eventually discover -- and embrace -- the content in Klee's often nonsensical compositions is never clearly spelled out.

But Klee is no run-of-the-mill artist either. I suspect what Phillips saw in him was this: That the magic of Klee's art lies not in the artist's ability to get in touch with his inner child, but in his work's power to get in touch with ours.

KLEE AND AMERICA