BERN.- Apparatuses – machines – acceleration: in the early years of the 20th century the world was heading into a new, mechanised age that placed big challenges on society. We feel the consequences – both good and bad – still today. The 55th exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Paul Klee. About Technical Frenzy, which will be shown from 3 September 2022 until 21 May 2023, reveals for the first time Paul Klee’s artistic engagement with the technical achievements of his time.

Progress v. burnout
Paul Klee lived – as we do today – in an age of major technological transformations. The technical progress that shaped the turn of the 20th century, brought about an industrial revolution and marked the beginning of the modern age, changed society from the ground up. X-rays, microscopes, telephones, cars and electricity questioned people’s perception of matter, space and time and dissolved the familiar image of the world. At the same time, with the end of monarchies, the establishment of democracies, workers’ strikes and demonstrations for women’s rights, the social order became unstable. Artists like Paul Klee were among those who reacted to this. Some believed in progress and found a suitable artistic language in constructivist structures. Others yearned for pristine primitiveness. Paul Klee did both. However, he responded to technological developments with critical detachment and commented on it in numerous works.

While technical progress had a positive effect on the many people’s everyday life, it also led to anxiety, depression, stress and exhaustion. Subjects such as globalisation, terrorism or ‘shattered nerves’ marked the media even in those days, and are all the more present in our contemporary society. For some the world’s new dynamic was like an intoxicating drug. Others reacted to the challenges of an accelerated, technological society with psychical problems which were at the time described as ‘Newyorkitis’ or ‘neurasthenia’, and would today be called ‘burnout’.

The exhibition
Five chapters devoted to robots and cyborgs, mechanics and dynamism, photography, microscopy and X-rays, geometry and construction as well as rhythm and polyphony shed light on phenomena of the modern age which we encounter in Paul Klee’s work. The exhibition reveals how the artist openly, but also ironically and with critical detachment, analysed the time of upheaval between tradition and modernity, and how he made use of new techniques in order to refer to the developments around him. This is apparent, for example, in Klee’s many geometrical drawings, or when he invents an alternative to photograms using a spraying technique and stencils. The artist was also interested in new techniques such as microscopes and X-rays, which penetrate the surfaces of an object. They extended the understanding of seeing to include pictures that the human eye could not see. This is in line with Klee’s motto, expressed as early as 1920, that art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.

Klee’s critical and ironic tendencies are apparent in his preoccupation with the rigid rules of Constructivism. He was criticised by Theo van Doesburg, an advocate for rationalist art and design and co-founder of the Dutch movement De Stijl, as being the representative of an individualistic Expressionism. One will look in vain for right angles and primary colours in Klee’s works from this period: in his square paintings he took up those trends before immediately distancing himself from them. His squares are not constructed with a ruler, and he mixes the primary colours red, yellow and blue into broken colour shades.

Some 115 works reveal the diversity of Paul Klee’s engagement with modern achievements in motifs and techniques. With regard to contemporary social developments the exhibition also shows the continuing topicality of his work, and offers an artistic perspective on developments that continue to preoccupy us today.