Paul Klee. Alle origini dell’arte

An artist with a multifaceted personality, not only a painter, but also a musician and a powerful theorist, Klee was one of the most important figures of the 20th century for having initiated several avant-garde groups and pursued a brilliant personal artistic development, continually making innovations in painting technique and theory.

The MUDEC project aims to address a novel perspective of Klee’s work, with the goal of positioning the artist’s activity within the primitivist ferment flowing through Europe in the early 20th century. Since the beginning of the last century, ethnographic and primitive arts and cultures exerted a particular fascination on the European avant-gardes, who discovered a still virgin territory of creativity, where powerful figurations were evoked in an imagery free of pre-established stylistic features. The MUDEC exhibition will illustrate how Paul Klee participated in this ferment of the affinities between the tribal and the modern in an utterly personal way, internalizing the stylistic and conceptual bearing of primitive art within his system of idea painting, and juxtaposing it with the inspiration he drew from the ancient and classical art of the Mediterranean peoples. Alongside a specific selection of the artist’s works will be placed in timely cross-reference journals and period documents documenting Klee’s specific training on these themes, along with ethnographic artifacts from the MUDEC collection.