Paul Klee Polyphonies - Exhibition - Musée de la musique - Paris

www.citedelamusique.fr/klee


As his contemporaries already noted, music runs throughout Paul Klee's work, at many levels. It is a potential model for painting, along with poetry and the performing arts. Born into a family of musicians, Klee learnt the violin from an early age and would continue to play the instrument during his entire life. Alone, in a duet with his wife the pianist Lily Stumpf, or in a quartet, his preference was to perform works by the composers he most revered: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. A demanding musical culture stands out in his writings; one which touched upon instrumental music as much as opera, and on the repertoire of contemporary authors, who from Schönberg to Stravinsky and from Bartók to Hindemith, would forge the history of modernity. From his penchant for the "golden age", represented in his eyes by the polyphonic art of Bach and the opera of Mozart, Paul Klee derived an aesthetic ideal. This would spur incessant research into the form, style, technique and the subject of his painting. The individuality of his work thus reveals itself in the multitude and range of registers it engages, and in which figuration and abstraction held equal importance. Inspired by the idea of polyphony, his work aspires to be a carefully crafted, constructed whole, at once multiple and organised.
Commissaire : Marcella Lista