How the Painter Paul Klee Felt out of Place among the "Conservative Minds" of Düsseldorf

Works by Paul Klee form the foundation and centerpiece of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and for many visitors, the starting point for a tour through the collection at Grabbeplatz. Hot off the presses, the book "Paul Klee in Düsseldorf" examines the artist's circa two-year stay in Düsseldorf.

We invited the author Welf Grombacher to discuss this new release for #32.

Paul Klee was never really at home in the Rhineland. In autumn of 1931, the 52-year-old painter left Dessau to come to the Düsseldorf Art Academy at the invitation of its director, Walter Kaesbach. When compared to the Bauhaus, with its avant-garde line, where Klee had spent the previous 11 years, the Academy was regarded as relatively reactionary. But Klee hoped to have more time for himself and his own work here. As for the rest, he talked himself into it. Of course, there was no "crowd of geniuses" here as at Dessau, as he wrote in a letter to his wife Lily. But "even conservative minds are intensively preoccupied with progress, and are to some extent more honest than the modernists, and hence more interesting."

Just how honest "conservative minds" could occasionally be is something Paul Klee must have experienced from the local press even before his arrival in Düsseldorf; immediately after his appointment, the critical question was posed of whether "his teaching activity might not lead to the proliferation of a highly eccentric style of painting"? The art historian Nicole Roth, who was born in 1977, went in search of the traces of "Paul Klee in Düsseldorf." The result is a succinct but penetrating and highly-readable summary of the painter's brief intermezzo on the Rhine, featuring numerous illustrations. Klee spent every day in his studio at the Academy - except Sundays, when there was no heat. He cultivated a reserved but friendly relationship with his students, at times even offering one a cigarette after class "as a reward."

For the most part, however, the door to a studio remained closed. With his painter colleague Jankel Adler, who maintained a guest studio at the Academy, but was not a member of the faculty, he worked out a special knock, as the latter reported later in his "Memories of Paul Klee": "It was necessary, because Klee found his numerous visitors distracting." In particular, Klee continued to develop the series of "Polyphonic Paintings," executed with pointillist brushstrokes, and begun in Dessau in 1931 - albeit now in the larger dimensions permitted by his more spacious studio. Klee was popular among the professors. When they doodled during boring meetings of the teaching staff, he would later collect the pages, conceiving - according to a teasing remark of his friend Heinrich Campendonck - "a new picture from every third squiggle that appeared on them."

Klee lived in sublet lodgings. With his wife remaining in Dessau, he did his own housekeeping. Compelled to do his own laundry, he writes to Lily jokingly, he became "even more universal than Goethe." In April of 1933, by the time he had finally found a suitable house for the family in Düsseldorf, the National Socialists - who had meanwhile come to power - had already dismissed Academy director Kaesbach. Klee too was suspended from teaching, and finally terminated on December 31st. The moving crates had yet to be unpacked when Klee was obliged to go into exile in Switzerland. In 1960, 20 years after his death, the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia acquired an ensemble of 88 works by Klee from an American private collection. The works formed the core of the permanent collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, established a year later.

Nicole Roth: Paul Klee in Düsseldorf. Stationen Reihe Band 15. Morio Verlag, 72 pages, 7.95 euros, ISBN 978-3-945424-12-4

Text by Welf Grombacher