Paul Klee. La collezione Berggruen

This publication, produced for the Klee exhibition at the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome, brings together 51 Klee masterpieces from the Berggruen collection, an extraordinary core of works lovingly collected between the post Second World War period and today and donated to the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Berggruen Museum in Berlin.

Klee (1879-1940) is undoubtedly one of the most loved twentieth-century artists. Born in Switzerland, he studied in Munich and travelled to Italy before returning to Bern (in 1902) where he spent a long period of isolation, studying the works of Kandinsky and his friends from the Blue Rider and cubists such as Delaunay. Following a trip to Tunisia in 1914, he began to develop a personal style consisting of abstract forms and symbolic representation. In 1920 he was invited to be a part of the Bauhaus, the revolutionary art school in Weimar. This marked the beginning of the most prolific decade of his career, during which he produced watercolours and small, exquisite drawings. In 1931, with the establishment of the Nazi regime, he left the Bauhaus and returned to Switzerland. In the final years of his life he was fragile and sick, but he produced a vast number of gouaches and drawings showing lyrical, evanescent, and imaginary figures, which are often angels.

Heinz Berggruen, sensitive and passionate, has dedicated his entire life to art. Paul Klee was his companion in both happy and difficult times throughout life; he was his talisman and helped him throughout his career, together with other important figures, including Picasso, Miró, Matisse and Juan Gris. For this occasion Paul Klee and Heinz Berggruen have joined forces with the aim of recognising and appreciating the deep imprint on future generations created by artists who were able to create new ideas and ways of seeing; this artist and gallery owner and dealer can be considered key elements in telling the history of contemporary art.

Essays by Heinz Berggruen, Olivier Berggruen (son of Heinz and curator of the show and editor of the catalogue) and Francisco Jarauta, show Klee's rich and multi-faceted artistic personality by highlighting how his interests spanned the figurative to the abstract, and his images were always charged with a unique expressivity.