Tag Archives: Paul Klee

The Impact of “The Klee Room” at the Phillips

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Paul Klee, Tree Nursery, 1929

Paul Klee, Tree Nursery, 1929, Oil with incised gesso ground on canvas, 17 1/4 x 20 5/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1930

Duncan Phillips was a stalwart champion of Paul Klee, and had his works on constant view over several decades in what became known as “The Klee Room” at the Phillips. In 1971, art critic Barbara Rose wrote about the influence of “The Klee Room” in DC in her essay “Retrospective Notes on the Washington School” in The Vincent Melzac Collection: Modernist American Art Featuring New York Expressionism and Washington Color Painting:

“[Kenneth] Noland was not the only Washington painter to look closely at Klee. Klee played the role in Washington that Kandinsky played in New York, which made for crucial differences in approach and emphasis. As opposed to Kandinsky’s expressionist romanticism, Klee’s experiments with surface and texture, his early use of banding, central images, and geometric motifs, provided important precedents for the kind of technique and imagery eventually developed in Washington. Klee was accessible in Washington as Kandinsky was accessible in New York because of the taste of a local collector. As Solomon Guggenheim had assembled a great collection of Kandinsky’s works in his New York museum, so Duncan Phillips put together a remarkable collection of Klee’s works. No one who has ever lived in Washington (this writer included) can ever forget the impact of the Klee room at the Phillips Gallery.”

This work is on view in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee through May 6, 2018.

The Whimsical and Free Artwork of Gene Davis

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Installation view of Gene Davis’s “Untitled” works, on view in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee

“My last show of symbol paintings are just Klee blown-up large.”—Gene Davis

Gene Davis acknowledged the profound impact of Paul Klee—“his very first mentor”—on his artistic development. Beginning in the 1940s, Davis made regular visits to “the Klee room” at the Phillips, where Klee’s small masterpieces left an “unforgettable impression.” These untitled works by Davis with playful, flat forms were among a series of symbol paintings the artist made at the end of his life that harken back to his early experiments of the 1950s, when he painted freehand compositions with organic motifs (for example, Black Flowers). Davis attributed his “urge to do whimsical, free-hand drawings” to his “early infatuation with Paul Klee and children’s art.” Like Klee, Davis valued spontaneity and intuition over intellect—aspects that lay at the heart of Davis’s artistic methods, whether in his stripe paintings (such as Red Devil) or in his more gestural works.

This work is on view in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee through May 6, 2018.

Tuesday Tunes: A Playlist for Kenneth Noland

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Taking inspiration from the major theme of music in Ten Americans: After Paul Klee, we paired 11 staff members with 11 works from the exhibition and asked them to respond to create a playlist in response to their individual artwork. Mika Rautiainen, IT Support Specialist, created this playlist in response to Kenneth Noland’s “In the Garden.”

Kenneth Noland, In the Garden, 1952. Oil on hardboard, 19 1/2 x 30 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1952 © Estate of Kenneth Noland/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

My playlist for Kenneth Noland’s In the Garden is fairly short—it’s the EP to the everyone else’s LP, so to speak. I went with my gut, and while some of the songs have more clear word association with the painting, I didn’t particularly look for one, nor did I look for songs of the painting’s time period.

The first three songs came to me immediately—they are what I imagine to be playing inside the painting, eerie yet fairly mellow. The last two songs popped into my mind the second time I looked at it in detail. Why grunge? I don’t know, I’m not really even that big of a fan. I suppose it’s something about the painting’s color and shapes that just scream early ’90s to me.

Mika Rautiainen, IT Support Specialist

Feeling inspired? Create your own playlist based around works in the exhibition and send it to us at communications@phillipscollection.org and we may feature it on our blog and social media.