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Ten Americans

After Paul Klee

Exhibition

$12 for adults; $10 for students as well as visitors 62 and over. Free for members and visitors 18 and under. 

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Exhibition curator Elsa Smithgall introduces the exhibition

The “Klee Room”

Klee builds himself a little house of art in a realm somewhere between childhood’s innocence and everyman’s prospect of infinity.—Duncan Phillips, c. 1938

More than 80 years ago, in 1930, The Phillips Collection’s founder, Duncan Phillips, acquired the first work by Klee for the museum, Tree Nursery. With this purchase, the Phillips became the third museum in the United States to own a work by Klee, joining the Detroit Institute of Arts and New York University’s former Gallery of Living Art.

Phillips soon became a stalwart champion of Klee’s work in the United States. Between 1930 and 1953, he assembled 13 of Klee’s finest works in oil and watercolor spanning the artist’s career—a strong unit that remains a cornerstone of the museum’s permanent collection. Phillips organized a Klee solo exhibition in 1938 and a memorial exhibition in 1942. Over the following two decades, as Klee came to occupy a central place in the collection, his art became a prominent feature of numerous group and solo exhibitions and permanent collection installations, attracting increasingly receptive American artists and visitors.

Committed to bringing Klee’s art to a larger audience, Phillips placed his work on nearly continuous view after 1948, in what came to be known as “the Klee room” at the Phillips. “The Klee room” served as an abiding source of inspiration for the generation of American abstract painters working at midcentury, especially for Washington, DC-based artists Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. In the words of writer Barbara Rose: “No one who has ever lived in Washington … can ever forget the impact of the Klee room at the Phillips Gallery.”

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, published by The Phillips Collection and Zentrum Paul Klee in association with Prestel, featuring color plates and essays by the curatorial team and outside scholars Katy Siegel, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art, Stony Brook University, and Elke Seibert, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the German Center for the History of Art (DFK) in Paris. Catalogue available in the museum shop.


Exhibition Support

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland.

The exhibition and its publication were made possible with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

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This exhibition is supported by Altria Group.

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Support for the presentation at The Phillips Collection was provided by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, the Ednah Root Foundation, and Eric Richter and Charles Shoener.

Brought to you by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

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In-kind support is provided by

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