A new exhibition in Rome enables the public to get better acquainted with one of the 20th-century's finest and most approachable artists - Paul Klee .
The show features an important selection of paintings by the Swiss artist, who has been associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism, although his works are difficult to classify .
The pieces on display belong to, or belonged to, German art collector Heinz Berggruen .
Berggruen assembled a first-class modern-art collection made up of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro' and Henri Matisse, among others, as well as Klee. He then started giving chunks of it away to top international museums. The exhibition at Rome's Palazzo Ruspoli sees works he donated to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Berlin's Nationalgalerie and the George Pompidou Centre in Paris alongside pieces remaining in his private collection. "You can admire some of my Klees and many others that are no longer mine," said Berggruen, who is in fine shape for a man in his 90s, at the exhibition presentation .
"You can really have fun when you organize an exhibition with Klee, because there are always lots of different ways of reading his work" .
The exhibition, curated by Berggruen's son Olivier, spans all of Klee's (1879-1940) career. But the main focus is his output during the 1920s, when he taught at the influential Bauhaus art and architecture school in Weimar, alongside his friend Wassily Kandinsky .
One of the highlights is The Man Under the Pear Tree, which was painted in 1921. The watercolour depicts a man as he catches a plump pear falling from the tree he is relaxing under. It mixes Cubist experimentation with geometric forms and Klee's distinctive eye for colour, an elegant blending of red, orange and gold here. An Analysis of Various Perversions (1922) illustrates the freedom Klee took to play with shapes and ideas while creating his art. It is a piece in which Klee let his intuition decide what should hit the canvas - a man with wheeled limbs, a fish, a caged bird, upward-pointing arrows .
Although the subjects were chosen with almost surreal randomness, his use of pink and purple and overlaying squares gives them a strong sense of harmony. Other big attractions are the intriguing Miraculous Landing (1923), Tapestry (1920) and Black Columns in a Landscape (1919) .
There are also samples of the work produced in the early 1930s which the Nazis dismissed as "degenerate" and some of his later works, in which he adopted a much simpler style. This was imposed on him by the crippling wasting disease that eventually killed him .
Among these paintings is the striking Blue-Bird Pumpkin (1939) .
The show, which runs to January 7, is open every day except Monday. Tickets cost nine euros .
