Zentrum Paul Klee

The largest single-artist museum collection in the world by the center's own account: close to 4,000 works by Paul Klee, around 40 percent of his known output, spanning his full career from early graphic work through the Bauhaus years to the late, simplified paintings made in the last years of his life. The Klee family's own gift is documented as fully reconstructable through the Nazi era; provenance work on the smaller body of other artists' works that passed through Klee's own collection is described by the museum as ongoing.

Renzo Piano designed the Zentrum Paul Klee as three long, wave-shaped structures that rise and fall along the eastern edge of Bern, following the slope of the Schoengruen fields down toward the A6 motorway. Piano gave each wave, which the center calls a hill, a distinct role drawn from the different sides of Klee's working life as a painter, musician, teacher and researcher. Hill North holds Creaviva, the center's hands-on studio, together with an auditorium built for concerts and readings, seminar rooms and a cafe. Hill Center is the public art venue, with two exhibition rooms totalling around 2,400 square metres, a museum shop and the main entrance. Hill South is the quiet end of the building, holding the sculpture park nearby and the offices, library and archive that the public reaches only by appointment.

The three hills are joined by an internal corridor the center calls the museum street, a glass-walled passage that runs the length of the building parallel to the motorway outside. Piano did not screen the road from view; the center describes it as a deliberate acknowledgement of the motorway as part of the surrounding landscape rather than something to hide the building from. Construction used 1,100 tonnes of steel girders, 1,000 tonnes of reinforcing steel and 10,000 cubic metres of concrete, with a glass front around 150 metres long assembled from panels up to 6 by 1.6 metres and close to 500 kilograms each. The center hill reaches 12 metres and the glass facade rises as high as 19 metres. Ground was broken on 15 October 2001 and the building opened on 20 June 2005, at a construction cost of CHF 125 million, after roughly 180,000 cubic metres of earth had been moved to shape the hills.

The museum exists because two families gave it the means to exist. In 1997 Livia Klee-Meyer, the widow of Klee's son Felix and herself the daughter of the Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, offered the city and canton of Bern her inheritance of almost 700 works by Paul Klee, on condition that the authorities commit to founding and permanently running a Klee museum by the end of 2006. The following year Alexander Klee, another family heir, guaranteed around 850 further loans and a body of family documents, and the Paul Klee Foundation, established in 1947 and until then housed at the Kunstmuseum Bern, announced it would give its own holdings of around 2,600 works and its archive to the new center. That foundation formally merged into the Zentrum Paul Klee Foundation on 1 January 2005.

The building itself came from a different donor. The surgeon Maurice E. Mueller and his wife Martha Mueller-Luethi offered land in Bern's Schoengruen district, where Klee is buried, along with the greater part of their family fortune, on three conditions: the museum had to stand on that site, Renzo Piano had to design it, and it had to operate as a cultural centre rather than a conventional museum. The Schoengruen site sat on the eastern outskirts of the city, away from the Kunstmuseum Bern where officials had originally hoped to keep the Klee collection close to the rest of Bern's art holdings, and the decision to appoint Piano without an architectural competition drew further objection at the time. The dispute did not stop the project: Bern's voters approved it by 78 percent at the end of 2000, and the city and cantonal parliaments passed it with little further opposition.

Between the Klee family gift, the Paul Klee Foundation's holdings and further works acquired since, the Zentrum Paul Klee holds close to 4,000 works by Paul Klee, which the center describes as around 40 percent of his entire pictorial output, making it the largest single-artist collection held by any museum. Roughly 80 percent of that total is drawings and watercolours rather than paintings, which reflects how much of Klee's actual practice was work on paper rather than canvas. The permanent display, Kosmos Klee, sets out a chronological path through his career in Hill Center, alongside a changing programme of temporary exhibitions; around 200 further works arrive as long-term loans from private collections.

The collection's size is also the reason so little of it is ever on the wall at once. Klee experimented constantly with unstable materials, oil paste on paper, wax emulsion, chalk grounds, and a large share of the collection is light-sensitive to a degree that rules out permanent display. The center rotates its holdings for conservation reasons and keeps the rest in the Hill South archive, open to researchers by appointment rather than to the public. Visitors expecting to see an institution's full collection on the walls sometimes read the resulting galleries as sparse for a museum of this size; the center's own published account of the collection treats the same fact as a conservation obligation rather than a shortfall.

Beyond its galleries, the Zentrum Paul Klee describes itself as a collection, research and information centre, and its archive is where that description is tested. It holds Klee's diaries, his handwritten catalogue of his own work, his notes from teaching at the Bauhaus between 1921 and 1931, his correspondence with family, dealers and museums, his working library, and his studio materials, alongside a continually updated database of every work the center holds, built as a continuation of the nine-volume printed catalogue raisonne of Klee's work. Four further specialised archives cover music written in response to Klee since 1930, teaching material from his own students, film and broadcast productions about him, and the wider critical reception of his work. The center publishes an open-access research journal, Zwitscher-Maschine, and opens the archive to outside researchers by appointment through its own research office.

Since a 2016 reorganisation the Zentrum Paul Klee has shared its governing structure with the Kunstmuseum Bern, the older museum in Bern's city centre, under a joint foundation and a single artistic director, Nina Zimmer, who has led both institutions since that change. The two remain separate museums with separate buildings and separate collections. The Kunstmuseum Bern, not the Zentrum Paul Klee, is the institution that accepted the Cornelius Gurlitt bequest in November 2014 and has since carried the provenance-research commitments that came with it; the Zentrum Paul Klee's own published position treats its provenance work as a separate undertaking, covering the Klee family's own gift and, separately, the wider body of Klee's work held by others.

The Zentrum Paul Klee states that the works it received from the Klee family estate can be classed 'green' under the provenance categories used in Bern, meaning ownership of every one of those works through the 1933 to 1945 period can be fully reconstructed. That status covers the core Klee holdings the family itself donated. The museum's own account is more guarded about a second, smaller body of material: works by other artists that passed through Paul Klee's private collection during his lifetime and later entered the center's holdings. The museum states that the provenance of that material is still being recorded to current standards rather than already established, and that its staff separately assist outside researchers and institutions worldwide who are tracing the history of Klee's own works held elsewhere. Neither the museum's own account nor the sources checked for this record describe an unresolved restitution claim against a work currently in the Zentrum Paul Klee's own collection; what remains open concerns the artist-friends' works still under review, not the Klee holdings themselves.

Klee's own late career sits inside a wider history of Nazi persecution of modern art that the center's own collection largely sidesteps rather than escapes. The Gestapo searched Klee's home and the Dusseldorf Academy dismissed him from his teaching post; the Klee family left Germany for Switzerland in late 1933. Back in Germany in 1937 the Nazi regime included seventeen of Klee's pictures in the Entartete Kunst, or Degenerate Art, exhibition and seized 102 of his works from German public collections. Individual Klee paintings taken in that campaign have since been the subject of long-running restitution disputes, most prominently a 1919 painting held by the Lenbachhaus in Munich, a separate institution with no connection to the Zentrum Paul Klee, whose dispute over that specific work was settled after 26 years of litigation.

The Zentrum Paul Klee opened to strong public backing in Bern itself, following a 78 percent vote in favour of the project at the end of 2000, after a genuine fight over the Mueller family's insistence on the Schoengruen site rather than a location closer to the Kunstmuseum Bern. That local vote of confidence has been matched since by broad praise for the building: visitors and critics alike single out Piano's three hills as the reason the museum is worth the trip out from the city centre, on a site most describe as unusually well integrated with the landscape around it.

The recurring complaint sits on the other side of the same fact that makes the collection remarkable. A museum holding close to 4,000 works by one artist cannot show most of them at once without damaging light-sensitive paper, and visitor reviews return again and again to the gap between the size of the holding and the size of what is on the wall on any given day, sometimes reading a partly closed gallery during a changeover as a poor use of an already-priced ticket. Both readings are visible in reviews written within the same week: praise for the depth of a single-artist collection, and frustration that so much of that depth is, by design, in storage rather than on view.

Visitors consistently single out Renzo Piano's building itself as the reason to come, and describe the depth of the Klee holdings as unmatched anywhere. The recurring complaint is the gap between that depth and what is actually on the wall: because so much of the collection is light-sensitive work on paper, only a rotating fraction is shown at any time, and some visitors weigh the admission price against how little of a roughly 4,000-work collection they saw.