THE NEW CRITERION, May 2026
On “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” at the Jewish Museum, New York.
The Nazis wasted no time in denouncing the artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). On February 1, 1933, less than a month after Hilter’s ascendance, the periodical Die Rote Erde (The Red Earth) published a hit piece on the Düsseldorf Academy and its fifty-three-year-old instructor:
Then the great Klee makes his entrance, already famous as a teacher at the Bauhaus. . . . He tells everybody he has pedigree Arabian blood in his veins, but is actually a typical Galician Jew. He paints in a crazier and crazier way, he bluffs and baffles, his students goggle and gape, a new, unheard-of art makes its appearance in the Rhineland.
Born in Switzerland to a German father and Swiss mother, both musicians, Klee was not Jewish, Galician or otherwise. It made no difference. Within the year, Klee lost his academic post. The Gestapo raided his apartment in Dessau and seized six baskets of papers. Finally Klee was forced to relocate to Bern, the city of his birth. He lived out his final decade in Swiss exile.
Elusive, idiosyncratic, and wide-ranging, Klee’s work today might seem decorative and anodyne. Clement Greenberg was right to observe in 1957 that “almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee.” The artist’s inventive and experimental mode, occupying a liminal space between depiction and description, became part of the post-war visual vocabulary. You can see his influence in artists from Jackson Pollock to Keith Haring.
The Nazis well understood his subversive encoding. Klee connected his art to child-like design, primitive symbolism, and parodic marginalia. He advocated for the sort of free-form line the Nazis looked to flatten. Identifying himself with the social outcast—at times the Harlequin, at others the Jew—Klee faced down the scourge of anti-Semitism by association. Occasionally he even made this association explicit. He deployed symbols such as the Star of David in his compositions. More than a decade before his persecution by the Nazis, as the artist went up for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, in October 1919, the press denounced him as “Paul Zion Klee.”
This history helps explain why the Swiss German artist now appears in “Other Possible Worlds,” a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum of a hundred works that focuses on Klee’s final decade.1 “He was not Jewish,” writes Mason Klein, the museum’s senior curator emeritus and the organizer of this exhibition, “but he might as well have been, given his particular denunciation by the National Socialists in 1933 in Germany.”
Paul Klee, Revolution of the Viaduct, 1937, Oil on cotton, Hamburger Kunsthalle. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
At the center of this presentation, and an impetus for the exhibition, is a selection of drawings from a rarely seen cycle of some two hundred works that Klee produced in 1933—a furious assembly created in response to what he called the “Nazi Socialist revolution.” Lost for decades, the works on paper were only rediscovered in 1984 by the Klee cataloguer Jürgen Glaesemer at Bern’s Paul Klee Foundation. In 2003, the art historian Pamela Kort presented them for the first time through four exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.
Composed in wild scribbles of pencil and chalk, these drawings are expressive and explicit. In title and substance they take dead aim at the false verities of the Nazi regime: “He” a Dictator Too! (Auch “ER” Dictator!) features a man pointing down at an exclamation point; Child Murder (Kindermord), an attack on a domestic scene; Crawling Man (Kriechender), a quivering figure on all fours; Accusation in the Street (Anklage auf der Straße), a man directing a crowd’s attention; and Violence (Gewalt), a laughing stick-figure who shoots scribbles into a screaming, crouching victim.
The drawings, here on loan from the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, are different from the reserved and finely wrought designs we might expect from an artist who otherwise spun his compositions like intricate spiderwebs. Klee showed the series over dinner in the summer of 1933 to the sculptor Alexander Zschokke and the art historian Walter Kaesbach, both Düsseldorf colleagues, and Zschokke later recalled he thought the cycle missed its mark:
The start of the cycle was a drawing with a few pencil strokes, not very straight, that looked like a child’s drawing, helpless. I must confess that this beginning . . . had a somewhat comic effect and appeared not to remotely match the seriousness of the situation in which the artist found himself.
At the Jewish Museum, with a selection of work extending as far back as 1903, “Other Possible Worlds” reveals how, in the 1933 cycle, Klee was revisiting his graphic origins in illustration and satire. A selection of etchings from his series Inventions (Inventionen), of 1903 and 1905, here on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hints at his admiration for the caricatures of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Virgin in the Tree (Jungfrau im Baum) presents an aging female nude sprawled out across dead branches. The Hero with the Wing (Der Held mit dem Flügel) features a figure with broken wings and heavy feet rooted in the earth. Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (Zwei Männer, Einander in Höherer Stellung Vermutend, Begegnen Sich) depicts Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph groveling down to one another. An example from another series, this one an illustration from 1911 for a chapter of Candide, dispenses with the modeled, sculptural effects of these early prints in favor of a simpler, more scribbled style later echoed in the 1933 cycle. “Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will,” Klee once said, “but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God.”
Other Possible Worlds” lays out a wide sampling of Klee’s circuitous output. At times it feels too wide. The exhibition attempts to be both a focused display and a retrospective survey and never quite delivers enough of either. A through line is not always apparent in the offerings. The exhibition also gives short shrift to Klee’s many formal innovations as it pursues his symbolic meanings. Klee’s creative processes of monoprinting and oil transfers, for example, freed his line from the artist’s controlling hand as he avoided a grand manner in favor of rhythmic ramblings. Coming from a musical background, Klee created visual sonorities that could be contrapuntal—semiautonomous points and counterpoints. One abstract watercolor here, from 1922, is titled Overture (Ouvertüre) (1922, collection of Alexander Berggruen). By never quite connecting the dots, Klee took a “line for a walk,” as he famously called his compositional style.
There are, nevertheless, some peripatetic highlights here. One is Chosen Boy (Auserwählter Knabe) (1918, anonymous loan, courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), of a child surrounded by a halo of dreamlike geometrical forms. In its selection, the Jewish Museum has also sought out works with explicit Jewish references. Harlequin on the Bridge (Arlequin auf der Brücke) (1920, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) is a symbolic self-portrait in which the artist-figure straddles a river beneath a Jewish star.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, Oil transfer & watercolor on paper, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Angelus Novus (1920), on loan from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, is a mothlike apparition that has taken flight through its afterlife as something of a cultural icon. Purchased by Walter Benjamin in 1921, the work inspired the German Jewish philosopher of the Frankfurt School to call it the “Angel of History.” In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940, Benjamin writes of this figure,
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Months after writing these lines, Benjamin was himself caught in the whirlwind. As he attempted to flee over the Pyrenees from Vichy France to Spain, he committed suicide after his arrest at Port Bo. Before his failed escape, Benjamin entrusted this drawing to Georges Bataille by hiding it in Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale, where Bataille was employed. When he was able to retrieve it, Bataille passed it to Theodor W. Adorno, who sent it on to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem per Benjamin’s wishes.
As a postscript to these fraught iterations, the arrival of this work in New York for the current exhibition was delayed by Iran’s bombardment of Israel. At the time of the exhibition opening, the work could not travel to the airport for transport, at least to the satisfaction of its insurers. So it has been represented here at first by facsimile. What was meant to be the highlight loan of this exhibition took on additional meaning for the Jewish Museum and its director James S. Snyder—who, from 1997 through 2018, was the head of the Israel Museum.
Klee’s art aligned him at times with Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Still, he was not an obvious adherent to any one group. “The Munich expressionists laid claim to him, the Zürich Dadaists hailed him, and to the French surrealists, he was a kindred spirit,” writes Klein.
In 1921, Klee joined the Bauhaus as an instructor. He taught there for ten years, following the school through its 1925 move from Weimar to Dessau. During his demonstration lectures, it is said he painted with his left hand while writing with his right. That same decade his art toured the United States along with work by Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky as part of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). As moma’s Alfred Barr noted in 1930: “Nothing is so astonishing to the student of Klee as his infinite variety.”
By the early 1930s, Klee had left his Bauhaus post, was facing down Nazis, and had begun to show the degenerative effects of fatal scleroderma. In his work, his gossamer line became thicker and murkier. His output intensified and his symbolism became more explicit as he painted through the catastrophe. Mask: Red Jew (Maske Roter Jude) and Your Ancestor? (Dein Ayn?), both 1933 works on paper from private collections, leave little doubt as to the state of affairs. Revolution of the Viaduct (Revolution des Viadukts) (1937, Hamburger Kunsthalle), the painting that appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, turns Nazi marches into jackbooted abstractions. Meanwhile Struck from the List (Von der Liste Gestrichen) (1933, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), with a black X slashed across a face, becomes his latest self-portrait as Klee dedicated himself to “serve Beauty by drawing her enemies.”
Still, he found time to take flight. A series of angels, from 1939 and 1940, make up the final series in the exhibition—here, transformed into the avenging angels of war.
“Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” opened at the Jewish Museum, New York, on March 20 and remains on view through July 26, 2026.