Published: September 2012
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From September 1 through December 9, 2012, Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art is exhibiting 66 works by the Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). The show, titled Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art, brings together pieces from the Zentrum Paul Klee and Beyeler Museum in Switzerland and 13* American museums and libraries. The show’s curator is John Sallis, Boston College’s Frederick J. Adelmann SJ Professor of Philosophy.
Klee’s appeal to philosophers owes in part to his vocation as a teacher—in Germany, at the Bauhaus from 1920 to 1931 and then at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf until 1933—and to the fact that his lectures survive in print even as their evolving ideas of art and life found application in the artist’s hands. Klee created more than 9,000 works—drawings, lithographs, paintings on glass, watercolors, oil on canvas, and mixed media. In an interview set in the McMullen exhibition space, Professor Sallis calls attention to three pieces in the show that say much about the artist and his admirers.