Enchanted Reverie: Klee and Calder: In Collaboration with the Calder Foundation

Di Donna Galleries is pleased to announce Enchanted Reverie: Klee and Calder, organized in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation. Bringing together over forty paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from international public and private collections, Enchanted Reverie presents Paul Klee (1879-1940) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976) in dialogue, illuminating their shared metaphysical understanding of the universe's unseen forces. Both artists developed new modes of artistic production to create a visual language for abstraction, space, and an ever-expanding network of energy and forms. The often-forgotten interplay between these two titans of modern art unfolds in Enchanted Reverie and encourages visitors to consider their overlapping expressions of what Klee described as "latent realities."

Enchanted Reverie marks the first dedicated reunion of Klee and Calder since 1942, when the Cincinnati Modern Art Society assembled one of the earliest known exhibitions to juxtapose the artists' work. While this early pairing explored their mutual penchant for versatile experimentation related to temporal and spatial relationships, Enchanted Reverie seeks instead to emphasize their respective investigations and interests in natural forms and kinetic energies. The works of Klee and Calder are placed in conversation once more, in an exhibition designed as a dreamlike realm where rare masterpieces by each artist are meaningfully presented to illustrate their explorations of the spiritual and unknown.

In a 1962 interview, Calder was asked, "What artists do you most admire?" He replied, "Goya, Miró, Matisse, Bosch and Klee."[1] These artists shared a commonality - namely the ability to conceptualize existence without heavy, dramatic overtones, but rather with a rhythmic lightness and vibrancy. Calder likely viewed Klee as a Modern master of this feat, whose lyrical investigations of space and form were inspirational.  

A prolific creator, Klee's works are cornerstones of nearly every major institutional collection. He continually demonstrated a masterful command of line and color, revealing the intricate connections that both capture and bind us to the concrete and metaphysical realms. For Klee, natural phenomena served as a metaphor for both artistic and cosmic creation. In his Creative Credo V (1920), Klee furthers this notion, stating, "formerly we used to represent things which were visible on earth… we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are many more other, latent realities."[2]

Though part of the subsequent generation, Calder's nonobjective sculptures exploit atmospheric effects to engage time and space within and beyond the human realm. His diverse body of work, celebrated in public collections and commissions throughout the world, transports viewers into the fourth dimension, evoking notions of immateriality and the sublime. In a 1946 catalogue essay, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: "Although Calder has not sought to imitate anything ... his mobiles are at once lyrical inventions, technical, almost mathematical combinations and the tangible symbol of Nature, of that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing."

The exhibition includes loans from distinguished private collections and international institutions including the Fondation Beyeler, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as an impressive selection of works from the Calder Foundation. Enchanted Reverie: Klee and Calder will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a selected chronology and major essays written by the historian Olivier Berggruen and Dr. Elizabeth Hutton Turner, renowned specialists in the emergence and development of Modern and Post-War art.

[1] Katharine Kuh, "Alexander Calder" in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 39.

[2] Paul Klee, "Creative Credo V" in Tribune der Kunst und Zeit (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920).