PAUL KLEE
Other Possible Worlds
at the Jewish Museum
by Melissa Stern, April 13, 2026
Monument in Progress – Mixed media on paper, mounted on board. 1929. Said to be a portrait of Mussolini
A fascinating and complex exhibition has opened at The Jewish Museum In NYC. Entitled Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds, the show is a large retrospective (100 paintings and drawings) that focuses on the artist’s works made during the last ten years of his life as an anti- Fascist artist living in Switzerland. This is the first American museum show of this body of work.
To do this credit and to give the proper context for Klee’s later work, the exhibition starts with very early drawings from 1903, gradually adding more complex works in oil, watercolor and mixed media as the show progresses in time. It’s a conventional museum paradigm. As always, it is valuable to watch an artist’s visual evolution over time.
But this show has an extra twist. The height of Klee’s success and influence dovetails with the rise of Fascism in Germany, and his response to it is the true focus of the exhibition.
In 1931 Klee lived in Berlin and had been teaching full time at The Bauhaus for about ten years. He had grown increasingly unhappy with both his teaching position and the change in the philosophical orientation of the school; he felt that that the school was focusing increasingly on industrial design rather than painting. He resigned and took a teaching job in Dusseldorf. His work had continually evolved as he developed the kind of abstracted visual language that eventually became a signature element of Modernism.
As the Nazis rose to power and began to purge Germany of “degenerate culture,” they began to persecute artists who worked in any form of modernist genre, particularly painting.
Crawling man-Chalk on paper on cardboard. 1933
The Game is Getting Out of Hand-Pencil on paper on cardboard. 1940
Though not Jewish, Klee was labeled a “degenerate” and in fact the Nazis found his work so subversive that it was officially declared that he MUST be Jewish. He was called Paul “Zion” Klee in a local Dusseldorf newspaper. He was fired from his job, all of his paintings were removed from German museums, and he and his family were forced into exile in Switzerland.
The exhibition explores the ways in which Klee, while continuing to pursue abstraction, began to express both overt and covert reflections of Fascism in his work. Drawings depicting outright violence, a new theme in Klee’s work, depict his response to the horrors happening all around him.
It’s an exhibition that demands your time and attention. While the later drawings express more obvious distress, the paintings are often quite subtle and “coded” in Klee’s own visually symbolic language. The exhibition is beautifully installed. The Museum’s designers have chosen a rich and potent shade of dark red to punctuate the artworks.
The irony of Klee not being Jewish yet being persecuted for perceived “Jewishness “struck me hard while at this exhibition. We have no written records of Klee’s reaction to this, and indeed he was lucky to have been able to leave Germany with his family and belongings. Seeing the future, he chose not to fight the accusation of being Jewish, but to leave and live. He obviously left behind Jewish colleagues as well as friends who, while not Jewish, resisted the Nazis, some of whom no doubt did not survive the war. The Jewish Museum has a stated commitment to showcasing the work of artists who currently or in the past have engaged with the political challenges of their era. This is admirable, and the Paul Klee exhibition very much in keeping with this commitment.
I came away from this expansive exhibition with a deeper, more visceral sense of an important 20th Century artist, about Klee’s feelings of the politics around him, his life in exile, and the deeply expressive palette he developed to capture the moment and make it universal. Klee’s pictures speak volumes, about his times, and perhaps about ours.
Installation of the exhibition