The Paul Klee retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was the great museum show in New York this past season.[1] It was a case of the Modern doing what it does best—delivering the classic modern goods. The museum staff was obviously in deep sympathy with the artist. How else could they have brought off this inspired installation, in which paintings we’ve known for years in Paris, Philadelphia, Washington, and New York found their perfect partners and places on the wall? The blessed absence of entry-point audio-tour salespeople and exit-point gift shops didn’t prevent Paul Klee from being a hit with the crowd that goes to perhaps half a dozen exhibitions a year. And unlike some shows that have pulled in the museumgoing public—unlike, for instance, the Modern’s own those-were-the-days Vienna extravaganza and the Whitney’s swashbuckling Sargent retrospective—Klee was an exhibit to which artists were also going, and going five and ten times. For some younger painters it might turn out to be one of those it-changed-my-life experiences.

The crabbed products of Klee’s symbolist and Art Nouveau youth were wisely kept in a kind of anteroom, so that his entry into the avant-garde at the beginning of World War I could hit viewers with full force in the show’s first gallery. Here, in works done between 1914 and 1919, he’s already in command of his singular synthesis of Cubist construction, Fauvist color, and a Da Vincean synthetic imagination. With the North African landscapes and such fantasies as