Paul Klee Rediscovered: Works from the Bürgi Collection

From the Inside Flap: Known for their subtle and vibrant color, their fantastic dream images, their wit, and their playful imagination, the works of painter Paul Klee are among the most famous and recognizable of modern art. In this ground-breaking new volume, an essential group of 150 oils, watercolors, drawings, and prints, representative of Klee's entire career, is released to the public for the first time. These unpublished works are held in the Burgi Collection. Hanni Burgi (1880-1938) and her son Rolf (1906-1967) were intimately bound to Paul Klee and his family, and during the two and a half decades Hanni knew the artist, she built up the second largest collection of his pictures in the world: as early as 1938, it was described as "a very beautiful, full collection of [Klee's] works, which reflects the whole of his development as an artist." Rolf Burgi continued to add to it after his mother's death. It was Rolf, also, who, as the Klees' closest friend and adviser, made possible their escape from Nazi Germany in 1933, and, after Paul Klee's death, administrated his estate, saved it from liquidation, and set up the Paul Klee Foundation. Offering new art-historical insight into Klee's career-from his early Impressionist-inspired works, through his Expressionism with Kandisky and his Bauhaus period between the wars-this book contains the only reproduction of these important but little-known pieces collected by the Burgis, and will become essential to all enthusiasts of the art of Paul Klee and the modern period. The Burgi Collection represents a legacy of enduring loyalty and commitment to Paul Klee and his work that this lavishly illustrated volume handsomely honours.