A Tepid Display of Modernity's Master

Paul Klee, the Swiss-born painter claimed by the dadaists, cubists, surrealists, and abstract expressionists, never set foot inside America. This fact alone makes the Neue Galerie's new show "Klee and America" somewhat confusing. In fact, the raison d'etre of this exhibit-on view until May 22-is to highlight the role played by American art dealers and collectors (of mostly German-Jewish descent) in bringing Klee to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s after his work was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis in 1933. This is, admittedly, an odd concept around which to curate an exhibition and one that the show really doesn't make much of. As such, the intimate show never really adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

A key into Klee's method is found in something the artist wrote during a trip to Turin in 1914: "Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever." The few dozen works on display in the three elegant rooms of the Neue's temporary exhibit space show Klee's remarkable and often unexpectedly meaningful use of color throughout the range of his output. Iconic watercolors like Yellow House (1915) and Tunisian Gardens (1919) show the artist's exuberant embrace of color. Many of the other works are mixed-media compositions of oil transfer, watercolor, pencil, and ink. They run the gamut of Klee's career, showing the integrity that underlies the artist's various forays into Modernism's various schools.

There is much here that one can consider typical Klee, a sensibility at once transparent and opaque: a love for symbols and non-representational notations and a certain juvenile simplicity. The artist's enthusiasm for the possibility of new techniques and experimentation is seen in works like Flowers in the Night (1930), a cornucopia of color and disembodied form. In 1922's Fool in Christ-one of the most striking works here-a totem-pole figure with flopping ears and a wrinkled chest, the grotesque effect is enhanced by the grim combination of browns and yellows. The result looks like a Picasso gone horrifyingly wrong.

The influence of cubism and futurism is seen clearly in Nocturne for a Horn, a triptych from 1921: amidst the geometrical precision, the jarring colors of a face and horn pop out of an otherwise muted palette. Also in the futurist vein is 1913's positively psychedelic When God Considered the Creation of Plants. Klee packs this small work-notable for its sophisticated use of shading-with almost obsessive detail of plants, people, and stars jutting out of every facet.

A dreamlike sensibility that lurks in the background of all Klee's work comes to the fore in pieces like Tropical Garden Plantation (1923), Colorful Meal (1925), and Village Carnival (1926). The last of these is a Chagall-like scene of figures of dogs and people floating amidst rooftops, the sun, the moon, and the stars. The saturated palette lends the work a more somber tone than that of the Russian artist's. Similar surreal impulses lie behind 1927's Conjuring Trick, where a disembodied eyes , nose, and mouth are propped up in a black space amid a background of various shades of red. Striking in its violence, Slavery (1925) seems unique in the degree of its sexualized content. It depicts a hurried sketch of a woman lying prostrate with a hideous grimace as the thick, burgundy legs of a man pin her down.

The third and largest room of the exhibit contains mostly works from the 1930s. In Lion Man (1934) soft wisps of watercolor form the cartoonish figure of a man. The most ominous of these often abstract pieces is 1934's Fear in which a serpentine form is directed by arrows to its target, a blank, oval face with a red pupil in its only eye. Similarly intriguing is The Path into Blue (1934) in which a goldish brown path swirls amidst a turquoise background, with a blue sphere (reminiscent of Yves Klein) in the center. Another standout is the pointillist-inspired At Anchor (1932). Klee depicts a ship in jagged strokes; the beads of light that speckle the ship represent light reflecting off of the setting sun.

The exhibit makes pitiful use of the fourth and smallest room, which contains information about Klee's early collectors in America. Music of Beethoven and Chopin plays in the background, possibly to keep visitors from going stiff with boredom.