I hate Paul Klee

Works on paper and artists' books from the Speck Collection

It is a very special and extraordinary collection that the doctor, Proustian and Cologne homme de lettres Reiner Speck has put together over 40 years. The group of artists assembled is a who's who of modern and contemporary art historiography. And yet, despite all the public admiration for a collection that so consistently seems to breathe the spirit of a library, there is something else that comes to the fore, a nuance that is strangely irritating, touching and astonishing. Cy Twombly's works on paper, with their smaller formats, are incredibly spectacular and dense, almost as if they wanted to make us forget the emptiness of large canvases. Works by Polke, Förg, Herold, Kippenberger, Oehlen and Trockel also seem like a quintessence, without coming across as pompous. Klossowski, on the other hand, who is now widely represented, is one of the few writers of significance who draws, alongside Proust - who is included with miniatures barely ten centimetres in size - and who, of course, discovered the large format long before the photographers for the layout of his fine coloured pencil drawings, their finely erotic obsessions. And so everything in this collection has its place, its meaning, and so the volume that has finally been produced for this purpose must justifiably claim the attribute of the most beautiful volume in the long series of collection monographs, from the successful layout to the finely printed illustrations of works such as books, from the paper to the texts; none of the other publications has so far managed to breathe the spirit of this collection in such a way and to give validity to a hitherto rather unfortunate movement of recent years: Modernity is our antiquity! This book shows why!

Exhibition:
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum Düren, 2/10 - 20/11/2011