I hate Paul Klee

Works on Paper and Artists’ Books from the Speck Collection: it is a very special and quite extraordinary collection that the physician, Proustian and Cologne homme de lettres Reiner Speck has assembled over more than 40 years. The array of artists gathered here is the who’s who of modern and contemporary art history. And yet there is something else that comes to the fore, for all the public admiration for a collection that so consistently seems to breathe the spirit of a library: an undertone that curiously unsettles, moves and astonishes. Cy Twombly’s works on paper, in their smaller formats, are uncommonly spectacular and dense, almost as though they wanted to make one forget the emptiness of large canvases. Works by Polke, Förg, Herold, Kippenberger, Oehlen and Trockel likewise seem to have the effect of a quintessence, without any grandstanding. Expansive, by contrast, is Klossowski, by now amply represented and, alongside Proust – present with miniatures barely ten centimetres in size – one of the few writers of significance to draw, and one who, for the disposition of his delicate coloured-pencil drawings and their finely erotic obsessions, discovered the large format for himself long before the photographers did. And so everything in this collection has its place and its purpose, and so the volume now at last devoted to it may with every justification claim for itself, within the long series of collection monographs, the attribute of the most beautiful volume of all – from the accomplished layout to the finely printed reproductions of works and books, from the paper to the texts; none of the other publications has hitherto managed to breathe the spirit of this collection in such a way, nor to lend force to a rather ill-fated dictum of recent years: modernism is our antiquity! This book shows why!

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