The Swiss-born painter, Paul Klee (1879-1940), has been beloved by the Japanese for many years, and numerous exhibitions have been held in the past. As illustrated by such subtitles as "Erzählung und Schöpfung (Narrative and Creation)", "Paul Klee and His Travels", and "To Draw, To Paint", these exhibitions have served to relay the charms of Klee's art to many, poetically extolling the stories surrounding his works and the creative philosophy. This Klee exhibition, which will be the first to be held in Kyoto and Tokyo at the National Museum of Modern Art, will build upon the legacy of these prior exhibitions to focus on a perspective that has not previously been considered, how Klee's works were physically created.

From 1911 onwards, Klee created an ongoing list of his work throughout his career. This list, which begins with a work in 1883, when the artist was four years old, contains approximately 9,600 entries. These entries include not only the title of the work, but also a detailed description of the method used to create each work, indicating that how each work was created was of extreme importance to this artist. Klee kept a document of this "working process" through photographs of his atelier, and categorized certain of his works as "Sonderklasse (Special Class)", keeping these works at hand to use as models to reflect on.

This exhibition, consisting of approximately 170 pieces selected mainly from the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, contains many works which have never been shown in Japan. Comprised of six chapters, two that introduce the works recorded in his atelier photographs and the model works that he categorized as "Special Class", and others that investigate the specific techniques used in the creative process, this exhibition seeks to shed light on the creative working process of Klee's art. Throughout his life, Klee pursued not only the philosophy of art and the artist, but also specifically how art is created by the hands of the artist. Investigating Klee's interest in this issue will provide a new critical perspective on production from which to consider art in the present day, in the years after the birth of the ready-made.