Paul Klee 'l'invention au quotidien: bauhaus 1921–1924' Exhibition Poster

The image in this poster is one of Paul Klee's lithographs for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar — a stacked composition of geometric forms in the Bauhaus primary palette, inscribed at the base with a handwritten reference to the Weimar Ausstellung and signed with Klee's distinctive monogram. The exhibition, held in the summer of 1923, was the Bauhaus's first comprehensive public show — in effect a justification of the school's existence, mounted in response to pressure from the Thuringian government, which had been funding the school and demanded evidence of its progress.

Walter Gropius commissioned twenty postcards from Bauhaus artists — including Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, and Herbert Bayer — as promotional materials for the exhibition. The postcards offer a snapshot of the school's educational philosophy and the remarkable variety of approaches being pursued at the time, before the Bauhaus identity became linked in popular perception with a single unified aesthetic of standardisation and tubular steel.

Klee (1879–1940) was a Swiss painter of German nationality — born in Münchenbuchsee near Bern, educated in Munich, a German citizen through his father. He taught at the Bauhaus from January 1921 to April 1931, serving in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops. These years proved to be his most fertile as an artist, and he was appointed Master of Form to the bookbindery and taught general courses in the theory of pictorial form. His lectures on colour and pictorial form, published as the Paul Klee Notebooks, remain central documents of twentieth-century art education.

Our poster imagines a February–March 1971 retrospective at a fictional Geneva gallery — the Galerie Imhof on the Place du Grand-Mézel — framing Klee's Bauhaus decade under the title l'invention au quotidien: the invention of the everyday.

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