The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

The Swiss-born artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) spent nearly his entire career in Germany, most notably at the Bauhaus, a school of art and design, where he was a master from 1921 to 1931. Beginning around 1927, Klee taught a design class there for weavers specifically tailored to the requirements of their craft. During this period of interaction with the weaving workshop, textiles figured prominently—as both material and inspiration—in his artistic production. This lecture by Charlotte Healy, Morgan-Menil Pre-Doctoral Fellow, focuses on Klee’s drawings in which forms and figures resemble woven or knotted fibers and relates them to works by his contemporaries, including his student Anni Albers and his compatriot Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Established in 2012, the Morgan-Menil Fellowship is awarded to scholars devoted to the study of art history and theory, with demonstrated expertise in the field of modern and contemporary drawing, including aspects of its continuity with Old Master and/or nineteenth-century drawing practices.

This year’s recipient is Charlotte Healy, a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, who specializes in issues related to the materials and techniques of modern art. She is writing her dissertation on the role of the hand, along with its various associations and manifestations, in the work of Paul Klee. Previously, she was a Museum Research Consortium Fellow and Research Assistant in the Department of Painting & Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she contributed to the planning of the upcoming exhibition Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction and coedited the accompanying catalogue.