Part of the game of art nowadays is for artists, whatever their influence or orientation, to avoid classification. Once this happens, their work often devolves into well-worm cultural cliche. One 20th-century artist who escaped this process, though, was Paul Klee (1879- 1940), whose work is as hard to pin down today as it was when it was first created.
"Paul Klee and his Travels," a exhibition now at MOMA Kamakura, then touring to Morioka, Tsu and Matsumoto, reinforces this innovative artist's popularity in Japan.
The works on display tease us with touches of genre -- Cubism, Primitivism and Surrealism -- as if daring us to lump their creator in with the early 20th-century artistic movements with which he collaborated, such as the Blue Rider Expressionist group or the Bauhaus movement.