• Paul Klee, exhibition invitation card recto. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1969. Cream card. Black line drawing printed on cream ground: a horizontal landscape composition combining industrial, architectural, and fantastical elements. At left, a squat brick chimney stack emits three rounded tree-like forms. Centre: scattered figures, flags, a crescent moon shape, and horizontal elements suggesting a ground plane. At right, a large triangular form — part tent, part tower — rises steeply, with a spiral
  • Paul Klee, exhibition invitation card verso. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1969. Plain cream card, no text or image. Faint embossed or impressed text visible along the top edge, partially legible, consistent with a printed address or gallery name pressed through from the interior. Light age toning, minor surface marks, and faint handling wear.
  • Paul Klee, exhibition invitation card verso. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1969. Plain cream card, no text or image. Faint embossed or impressed text visible along the top edge, partially legible, consistent with a printed address or gallery name pressed through from the interior. Light age toning, minor surface marks, and faint handling wear.
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Musée National d’Art Moderne

Paul Klee — Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1969

Paul Klee — Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1969

£180.00 GBP
£180.00 GBP
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French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Paris
Exhibition invitation (carton d’invitation)
Blind-embossed laid card; offset lithograph reproduction to recto; printed invitation text to interior
Inauguration: Tuesday 25 November 1969, 15h–20h
Musée National d’Art Moderne, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris 16
Invitation valid for two persons

Condition: Very good. Even toning to laid stock, light handling wear consistent with age.

Official invitation issued under the authority of the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs for a major retrospective of Paul Klee at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. The card is printed on high-quality laid paper bearing a blind-embossed manufacturer’s mark (‘LES MANUFACTURES D’ANSONS’), situating it within a tradition of refined French art publishing and state-issued cultural material.

The recto reproduces Klee’s 1924 drawing In der Segel-von-Taschen-Klip-Klap-Anstalt, produced during his Bauhaus years. The work stages a mechanical, quasi-architectural fiction — part satire, part diagram — reflecting Klee’s resistance to rigid functionalism and his insistence on intuition within structured systems.

The interior text formalises the invitation through Monsieur Edmond Michelet, then Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, marking the exhibition as a state-level cultural event. The card operates less as a simple announcement and more as an administrative object: a controlled document issued to a limited network of officials, collectors, and institutional figures.

Printed support for the alignment of artist, state, and institution. A minor document carrying the consolidation of Klee within postwar French cultural policy.

Ships flat with protective backing.

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