Paul Klee museum in Bern is a refuge of the modern

THE elegant city of Bern is home to a museum built to house the oeuvre of Paul Klee.

Refuge of the modern

BERN, though the capital of Switzerland, is less well known to foreigners than the cosmopolitan centres of Geneva and Zurich, but it is an elegant city with arcaded streets and houses mostly dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It also has a number of museums, of which the most conspicuous is the relatively recent Zentrum Paul Klee (2005), honouring the city's most famous artist.

Klee was born in 1879 near Bern to a German father and a Swiss mother but spent many years in Germany. He began his career in Munich before moving to Weimar in 1920, where he was a teacher at the Bauhaus, moving with the school to Dessau five years later. In 1931 he left the Bauhaus to take a position at the Academy in Dusseldorf, but was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933.

He returned to Bern and spent the rest of his life in Switzerland, where he died in 1940. His son Felix, who had been serving in the German army, was thought to have perished on the Russian front, and Klee's widow Lily transferred the estate to the new Paul Klee Foundation. Some years later Felix, who had been in a Russian prison camp, came back and challenged the transfer of his father's estate. He was partly successful, with the result that the Klee oeuvre was divided for years between the foundation and the family.

On Felix's death in 1990, his widow Livia agreed to give the collection to the city of Bern on condition that a museum be built to house it. The municipal government had no funds for this purpose but a wealthy surgeon, Maurice Mueller, offered to pay for the building on condition he could nominate the architect. He chose Renzo Piano, and the result is a remarkable building that undulates in three great waves on the side of a hill outside the city.

Inside, the museum is a capacious series of spaces built over several levels. The central hall is devoted to the exhibition of Klee's work, and the present display, as its title suggests, follows the artist's life and development from his childhood - including both documentary material and intriguing early drawings - through the process of discovering his own particular language in which poetic whimsy is combined with delicacy of line and refined subtlety of pictorial surface.

Klee's work was included in the notorious Nazi exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) which opened in 1937, and this is a natural link to the temporary exhibition downstairs, devoted to Hanna Bekker vom Rath, a collector, art dealer and supporter of modern art, who continued to protect German modernists during the Nazi period and did much to promote their work internationally after the war.

Hanna vom Rath was born into a wealthy family in Frankfurt in 1893, and studied art at the Stuttgart Academy before marrying Paul Bekker, a Jewish writer and music critic, with whom she had three children before their divorce. In the meantime she bought a large house near Wiesbaden which she redecorated and gradually filled with her collections; it became known as the Blue House and remained her home for the rest of her life.

The exhibition opens with a reconstruction of the Blue House's living room, and many of the works included are from her collection, supplemented by others by the same artists. They include individuals like Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and, of course, Klee, who are well known, but also less familiar figures of the time such as Ida Kerkovius.

Perhaps even more interestingly, we discover late works by such painters as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who was a close friend. Artists in any age may have a period of greatest strength and maturity, preceded by a more tentative phase of apprenticeship and followed either by the mellowing of age or outright decline, but the pattern in the 20th century is different. Frenetically changing art fashions consign all but a few individuals - Picasso being an obvious exception - to a defined time span of relevance, which may be mercilessly brief; outside this historical window, we are surprised to find them still working.

During the Nazi years, vom Rath held secret exhibitions at the Blue House and at her flat in Berlin, and in 1947 she was able to show her friends openly through her Kunstkabinett Gallery in Frankfurt; the first works she exhibited there were the prints of Kaethe Kollwitz, which also stand out as the most enduring things in the present exhibition.

She spent many years after the war - from 1952 to 1967 - travelling the world promoting the work of the German modernists of the first half of the century. The exhibition includes photographs of the installation of works, which she carried around from one place to the next. There is a certain pathos in this promotion of an earlier modernism amid the storm of changing postwar art fashions, but her act is especially moving as a kind of act of national expiation, an attempt to show the world that Germany was not reducible to the brutality of the Nazis.

It is hard to exaggerate the horror of Hitler's regime, but also hard to imagine today how the totalitarian mind worked, whether in its Nazi or Soviet manifestations. In fact, if North Korea serves any purpose, it is as a living fossil of this vanished world of the 20th century, with its clownish pomposity, intellectual repression, militarism, relentless surveillance of the population, and a primitive personality cult.

But it is a mistake to underestimate the element of idealism that supported all varieties of totalitarianism, for the greatest evils of the 20th century were the outcome of perversely utopian visions, not just base passions and opportunism. Similarly, it is wrong to dismiss the Degenerate Art exhibition as simply a bad joke, as we tend to do with smug hindsight, or as a freakish eccentricity of German history.

In reality, the idea of degeneracy was pervasive from the later 18th to the mid-20th centuries. One of its origins may lie in the Enlightenment concern with the different character of nations and the effect of environment on health and physical and psychological constitution. From the middle of the 18th century authors from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Johann Joachim Winckelmann also start to criticise the debility of modern Europeans compared with the "noble savage" or the people of antiquity, who lived outdoors and took constant exercise.

The growth of cities in the Industrial Revolution made the situation worse: modern urban man grew feeble from days in the office while the working class was exhausted from labour in factories and sickly from life in crowded, unhealthy tenements. Disease flourished in these conditions. Public health and sanitation became increasingly urgent concerns and working conditions in factories and mines began to be regulated.

This was also the time of the first modern systems of physical education and the beginning of the kind of collective exercise regimes that are still used today in schools, sports teams and armed forces. Gymnastic and aerobic exercises were developed in Sweden, Germany and England, from where they were taken as far as India. Strengthening the body was seen not only as a way of improving individual health, but at a social level as a defence against the weakness and degeneracy of the people as a whole.

This question is prominent in the history of Australia as well, because of anxieties about the taint of degenerate convict stock. Against this view was the hope that the same outdoor conditions and exercise that had made the ancients healthy would transform our population - ideas one finds expressed in almost these words in the period between the wars.

The sense too that art could be a kind of canary in the mine for national degeneracy has a long prehistory, but it is perhaps first manifest in the initial angry reaction against the impressionists in 1874, in the wake of France's defeat by Germany four years earlier. The apparent deliquescence of the new pictures was felt to mirror the recent failure of the national spirit.

The condemnation of modern art in these terms is by no means the monopoly of the extreme Right. Modernists were repressed in Soviet Russia in the same way, only the Marxist condemnation of the avant-garde tended to emphasise social decadence rather than psycho-physiological degeneracy. And whereas nothing more was heard of degeneracy after the fall of the Nazis, the communists carried on their critique of modernism as decadent until the fall of the Berlin Wall. I recall being unable to buy a copy of Kafka in one of the main bookshops of Prague, and Marxist intellectuals had to struggle to justify their appreciation of such authors as Proust or Beckett.

Perhaps the ultimate irony in all this is that the resort to primitivism by the modernists of the early 20th century is itself a manifestation of the same belief that contemporary culture is effete and that we need to resort to something more primal and instinctual. These early German modernists are anti-rational, primitivistic and subjectively mystical in ways akin to the more disturbing tendencies in German politics of the time; Emil Nolde, indeed, was a member of the Nazi party.

If their work was unpalatable to Germany's new rulers, it was partly because Nazi racial theories condemned modernist primitivism as inspired by the art of inferior peoples. At the same time, the Nazis wanted an art capable of communicating with the masses. Like all the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, they debauched the tradition of Western art in their quest for propaganda imagery - inevitably kitsch and even, as in the simultaneously brutal and mincing sculpture of Arno Breker, strangely camp. The Nazis might long for the poise and authority of classicism, but that goal was unattainable because their ideology was quintessentially at odds with the humanism that was its foundation.

Between Bruecke and Blaue Reiter: Hanna Bekker vom Rath, a pioneer of modernism, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, until February 23

Paul Klee: Life and work, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, until March 30