Francesca Ferrari: Paul Klee's Automata

Please join us for a talk that explores the depictions of automata that the Swiss artist Paul Klee executed in the late 1910s and early 1920s, offering a fresh interpretation of his engagement with the mechanization of modern life. It shows that, by combining biological and mechanical elements, Klee’s automata foster his unique understanding of machines – not just as systems compatible with the inner workings of organisms such as human beings, animals, and plants, but also as models for the vitality and dynamism that he attributed to pictorial elements like lines, planes, and geometric forms. The works discussed present nature and technology as complementary and interconnected categories, celebrating the animation that Klee thought propelled both life and art.

This talk is presented in conjunction with After Modernism: Selection from the Neumann Family Collection, which includes four works by Klee.

Francesca Ferrari is an art historian specializing in early twentieth-century European and Latin American Art. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having obtained her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in art history and English from the Université de Lausanne. At present, she is working on a book project titled Animated Geometries: Abstraction and the Body After the First World War, which examines the intersection of geometric abstraction, physical motion, and sensory stimulation in post-WWI avant-garde art. Her research and publications focus on the international development of abstraction, art’s role in shaping new models of corporeality and subjectivity in the so-called Machine Age, and the co-defining histories of modern art, dance, theater, and performance. She has received fellowships from the Museum of Modern Art, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Stiftung Arp e.V., among others, and has curated exhibitions at MoMA, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and Monaco’s Palais Princier. Her work has appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, and Afterimage, as well as in several peer reviewed journals, exhibition catalogues, and online publications.

Host or Publisher Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania