Image: Paul Klee, Fast getroffen (Nearly Hit), 1928; collection SFMOMA; Albert M. Bender Collection, Albert M. Bender Bequest Fund purchase, 1944 Paul Klee, Komiker (Comedian) [Invention 4], 1904; Fractional and promised gift of the Djerassi Art Trust Man Ray, Untitled (Mask), 1955; collection SFMOMA, Gift of Richard and Frances Singer, 1992 Paul Klee, Barockbildnis (Herr zu Perücke) (Baroque Portrait [Lord Wig]), 1920; Extended loan and promised gift of the Carl Djerassi Trust I Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe), Untitled (Hands and Doll), 1936; collection SFMOMA, Gift of Robert
Klee Behind the Mask opened on 8 August 2026 on Floor 2 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where entry to the exhibition is included with general admission. The museum's event data lists the presentation as running to 30 June 2027, although its public exhibition listing gives no closing date.
The exhibition places Paul Klee at the forefront of a fascination with the mask that took hold at the turn of the twentieth century. As artists in his circles looked for alternatives to realistic representation and to stable notions of identity, the mask became a versatile form linking ancient ritual, modern psychology and popular entertainment, while theatre, caricature and folk traditions blurred the distinction between high and low culture. After the First World War those attitudes gained urgency: many of Klee's friends were killed, exiled or deeply changed, and he embraced abstraction as a cathartic process. His simplified, interlocking figures function like masks, as symbolic systems rather than portraits. As Klee remarked, "My self, for instance, is a dramatic ensemble."
Because his work circulated widely through exhibitions and reproductive media, it reached artists associated with Dadaism and Surrealism, and works connected to those movements are central to the display. Among the pieces SFMOMA has previewed are Klee's oil on board Fast getroffen (Nearly Hit), 1928, from the Albert M. Bender Collection, which the museum's own collection record lists as on view on Floor 2 for this exhibition; Komiker (Comedian) [Invention 4], 1904, a fractional and promised gift of the Djerassi Art Trust; Barockbildnis (Herr zu Perücke) (Baroque Portrait [Lord Wig]), 1920, an extended loan and promised gift of the Carl Djerassi Trust I; Man Ray's molded paper and pigment sculpture Untitled (Mask), 1955; and an untitled 1936 gelatin silver print by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. The selection therefore draws on SFMOMA's own holdings together with promised gifts and an extended loan rather than on institutional loans.
The museum is at 151 Third Street in San Francisco, open Friday to Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday from noon to 8 p.m., and closed on Wednesdays.
