Zentrum Paul Klee

Listen first. On a still day, the loudest sound here is often the wind moving through the grass. Under your feet the path is smooth and pale. Ahead, three long curves of steel and glass rise out of the field and sink back into it, like low hills. The building does not tower over the land. It lies down inside it. This is the Zentrum Paul Klee, on the quiet eastern edge of Bern, and it was built for one artist.

The architect was Renzo Piano, the Italian designer who also worked on the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He looked at this gentle slope and chose not to place a box on top of it. Instead he shaped the roof into three waves that follow the line of the countryside. The centre opened in 2005. From the motorway nearby, many drivers see only a ripple of metal in a meadow. Up close, the scale feels larger, and the long glass front lets the light flow deep inside.

So who was Paul Klee? He was born in 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, a small town just outside Bern, and he grew up in this city. His father was a German music teacher and his mother was Swiss. Music filled the house. As a young man Klee was a serious violinist, good enough to play with the city orchestra. For years he could not decide between music and painting. Painting won, but music stayed with him. You can feel rhythm and tempo in much of his later work.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Klee spent most of his childhood in Bern, and he chose to return here near the end of his life. Yet he was never a Swiss citizen. Because his father was German, Klee carried German nationality. He applied for Swiss citizenship in his final years, but he died before the decision came through. The city's most famous painter was, officially, a foreigner in his own hometown.

As a young artist he moved to Munich, which was then a major centre of modern art. He worked alongside painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. A journey to Tunisia in 1914 changed him deeply. The strong North African light opened his eyes to colour. Afterwards he wrote in his diary that colour and he were now one, and that he was a painter. From then on, colour became the centre of his work.

In the 1920s Klee taught at the Bauhaus, the famous German school of art and design. The Bauhaus tried to bring together art, craft and industry. Klee was a patient, thoughtful teacher. He filled thousands of pages with notes on line, colour, movement and form. Those notes still guide art students today. One sentence from that period is often repeated: art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible. Keep that idea with you as you walk through the galleries.

Then the political climate darkened. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Klee lost his teaching post in Düsseldorf. His home was searched. Later, the regime labelled his work as degenerate and removed it from German museums. Klee and his wife Lily left Germany and came back to Bern. Here, in a modest apartment, he kept working. He had less money and less recognition, but his ideas did not stop.

In his last years Klee fell seriously ill with a disease that hardened his skin and his internal organs. It was later identified as scleroderma. His hands grew stiff. And yet this was one of his most productive periods. In one year alone, he produced well over a thousand works. The lines became thicker and simpler, sometimes like signs or letters. Many show angels, half human and half spirit. He died in 1940, in southern Switzerland.

The centre holds the largest collection of Klee's work anywhere in the world — around four thousand paintings, watercolours and drawings. That is a large share of everything he made. Because works on paper are sensitive to light, only a small selection is shown at any one time. The display changes regularly. If you come back in a year, you will likely meet a different Klee: playful in one room, serious and quiet in the next.

The centre exists largely thanks to a surgeon. Maurice Müller, a Bernese orthopaedic doctor known for his work on hip replacements, and his wife Martha gave the land and much of the funding. Klee's family also gave a large part of the collection. Many cities build museums for an artist long after the fact. Here, private generosity, family memory and the city came together to bring Klee home in a lasting way.

Notice that this is more than a picture gallery. Under one of the waves there is a concert hall, a nod to Klee the violinist. Another part holds Creaviva, a hands-on space where children and adults can paint and experiment. Klee loved children's drawings and took them seriously. He believed their freedom was close to real art. So the sound of a child laughing in the corridor here is, in a way, part of the plan.

Step outside again and look around. The fields around the building are still farmed, and the seasons change the view from the glass. There is a sculpture area on the grounds, and paths lead across the slope. Not far away lies the Schosshalde cemetery, where Klee is buried. His gravestone carries words he wrote about himself: that he could not be grasped in this world, and that he lived as much among the dead as among the unborn.

Before you leave, stand for a moment where the roof meets the ground. Follow one steel curve with your eyes, from the grass, up into the sky, and down again. It is a simple line, drawn large across a Swiss field. Klee once described drawing as taking a line for a walk. Today, that line runs right in front of you... and now, it is your turn to walk.