Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

In 1960 the state of North Rhine-Westphalia bought eighty-eight paintings by Paul Klee from an American steel magnate and built a museum around them. The choice was deliberate. Klee had taught at the Düsseldorf art academy until 1933, when the Nazis dismissed him and branded his work degenerate, and buying him back was a public act of repair.

That Klee core, well over a hundred works now, still runs through the Kunstsammlung, spread across two buildings in Düsseldorf, the black-glass K20 and the K21. Around it the state assembled classical modernism at full strength, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky and Mondrian, and later American and contemporary art.

K20's dark curved façade wraps a single city block, and inside the Klee rooms stay deliberately quiet, small pictures that reward standing close.