Rhythm, melancholy, humor and mystique exude in large dollops from the expansive display of Paul Klee’s oeuvre currently on view at Tate Modern.

Swiss expressionist, Paul Klee is one of the great creative innovators of European Modernism and a twentieth century giant. His importance equals that of Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky and Miro, but his work is also mysterious, deeper in narrative and more demanding. It is the years that he spent as a teacher working at the Bauhaus, the German hotbed of early twentieth-century modernist design, that forms the central thesis of the exhibition. This period was significant in the development of Klee’s prolific career as a master colourist who worked fluently across many mediums. A natural and admired draughtsman, he embarked on an extensive passage from symbolism to abstraction, while developing an intuitive line in vibrant, witty narratives. It is his extraordinary versatility which has enchanted the public and influenced many artists for over a century. artes fine arts magazine

Paul Klee: Making Visible is a triumph for curator Matthew Gale, who successfully reveals the innovation and rigour with which Klee’s work was created, and is presented. The gallery space has been arranged into a glorious survey and disciplined examination of Klee’s work from 1912, when he was 32, until his death in 1940, then aged 60. It is a very large show which is organised in a strictly chronologically style around six main periods, spreading across 17 galleries. The selection of 130 colourful drawings, watercolours and paintings from collections around the world have been reunited and hung in a way that the artist originally intended. The viewer is immediately transported into the Paul Klee visual universe. As orientation to the show, there is a suite of intimate rooms at the start, and the ensuing pictures are presented in a sparse way permitting them to sufficiently breathe and encouraging each work to be experienced with deep concentration. Abstract and semi-abstract artwork adorn the walls, presenting cubist, surrealist, symbolist and expressionist narratives, as well as fantasies mixed with realist mythology. Gale aspires that this exhibition serve to “challenge Klee’s reputation as a solitary dreamer.” The down side of the exhibition hang is how excessively serious and hard-going the work feels at times. This is in contrast to the whimsical representation and caricature-like nature which Klee saw as “the infantilism of my work,” which is omnipresent across his work.

Paul Klee was born near Bern, in 1879, to a German father and Swiss mother. He grew up in a house devoted to music. His father taught piano, organ, singing and violin while his mother was a trained singer. Inevitably, music and art would be equally important to Klee during his school years. A move to Munich to study painting after he graduated was unsuccessful, as he was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts. This led him to study privately with Heinrich Knirr. A trip to Italy in 1901 led Klee to undertake an extensive four year programme in reading, studying and experimenting. It was this quest which allowed him to develop his own artistic identity. During this time he also rediscovers an entire body of work from his childhood, consisting of landscapes, townsapes, and satirical and grotesque doodles from his parent’s attic.

When Klee held his first solo exhibition in 1910, the response was mixed. It was around that time that he encountered Picasso’s early works and began to engage with the radical reinvention of perspective and pictorial space pioneered by cubism. Paul Klee kept a meticulous, detailed handwritten catalogue of his work from the early stages of his career. This record proved to be crucial when organising the numerous exhibitions that he subsequently enjoyed throughout his life, as they demonstrated the consistent progression of his work. Presentation of his work was important to Klee, seeing of each motif growing like a living organism. Klee’s unique system of recording his output has benefited the large number of monograph exhibitions that have been devoted to his extraordinary, extensive body of work, ever since. This exhibition is no different. Before the outbreak of World War 1 and early on in his career Klee became loosely associated with the Blaue Reiter group, founded byartists, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He was devastated when Marc was killed in battle, and although Klee was also drafted, the deaths of so many artists allowed him to be kept away from action on the front. Cubism, abstraction and colour allowed his visual language to evolve over the years. He reveals himself in small amounts of detail over a period of time and in a variety of ways, even in the many works that he created during the same period.

Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus, first located in Weimar, and then Dessau, Germany from 1921, until closed by the government in 1933. But the radical political changes adopted over time saw his work being removed from collections and labelled ‘degenerate modernist art’ by the Nazis. After being dismissed from his post he moved with his family back to Switzerland where his productivity remained fertile amidst great turmoil and financial insecurity. It is during this time that Klee was diagnosed with an incurable degenerative disease and began receiving medical treatment. Every one of Klee’s pictures is a departure, yet each work appears to start with a similar method- the abstract mark or shape . He famously described his drawing as “taking a line for a walk.” Klee effortlessly encouraged dots, triangles, circles and squares to join the journey into the great unknown, enticingly drawing in the eye and allowing the viewer to comfortably “walk” with him as enter his world of fantasy and vision. The result is individualist and inventive. His colourful, dainty, jolly and boarderline Fauvist tendencies are on full show in Rhythmic Landscape of Trees (1920). In A Young Lady’s Adventure (1922), the opaqueness of his watercolours gives way to a subtle, mysterious eroticism.

Klee is widely acknowledged as the ultimate artist’s artist. It is easy to see why artists, in particular, respond favourably to Klee’s visual language, although his exquisite paintings do not respond to easy classification. He was undoubtedly shaped by an era of artistic and political turmoil and was affected by momentous historical events. To embrace Paul Klee’s oeuvre is also to understand his particularly European contemporaries and subsequent followers: from Jean Miro to Pablo Picasso; Andre Derain to Georges Pierre Seurat; Rene Magritte to Mark Rothko. His influences are also felt in the work of Mary Fedden, Sandra Blow, Sean Scully and Paul Huxley, to name a few. Around the Fish (1926) shows his mastery of still life deep with a symbolism that is fresh and vibrant. Like Braque the symbolism of fish played an important role in Klee’s visual repository. He also created rich, evocative compositions with “magical squares” and a strong geometric passion and pattern is displayed in Fire In The Evening (1929), while Above Mountain Summit (1917) is a playful, symbolic representation of his unique artistic language. Puppets (1930) emanates with wonder, wit and humour, while Town Castle KR (1932) demonstrates the pointillist influences he cleverly adapted, creating a lightness which entices the viewer into the centre of the composition.

A large body of his work was developed in miniaturist fashion, and as a result, the galleries are full of modestly-sized expressive pictures. In the later galleries, works are larger, making the deciphering of Klee’s fascinating art easier. This is evident In Twilight Flowers (1940) a light, optimistic painting which also evokes an artist reminiscing; and dark premonitions become apparent in Catastrophe in a Dream (1939). Nevertheless there is a continuous musicality about the body of work, revealing the other passion of Klee, who was also a child prodigy violinist. The exhibition closes with the final painting that Klee exhibited during his lifetime, Untitled (The Last Still Life) 1940. This appears to be a prescient indicator of his impending morbidity. Paul Klee and his father passed away in the same year, six months apart from each other. More than 10,000 of his works survived Klee’s death. His output was particularly feverish in his final year, when he created over 1,200 oils, pastels, gouache and watercolours.

Right: Catastrophe in a Dream (1939).

This is an important, but intensely complex show. The small-scale nature of Klee’s body of work, coupled with the magnitude of viewing so many together, is a tad overwhelming. It requires a focus to totally comprehend the originality and nuance of his output. Furthermore, Klee’s popularity may require the serious exhibition goer to visit the show again and again, experiencing the detailed wonder displayed throughout the galleries. There is a certain type of magic that exists in Paul Klee’s work. We can learn such a lot from him. A journey of discovery awaits at London’s Tate Modern with The EY Exhibition, Paul Klee: Making Visible.

By Jennifer Francis, Contributing Writer*

Left: Paul Klee, Untitled (The Last Still Life), 1940.

Paul Klee: Making Visible is at Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk) until March 9. Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm, Fri-Sat 10am-10pm. Admission £15, concessions available.

*Jennifer Francis is Director of Marketing and Communications at the Philadelphia Museum of Art