Paul Klee at Tate Modern
Paul Klee [1879-1940], prolific painter, printmaker, lecturer and writer on art, ranks among the most distinctive figures in 20th century Modernism, enjoys enduring popularity for his playful, witty and quasimysterious compositions, often imbued with childlike wonder.
Yet Tate Modern’s comprehensive, 17-room exhibition Paul Klee: Making Visible readily testifies his intricate, multi-layered and usually small-scale pieces are deeply serious and richly sensitive, revealing complex interaction with key influences - the Cubist, Expressionist and ‘Blue Rider’ movements. Over 130 colourful oils, watercolours and drawings from collections worldwide clearly demonstrate Klee’s artistic evolution over the three decades to his death.
A Swiss-born German citizen, Klee studied in Munich, by 1911 joining its ‘Blue Rider’ group with Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Macke and Marc - but on a 1914 visit to Tunisia, the beauty and power of natural colours profoundly changed his work: “Colour possesses me forever”. Radical transition from dark imagery to sunlit colour is evident by contrasting the 1913 Cubist grey-and-brown ‘When God considered the Creation of the Plants,’ with 1914’s delicate Kairuan vista, while Translucencies ‘Orange-Blue’ (1915) suffuses vibrant Cubist shapes with back-lit glow.
Klee never ceased experimenting across the whole range of colours and shades, contrasting and blending to create mysterious atmosphere. From ‘Ships in the Dark,’ its yellow-sail vessels afloat on a dark brown sea under a blue moon, and the colourful rectangles of his Mondrian-style Harmony of the Northern Flora (both 1927), through the muted pointilism of ‘Plants in the Courtyard’ (1932) to Blue Night’s menacing purple shapes (1937), he restlessly expressed his conviction: “Colour and I are one”.
After radical art politics in Munich’s short-lived 1918 Communist Republic, Klee became an inspiring teacher at the avant-garde Bauhaus (1921-31), and then Dusseldorf Academy, but fled to Switzerland in 1933 when dismissed by the Nazis, who deemed his art ‘degenerate’. Yet in these most creative years, he perfected his hallmark mini-worlds of strange creatures and micro objects - flowers, trees, fish, houses, church steeples, sun, moon and stars - in bright or muted hues. The bizarre plant and bird-like figures in ‘Comedy’ (1921), evocative of African tribal masks, dancing clown-like in a dream circus, wonderfully typify this unique genre.
In deep perspective with floating boxes and flags in ‘Uncomposed in Space’ (1929) and in quasi-Surrealist rendering in ‘Puppets’ (1930), Klee’s instantly recognisable mini-worlds are at their most delightful in such works as ‘Fish Magic’ (1945), its creatures swimming around a hanging clock while two odd figures look on.
Such works merit close scrutiny - but what exactly are we seeing? Klee’s eyes are both of a child’s innocent wonder, and also of an adult’s awareness of the seemingly absurd - both scan the mystery at the heart of all things. Religion is not explicit in Klee, but it is as if he says: “unless you become like a child, you cannot enter the eternal mystery.”
Geometrical shapes were a constant in his imagery. Unlike his contemporary Mondrian, not in a quest for abstract precision, but rather one for subtle harmony: ‘Static-Dynamic Gradation’ (1923) is like a just-discovered ancient mosaic.
Onset of war and premonitions of his own death - he suffered from a skin-wasting disease - give his final works like Twilight Flowers (1940) a feeling of menacing sadness. Yet his huge legacy - some 9,000 works - testifies to the remarkably inventive genius of one of the towering masters of modern art. And the exhibition title? Klee once declared: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.”
Brian Cooper Paul Klee: Making Visible is at Tate Modern until 9 March.
Admission £16.50, concessions.