Paul Klee, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Berlin

Born in Switzerland, Paul Klee (1879-1940) started out as a musician like his parents but soon chose to study painting in Munich during the years 1898-1901. After finishing at the Acad­emy, he visited Italy with another young artist to widen his know­ledge of art. Then he lived in Bern during 1902-6, taking great interest in music as well as painting. This busy young man settled in Munich in 1906 and had his first one-man exhibition in 1910 at the Kunsthaus in Zurich.

For me the most interesting part of Klee’s life started when he met Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Macke and Marc in 1911 and was included in the second avant-garde Blue Rider exhibition 1912. He was formally invited by Kand­insky to join the Blue Rider group in that same year.

The next big revelation occurred when Klee visited Paris,  meeting Delaunay and his Cubist pictures. Within a couple of years, Klee travel­led to Tunis and Kairouan with Moilliet and Macke where his interest in colour was becoming evident.

Klee, 1920

Head with a German Moustache

MoMA

The EY Exhibition – Paul Klee Making Visible was on at the Tate Modern in London till March 2014.  The history for this post came directly from the Tate Modern’s press release.

I would have liked the Tate Modern’s exhibition to include paintings from the Blue Rider and the pre-war Tunis era. But the exhib­it­ion began with the post-WW1 era, when he first developed his individual abstract patchworks of colour. The many technical innovations that followed were displayed throughout the exhibition, including oil transfer paint­ings (They’re Biting 1920 see below), dynamic colour gradations (Sus­pended Fruit 1921) and multicoloured pointillism (Memory of a Bird 1932).

Being a Bauhaus fan, I was delighted when Klee moved to Weimar in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus, then moved again with the Bauhaus when they opened up plush new facilities in Dessau in 1926. Klee worked with great rigour; he inscribed numbers on his works in accordance with a personal cataloguing system and wrote volumes on colour theory and detailed lecture notes. The abstract canvases he produced at Bauhaus, such as the rhythmical composition Fire in the Evening (1929 see below), took his reputation to new international heights. This king of European modernism shared the throne only with Matisse and Picasso.

Klee 1920

They’re Biting

Tate Modern 

Klee then taught at the Dusseldorf Academy 1931-3 but the joy of being a practising artist and academic ended when he was dismissed by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933. Klee was not only dis­missed from his teaching position by the Nazis; his works were removed from public art galleries and labelled Degenerate Art in Germany!! He took refuge back at home in Switzerland where he suff­ered from politic­al turmoil, financial insecurity and declining health. Nonetheless he continued to paint until his death in 1940, still in Switzerland.

This was the UK’s first large-scale Klee exhibition for over a decade. Challenging his reputation as a solitary dreamer, the exhibition revealed the innovation and rigour with which he created his work and presented it to the public. Bringing together over 130 colourful works from collections around the world, the Paul Klee exhibition spanned the three decades of his career: from WW1, his years of teaching at the Bauhaus, up to his final quite radical paintings made in Bern until the outbreak of war in 1939. The show reunited important works which the artist created, catalogued or exhibited together at these key moments in his life. By showing these delicate works alongside each other, it was a unique chance to explore his innovations and ideas.

Klee 1929

 Fire in the Evening

MoMA

Klee left more than 10,000 astoundingly diverse works at his death. Let me cite The Observer. Klee was the Buddha of the Bauhaus, imagining the afterlife as a pale paradise floating in a universe of tremulous lines and finding the divine in every dragonfly and acorn. He was Klee the modernist, overriding the paradox of depiction – how to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface – by showing the world as if viewed from above and yet also within, as idiosyncratic incidents and structures adrift in a haze of pure colour. There was Klee the innovator and Klee the genius cartoonist, deflator of pomp, mocker of tin-pot tyrants and inventor of that scratchy pictographic style.

The exhibition was fortunately accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue by Tate Publishing (October 2013) which I warmly recommend.

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A special exhibition called Les Klee du paradis - Paul Klee in the Collections of the Nationalgalerie will continue until the end of August 2014 at the National Gallery of Berlin. The idea of presenting this exhibition originated from art dealer-collector Heinz Berggruen  who died in 2007. Paul Klee was one the collector's favourite artists. Represented by 70 works in the collection, he stands as one of the main protagonists of the Museum Berggruen. And Dieter Scharf (died in 2001) was also an avid collector of the artist's works. As a result, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg that he built up now includes 30+ works by Paul Klee. The two collectors specialised in different parts of Klee's career - Heinz Berggruen mainly acquired works dating from Klee's time as a teacher at the Bauhaus, while Dieter Scharf was particularly drawn to Klee's early, Symbolist-inspired works. See these two significant collections at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, part of the National Gallery of Berlin.