Paul Klee
at Tate Modern: Making Visible 2013/2014
Paul Klee 1921
No other artist of the twentieth century made marks, lines and doodles
sing with quite the same melody as Paul Klee. As a result, you’ll spend ages
peering at and poring over the witty, joyful masterpieces in this
career-spanning retrospective of the Swiss-German artist, watching Klee’s ideas
spring to life on canvas and on tiny sheets of paper that become flickering
constellations. It's hard to imagine now that his intricate, fantastical art
was regarded as 'degenerate' by the Nazis in the early1930s. At that time, Klee
was teaching at the Düsseldorf Academy. When he returned to his native Bern in
Switzerland in 1933, his work became darker in tone, reflecting the
deteriorating political situation and his severe illness – diagnosed as
scleroderma in 1936.
Blue Night 1937
The Tate's exhibition challenges Klee’s reputation as a whimsical
dreamer – famous for describing drawing as being like 'taking a line for a walk
– drawing attention to the rigour with which he recorded and catalogued his
work throughout his career. We can’t time-travel to enter Klee’s studio and see
how his works progressed but, in offering up paintings made in sequence, Tate
Modern’s show gives us the next best thing. Moving through the exhibition is
like seeing a series of snapshots of Klee’s working life. You’ll discover how
paintings developed in tandem or relay, like the Tate’s famous watercolour
‘They’re Biting’, which is flanked by three works that precede it and one that
follows. Or how they may have been revisited and reworked over time, like ‘Akt
(Nude)’, which Klee started in 1910 but didn’t finish until 1924.
Tate’s reappraisal sheds light on dualities in Klee’s character. He was
a talented musician (he played the violin, often to make ends meet) as well as
an artist. He was also ambidextrous, painting and drawing with one hand while
writing with the other. This stunning show also reveals that, while there are
elements of cubism, surrealism and pointillism in his work, he was, above all,
an individualist. It leaves you with a sense of creative, personal enquiry
about the world that is uplifting and truly inspiring.
Static Dynamic Intensification
Paul Klee at Tate Modern:
curator interview(Matthew Gale)
Paul Klee is forever associated with his famously quirky description of
drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’. The stories about the Swiss-German
artist that have stuck since his death in 1940 are similar eccentric. There’s
the tale of his first day of teaching at the Bauhaus in 1921, when Klee, then
aged 41 and already well-known in Europe, is said to have backed through the
door of the classroom, avoiding eye contact with his students, drawn two arcs
on the blackboard and declared: ‘This is the fish of Columbus!'
Another anecdote from around 1930 – by the American art collector Edward MM
Warburg – places Klee in his Dessau studio. When the artist’s beloved cat Bimbo
ambles across the still-wet watercolours they are admiring, Warburg tries to
shoo it away. Klee, however, just laughs and says: ‘Many years from now, one of
your art connoisseurs will wonder how in the world I ever got that effect.’
Steps 1929
These accounts are of a piece with Klee’s endlessly innovative and
apparently effortless paintings and works on paper, with their flowing lines,
glowing patchworks of colour and whimsical depictions of animal, plant and sea
life.
‘Klee’s work is always about what it means to be in the world, how to process
it,’ says Matthew Gale, curator of the first Klee exhibition in London for more
than a decade. Yet, behind the freewheeling genius there was another,
altogether more obsessive side to this modern master. Throughout his career,
Klee used a variety of numbering systems – made up of the year, month and day –
as a way of documenting his prodigious output. His apparently spontaneous
creativity, which led to a total of 9,000 works being produced during his lifetime,
was always held in check by this analytical approach to numbering his work. It
was his way of revisiting what he had made, making sense of quickfire artistic
impulse.
Featuring around 200 paintings, Tate Modern’s new show foregrounds this
characteristic, using it to delve deep into Klee’s creative processes. ‘The way
in which the exhibition is structured derives from Klee’s own numbering system,
which he started in 1911,’ explains Gale. ‘The purpose is to show the
incredible diversity of his production.’
Comedy 1921
Museum exhibitions are great at presenting us with end results – those
polished, cherished icons of art history. They’re often less adept at revealing
how those results came into being. We can’t time-travel to enter Klee’s studio
and see how his works progressed but – in offering up paintings made in
sequence – Tate Modern’s show gives us the next best thing. Moving through the
exhibition is like seeing a series of snapshots of Klee’s working life. You’ll
discover how paintings developed in tandem or relay, like the Tate’s famous
watercolour ‘They’re Biting’ (1920), which is flanked by works that precede and
follow it.
Tate’s reappraisal sheds light on dualities in Klee’s character. He was a
talented musician (he played the violin, often to make ends meet) as well as an
artist. He was ambidextrous, painting and drawing with his left hand while
writing (and signing the work) with his right. ‘I think cataloguing the work
allows him to have a structure,’ explains Gale. ‘This clear, orderly side to
him means he can open the door of his studio and range freely as his
imagination allows him.’
If Klee is underappreciated in Britain, Gale puts it in part down to fashion:
‘We’ve passed through a sort of dip in his reputation and I hope that we’re
going to inspire a new generation to look at Klee in a different way.’ It may
also be due to the juggernaut of art history. While Picasso will forever be linked
with cubism, Matisse fauvism and Seurat pointillism, Klee’s fame may have
suffered from a lack of ties to any particular art movement. ‘“Isms” aren’t
everything,’ says Gale. ‘I think the fact that Klee isn’t associated with an
“ism” can make him difficult to categorise, but I think that is probably also
the strong point in his legacy – that he provides an example of an incredibly
rich creativity that’s not pigeonholed.
Full Moon 1933
Klee was
certainly celebrated in his lifetime, with a solo exhibition at the
Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1921 and a retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, in 1930. During the final decade of his life, Picasso and
Wassily Kandinsky came to pay tribute to the master in Bern, Switzerland, where
Klee took refuge after his work was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis and he was
dismissed from his teaching position in Düsseldorf.
By this time he had been diagnosed with scleroderma, a debilitating hardening
of the skin. Klee’s numbering of his work didn’t stop but his production became
erratic. In 1936, he produced just 25 works, while in 1939 he made more
than 1,000 paintings and drawings that ‘fell like leaves’ around him. The last
work he numbered in 1940, a leap year, is 366. ‘There seems something very
symbolic about stopping with that number as if he feels he’s completed that
year’s work,’ says Gale. ‘He clearly knew he was dying.’
While this casts a shadow over Klee’s later works, many of his final paintings
are defiantly upbeat, like the joyously rhythmic ‘Twilight Flowers’ (1940).
It’s this sense of playful enquiry about the world which Gale hopes visitors
will take away with them. ‘I think you’ll get a sense of the amazingly
productive journey he goes on, and go away inspired to make work yourself, in
whatever realm. Klee wrote, as well as playing the violin and painting, making
his own brushes and puppets for his son. His is not an exclusive sort of
creativity but one that encourages you to explore that creative part of your
life.’ Who knows, maybe you’ll even get the cat to take a line for a walk too
No comments:
Post a Comment