Paul Klee: a modern master gets a major show at Tate Modern

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‘Paul Klee: Making Visible’


Tate Modern

16 October 2013 – 9 March 2014

 

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was one of the most renowned artists to work at the Bauhaus and was both a playful and a radical figure in European modernism. His intense and intricate work will be the subject of a major new exhibition at Tate Modern from 16 October 2013, the UK’s first large-scale Klee exhibition for over a decade. Challenging his reputation as a solitary dreamer, it will reveal the innovation and rigour with which he created his work and presented it to the public.

Bringing together colourful drawings, watercolours and paintings from collections around the world, Paul Klee: Making Visible will span the three decades of his career: from his emergence in Munich in the 1910s, through his years of teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, up to his final paintings made in Bern after the outbreak of the Second World War. The show will reunite important groups of work that the artist created, catalogued or exhibited together at these key moments in his life. Having since been dispersed across museums and private collections, these delicate works will once again be shown alongside each other, often for the first time since Klee displayed them himself, in a unique chance to explore his innovations and ideas.

Born in Switzerland in 1879, Klee started out as a musician like his parents but soon resolved to study painting in Munich, where he eventually joined Kandinsky’s  ‘Blue Rider’ group of avant-garde artists in 1912. ‘Paul Klee: Making Visible’begins with his breakthrough during the First World War, when he first developed his individual abstract patchworks of colour. The many technical innovations that followed will be showcased throughout the exhibition, including his unique ‘oil transfer’ paintings such as They’re Biting1920, the dynamic colour gradations of Hanging Fruit1921 and the multicoloured pointillism used in Memory of a Bird1932.

The heart of the exhibition will focus on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at the Bauhaus. The abstract canvases he produced here, such as the rhythmical composition Fire in the Evening1929, took his reputation to new international heights by the end of the 1920s. The 1930s then brought about radical changes, as Klee was dismissed from his new teaching position by the Nazis and took refuge in Switzerland with his family, while his works were removed from collections and labelled ‘degenerate art’ in Germany. Despite the political turmoil, financial insecurity and his declining health, he nevertheless became even more prolific. ‘Paul Klee: Making Visible’will bring together a group of his final works from the last exhibition staged before his death in 1940.

Although he saw his art as a process of spontaneous creativity and natural growth, exemplified by his famous description of drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’, Klee actually 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. In grouping these works as Klee himself did, this exhibition presents an extraordinary opportunity to explore them in a new light and understand them as the artist intended.

‘Paul Klee: Making Visible’is curated by Matthew Gale, head of displays, Tate Modern, with Flavia Frigeri, assistant curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Tate Modern

Open daily from 10 a.m.–6 p.m. and until 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.


For public information and tickets please go to www.tate.org.uk or call +44(0)20 7887 8888

A review of this exhibition will appear in November's Cassone