Theresa Thompson on one of history’s most inventive artists

Vibrant colour and instinctive line mark out the work of Paul Klee (1879-1940). The Swiss-born artist who famously liked to ‘take a line on a walk…’, a radical figure in European modernism, hugely respected by his peers — Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky among them — had an extraordinary flair for playful narrative and wonderful abstraction. But, as I learned from Tate Modern’s exhibition, Paul Klee Making Visible, though Klee was often thought a ‘quirky’ spontaneous artist, a ‘dreamer’, he actually worked with great rigour.

In 1911 he began to keep a handwritten inventory of his works, assigning each a number and year, going back even to drawings made when he was a boy. By the time of his death Klee had catalog-ued 9,800 drawings, prints, paintings and illustrations in nine volumes. Tate uses the same numbering system to show over 130 works in 17 galleries. “It’s why this show is so different to any other about Klee,” said the gallery’s director, Chris Dercon. “This is probably the first time that a museum is showing Klee’s work in the way he wanted his work to be seen.”

So, chronologically, we see paintings from the three decades of his career labelled as he did: with the Yellow Half-Moon and the Blue Star, for example, (numbered 1917, 51) its kaleidoscopic forms tumbling together in colour blocks of purples, blues, and yellows; the part-abstract part-figurative Sunken Landscape (1918, 108), with joyful heart at its centre; and Aerial Combat (1920, 2), the earliest of his innovative oil-transfer drawings, and Memorial to the Kaiser (1920, 3) from a year later, reflecting the First World War and its aftermath.

They have given each work a lot of space, to convey the intimacy of Klee’s work, says Curator Matthew Gale. This makes viewing easier, for they are intimate, intense little works for the most part, only getting slightly bigger in the last gallery, which is surprising given that by then he was ill. Technical experiments were always part of Klee’s practice. In 1919 he developed what he called an ‘oil-transfer’ method, essentially a tracing system that allowed him to reproduce ‘the moment of inspiration embodied in a drawing’. Lines twisting and turning, these unusual draw-ings display Klee’s lightness of touch. One example is the satirical They’re Biting, a virtually transparent scrawl incorporating fishermen and exclamation mark.

However, Klee’s vivid paintings were irresistible, especially the pure abstractions he was making from 1921 as experiments in ‘gradation’ while teaching at the Bauhaus. Klee’s abstracts from his decade there (the Bauhaus was then the most innovative school of art) form the heart of the exhibition. Later works from the 1920s, such as Fire in the Evening, a marvellous mesmeric composition in which a flame-coloured rectangle stands out among bands of soft browns, mauves, and blues, evoking the desert sun at day’s end, took his reputation to international heights.

Hot-coloured and banded compositions like this were inspired by Klee’s visit to Egypt in the winter of 1928–29. Fire at Full Moon, painted 1933, a patchwork of squares of red-greens and violet-yellows punctuated by a stylised fire and moon, is another masterpiece.

Gaze of Silence, 1932, a magnetic and more rigorously abstract work, was one of many that a year later was condemned by the Nazis as ‘degenerate art’. The Bauhaus was closed, and Klee, banned from teaching or exhibiting his work, returned to Switzerland. Today, Klee’s paintings resist easy classification and can be easy to overlook. This show reminds us, however, of his avant-garde credentials and his lasting influence on abstraction. From the simplest, Le Rouge et le Noir, 1938, to the decorative and the more complex, Fish Magic, 1925, and other recurring motifs like arrows, ships and music, and whether an optimistic or apocalyptic vision, the works in this retrospective are a joy.

Paul Klee Making Visible
Tate Modern, London
Until March 9
Call 0207 887 8888