Paul Klee: Making Visible

Vase of pink roses ©Heather James

I made this drawing in response to visiting the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern titled Making Visible. The quiet simplicity of his art made a big impression on me and I wanted to try and capture some of that without actually copying any of his work. This was the third image I made during this exercise and the previous two images had different subject matter.

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was born near Bern in Switzerland to a German father and a Swiss mother, was given German nationality and lived through turbulent times during his whole life. He was brought up in a musical household and as a young man became a professional violinist. Paul Klee certainly packed a lot into his life which was relatively short but the periods that most interest me are his early life and the 10 year period when he was teaching at the Bauhaus.

His route to studying art was far from straight forward and included being rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Instead of throwing in the towel he studied at a private drawing school and then later on embarked on a six month tour of Italy with his sculptor friend Hermann Haller. On returning to live with his parents in Bern he spent the next four years studying art and experimenting in order to develop his own artistic identity meanwhile supporting himself as an orchestral violinist. It strikes me he must have had a burning desire to explore his interior life as an artist if he was prepared to go to these lengths.

My view from the sofa when I work in the sitting room

In 1906 he married Lily Stumpf and they moved to a small apartment where he had to work in the kitchen or the sitting room since he didn't have a studio. There would be other periods in his life when he also had to work from home and the constraints this must have imposed on him (and his family) didn't seem to affect his output or the quality of his work.

My apologies for skipping the next 15 years including Klee's service in WWI. We meet Klee in 1921 as he joins the faculty of the Bauhaus school.He begins teaching on the preliminary course and in the bookbinding workshop. Then he is appointed master in the metal workshop and following that the stained glass workshop. Several years later he takes on the textile composition class as well as teaching painting classes. I'm impressed by the range of techniques he could turn his hand to as well as teach. Maybe if he was alive now he'd be designing websites, making art installations and films.

Sadly Klee was diagnosed in 1935 with scleroderma, an incurable degenerative illness which meant he was unable to work. In time his strength improved and he was able to paint again at a steady pace. The final gallery (of 17) in this exhibition has about eight works in it which he produced during the last couple of years of his life. I found these to be among the most moving pieces in the exhibition as I felt drawn, as if by a magnet, into their quiet, colourful interiors where I could have stayed for hours.

A bigger splash makes me think

Today I've been lucky enough to spend a few hours socialising with two different friends at two different locations. I met my first friend at En Cas & Espresso café near Old Street where we enjoyed some food and watched snow falling outside.

I met my second friend inside Tate Modern by the bookshop which is next to the Turbine Hall. Since it is often easier to walk round London than go by public transport I made this journey on foot. I walked along City Road until I passed Moorgate Tube station. I wiggled my way round the City until I reached Cheapside then onto Queen Victoria Street, over Millennium Bridge to arrive at the forbidding and fortress-like museum of modern art on the south bank of the Thames where I noticed that the tide was in.

Along the way I dodged traffic and other pedestrians, giving way here and taking the initiative there. Once inside the museum I had to do the same to navigate my way to the bookshop to meet my friend. Then we had to travel on several escalators to finally reach floor four so we could visit A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance.

There are 13 rooms devoted to this exhibition and the bigger splash refers to the David Hockney (1967) painting in Room One, of a swimming pool with a burst of water as its focal point. On the opposite side of the room there is a Jackson Pollock painting (circa 1950) on display on the floor and on the wall above a documentary showing the artist at work on this same piece. I think I liked this exhibit most out of the whole exhibition.

The first paragraph of the exhibition notes states: "A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance looks at the dynamic relationship between painting and performance since the 1950s, and at how experiments in performance have expanded the possibilities for contemporary painting."

I confess I don't really understand what this means but we ploughed through every room doing our best to take in what there was to offer. At one point I asked myself: "If I had made this morning's journey covered in wet paint and had someone film me doing it, then shown it on TV in an art gallery would it count as art?" I really was that puzzled.

While I really didn't like watching female models being used as props and some of the images appeared to be quite sadistic I was intrigued by Geta Brătescu's films of her painting her face and then cleaning it all off again. Likewise I enjoyed the Polish artist Edward Krasiński's line of blue tape stuck all around Room Six at a fixed height and watching footage in Room Two of people firing guns at sacs of paint embedded in canvas devised by Niki de Saint Phalle made me laugh.

I found this exhibition very challenging and surprisingly thought provoking which I wasn't expecting when I walked into the first room and by the time we left Tate Modern I noticed that the tide was going out.