A Bit of Art - Paul Klee

I really enjoyed two days looking around the Tate Modern.
On Monday I went to the major exhibition on Paul Klee. It was wonderful. Early works were from 1912-13 from work made in Munich when he was with Kandinsky and Marc in Der Blaue Reiter. These works are small, intricate and intense. The show covered his life up until his last work of 1940.
His work is wonderful and intense and what is amazing is the variety and invention of the processes he explored all through his working life. He was also a professional violinist and his wife Lily a pianist. So music and colour were his enduring anchors. His watercolours and gouaches are just luminous. They just skip on the paper. The scale of his work is very intimate and it's wonderful to be able to view them up close. In the first part of 1914 after a painting trip to Tunisia he wrote 'Colour possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. it will possess me always. I know it. That's the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter.'
Klee survived the war of 1914-18. By the time he was drafted there was a German policy not to send artists to the front as so many had been killed. Of Klee's friends, Macke was killed in December 1914 and Marc in 1916. it was amazing to find out about this government policy.
Also incredible is to remember that mutinies within the German Fleet lead to a German revolution in 1918 following the Russian one in 1917. Klee went back to Munich and was active in the Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists. But in 1919 when the Weimar German army put down the revolutionary bodies many supporters were executed. Klee went to Zurich where he met many of the Dada artists.
In 1921 he joined the Bauhaus. It was fantastic to see in many works his exploration of colour opposites and colour theory. There are clear watercolours and very dramatic explorations of yellow/violet in oil - so magnificent on a bed of dark.
The works where he made imagery from careful gradations of transparent colour over opposite colour to create tonal neutrals are just mind boggling. They look so simple and childlike at first and then when you try and work out how they were produced it's just amazing. These works and the soft grid works exploring colour and surface are the ones I admire the most. But all of the work I saw was just beautiful.
There were many examples of his 'transfer-method'. Basically he monoprinted by tracing drawings to get beautifully sensitive black lines onto a new blank paper which he then coloured. The contrast between the broken fragile black ink line and the fresh luminosity of colour is so Klee.
Another process is his sgrafitto technique - this is a beautiful, gentle but persistent type of sgrafitto in which the close tone of the colour minimises the texture to quite a minimal effect. He also used 'spray paint' which I'd say was blown through straws and the wall text suggested this was in response to the increasingly doctrinaire 'modernist-industrial' stance taken by the Bauhaus under the leadership of Hannes Meyer. Klee never ceased to champion the importance of the imagination and using nature as a source for inspiration. He always valued the aspect of exploration, play and process in his work.
In 1930 an exhibition of 65 of his works was organisd at MOMA in New York - the first exhibition of a living European artist to be held at that museum. Alfred Barr the Director of MOMA had written of Klee 'Nothing is more astonishig to the student of Klee than his extraordinary variety. Not even picasso  apporaches him in sheer inventiveness...'
In January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and at the end of that year Klee and his wife emigrated to Switzerland. In 1935 he became very ill with the degenerative disease that finally killed him in 1940. Meanwhile 17 works by Klee were included in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich organised by the Nazis. Later the Nazis seized over 140 more works by Klee, some sold, some destroyed. In 1938 his work was included in a big show in London  presented as a response to the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.
Klee kept working and developed other ways of working. Some of the largest works made were among his last pieces for a major exhibition in February in Zurich. He died in June 1940.
I was really fortunate to see this extensive show. No pictures yet I will try and put some up from the internet.