There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist, his paintings and drawings too perfect, too contrived. Viewing this new exhibition at Tate Modern, one might add that they are also too mannered and precious. I had been looking forward to this show, but going round it I found myself all too frequently impatient and disappointed. Yet Klee is a great modern master, you say; can he be dismissed so easily? Perhaps it is all in the selection of work, for Klee was prolific even though he died young, with a total output of about 10,000 paintings, drawings and works on paper, more than a thousand of which he made in the last year of his life.
Many different interpretations are possible through varying combinations of his work, and perhaps the one offered here is not the most convincing. It is based upon Klee’s own groupings of his work, reuniting pictures long sundered, and perhaps this is the problem. Artists are not always the best judges of their own art. I never thought I would be advocating more curatorial input in a Tate show, but I think an independent selection of Klee’s best work would have been preferable to this academic exercise in recreation.
The actual installation of work is thoughtful and sympathetic, consisting of 17 rooms with a few small pictures in each, with plenty of space around them. This should provide ideal viewing but it only serves to emphasise the twiddly and insubstantial aspects of Klee’s imagery. His art so closely approaches writing (line being taken for its famous walk) that his symbols and metaphors are ideograms, mental rather than sensuous images, skeletal rather than fleshly.
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