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Klee participated in several pivotal moments and managed to cross paths with just about every major artistic figure of his time: he was both a member of the Blaue Reiter, the seminal expressionist group, and a teacher at the Bauhaus, the quintessential modernist art school. Seen in group photographs, framed between Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, Klee appears at once central to the action and not quite there; unsmiling, his gaze intense and oddly opaque. He was preoccupied with intuition and the irrational, yet no artist made greater efforts to analyse and codify the marks he was making. He claimed to be completely uninterested in politics, yet collided with major events at every turn.

Born in 1879 into an eminently respectable, if slightly eccentric, family in the then staid Swiss capital - his father, a German national, was a fiercely opinionated music teacher - Klee possessed a fundamental drive to create, but it took him a long time to find his path.

He played the violin to a professional standard, wrote extensively and filled the margins of his school exercise books with caricatures and erotic drawings. His diaries reveal a slightly snobbish sense that whatever he attempted must be at the highest level, and a feeling of uncertainty about what form his self-expression should take. In 1898, a move to study under some of the most eminent artists of the day in Munich - then second only to Paris among the art capitals of Europe - only underlined his confusion.

Three years later, a study trip to Rome led him to the "humiliating" conclusion that everything he was learning in Munich was imitative and second rate, and that the classical ideal that then dominated art teaching was "completely anachronistic". Searching for a more vital and direct means of expression, he began looking back to his own childhood drawings. Yet rather than steering him in a dynamic new direction, this pivotal experience led to more restless shifting in focus, more toing and froing between his parents' home in Bern and Munich, where he lived with his wife Lily Stumpf, a pianist slightly older than himself, and their son Felix.

At 27, Klee was a house-husband working on the kitchen table, supported by Lily's teaching, while he attempted to make a career as a satirical illustrator. In 1910, he visited Paris and saw Picasso's Cubist paintings; at the same time he loved walking in the mountains in the classic German Romantic spirit. In 1914, he travelled to Tunisia, executing the luminous watercolours that are among his most popular works, claiming "colour and I have become one".

Fire at Full Moon, 1933 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Far from being a collection of false starts, all these threads can be followed through Klee's subsequent work. Once you're aware of his rather surprising interest in satire, Klee's tendency towards visceral anthropomorphism and cartoonlike simplification make a different kind of sense. Klee was acutely aware that he was living in a time of flux. The idea that art and culture should renew themselves was in the air, in the mood of uneasy euphoria before the First World War. Yet Klee didn't get into the generational swing of his era until he was 33, and became part of the Blaue Reiter, Munich's leading modernist group, under the leadership of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Klee and Kandinsky became one of the great duos of 20th-century art. Where Klee was reticent and detached, Kandinsky, 16 years his senior, was outgoing and charismatic. His preoccupation with art and the spiritual, which led him to create some of the first abstract paintings, resonated with Klee's less clearly defined metaphysical concerns. The two men went on holiday together en famille, and later shared a house at the Bauhaus specially designed for them by the institute's founder Walter Gropius, where they watered their plants side by side and played bowls together.

No sooner had Klee found a position in the avant garde than the First World War intervened. While his fellow Blaue Reiter artists and close friends Franz Marc and August Macke were killed in the trenches and Kandinsky returned to Russia, Klee more or less sat out the war as a military paymaster's clerk. In the chaotic aftermath, he became part of the artists' advisory board of Munich's short-lived Revolutionary Republic, claiming that "the part of us which aims for eternal values would be better supported in a Communist community".

Yet Klee and decisive opinions didn't really go together. At the Bauhaus, that great crucible of the modern spirit, where he taught from 1921 to 1931, with its continual infighting between technocrats, mystics and ideologues, he played the role of watchful fence-sitter. His response to conflict was to "turn away from this world" and lock his studio door. The artist Hugo Ball observed that, "in an age of the colossus, Klee falls in love with a green leaf, a star, a butterfly's wing. I know of no man more in touch with his inspiration than Paul Klee."

Klee would sit for hours in the corner of his studio, recalled his Bauhaus colleague Lyonel Feininger, "quietly smoking, apparently vacant, but full of inner watching". His reputation as one of the great theorists of modern art, arising from his collected Bauhaus lectures, the Pedagogical Sketchbook, in which he attempted to analyse every last permutation of his wandering lines, seems to have stemmed principally from shyness and a horror of facing a roomful of students unprepared. His pupils remembered Klee "backing" into the classroom and reading his lectures without looking at his audience.

Despite his reticence, Klee had a strong sense of his own value. On Hitler's accession to power in 1933, he produced 250 brutally scrawled pencil drawings permeated with a sense of anxiety about the future. Yet when asked to produce evidence of Aryan ancestry, he refused: "I would rather accept some hardship than play the tragicomic figure courting the favour of those in power."

Dismissed from his professorship at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he had moved from the Bauhaus in 1931, Klee was back in Bern by the end of the year, to the indifference of the townspeople. The great professor and modern artist was once more living with his parents, feeling the sense of humiliation that had dogged him all his life.

Klee and his wife and son soon moved to a small flat, but at 54 he was already an old man. In 1935, he was diagnosed with scleroderma, a degenerative hardening of the skin, which steadily restricted his movement. Yet he kept working.

In 1936, Klee was able to produce only 25 works, but in 1939 he created more than 1,200 paintings and drawings - "something of a record performance", as he told his son. Of these, Outbreak of Fear has the feel of a self-portrait: a startled face looking out at us from beside a collection of limb-like forms; the artist reduced to a dismembered doll. Yet High Spirits, from the same year, with its abstracted tightrope walker, has an exuberant joie de vivre.

Klee died in June 1940 of complications arising from scleroderma. Yet in those final months he went on producing paintings that confounded the expectations of his audience, including some of the largest canvases of his career, images that teetered between figuration and abstraction, that went on taking lines for a walk for the sheer curiosity of seeing where they would take him - pursuing that fundamental drive to create right up to the last minute.

The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (tate.org.uk; 020 7887 8888), from 16 October until March 9

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Paul Klee: the misunderstood master of modern art

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Klee participated in several pivotal moments and managed to cross paths with just about every major artistic figure of his time: he was both a member of the Blaue Reiter, the seminal expressionist group, and a teacher at the Bauhaus, the quintessential modernist art school.

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved. Picasso and Matisse seize you with their vision, Klee has the knack of making you feel a partner in it.
Click here or on 'view gallery' to see more of Klee's works on show at Tate Modern
And yet there is something elusive, unknowable indeed, about his compositions, hovering as they do between natural observation and imagination, neither the one nor the other: "Somewhat closer to the heart/Of creation than usual/But far from close enough," as he puts it in the same epitaph. It is a delicacy of feeling that has made him, however popular, seem less imposing than his great Modernist contemporaries and less obviously influential.

Tate Modern clearly intends to change his standing if not his popularity with its autumn blockbuster devoted to his work. The show may not have very much new to say. It is, after all, only 10 years since the last major show devoted to the artist. But this one aims to be the most comprehensive, taking Klee from his first entry on the art scene in 1910 to his death from a wasting disease aged just 60 in 1940. In between we are given, over 17 rooms, every phase of his enormously productive output (he completed nearly 10,000 works) and every twist of his endless innovation.

You can never have too much of Klee. The joy of his work, however small, and however persistent his themes, is that he seems so endlessly fresh in the result, whether you are looking at his first passionate embrace of colour on visiting Tunisia or in the bigger, freer oils of his final spurt in the last year of his life. Whether you come much closer to understanding the springs of this reticent man is more questionable.

For a man who taught with great effect in the Bauhaus schools as they moved from Weimar to Dusseldorf and finally Berlin in the 1930s, and had his lectures published and still read for their lucidity of thought, Klee found it remarkably difficult to express exactly what he sought in his pictures. Trained as a violinist and married to a pianist, he was remarkably precise in the way he organised his work. From very early on he catalogued his paintings and drawings in the way a composer does, giving each a number and date according to their sequence in time, keeping back some as special and taking great care over what he would send to show.

His working methods were equally deliberate. He would, according to visitors to his studio, work on several paintings at once, sucking for long periods on his pipe before going to one easel or another to develop his compositions. Like several of his colleagues in Germany, he believed and sought fundamental scientific principles behind his art.

If this gives the impression of an almost constipated effort, it was anything but. The process of reflection followed by application gave a sense of spontaneity to his work that made him popular with the Surrealists, seeing in him an artist of the unmediated subconscious. That certainly helps explain why the viewer feels so complicit in their working. "Take a line for a walk" was his injunction to students and that is what his lines seem to do.

And yet his paintings have too strong a sense of composition to be passed off as purely autonomic. Not for nothing did Klee earn his way as a professional musician until he sold his first pictures in his thirties. Nearly all his works, even the squared abstracts, have a sense of rhythm to them, a feel of a developing theme over the picture.

The Tate exhibition makes much of his continuous experimentation with technique, the "oil-transfer" method, which he developed in 1919, making drawings in paint by laying a sheet of painted paper on a blank one and then impressing the lines, the graded build-up of colour in the early 1920s and the later pointillist abstracts he produced with such glorious effect in 1932.

But technique was only part of his genius, and not the main one. One of the remarkable things about Klee is the consistency of his imagination. The watercolour of 1915, Brown Striving at Right-Angles, is not so very different in tone or mood from the squared abstracts of the early 1930s, nor the imaginary landscape of Above Mountain Summit of 1917 from the pointillist Plants in the Courtyard of 1932. He moves in and out of abstraction at all points of his careers and often in parallel, just as he skips from lighter to darker palette without any particular sense of sequence.

The exceptions seem to be when he becomes more emotionally involved with his work. There is a remarkable room in the show devoted to his work in 1921-2. It was the time when he first joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar and, free to spend time on his painting, he experimented with newer, more geometric compositions and gradations of colour.

What is so striking about these works is less their formal innovation than the way, for the first time, his compositions seem to be unstable. Even his Room Perspective Pictures of the period have an unnerving feeling of tension, while his oil-transfer drawing In The Wilderness and his later Ghost of a Genius from 1922 have the sense of a self-portrait of an artist out of focus.

He was not to express such unease again until the 1930s. With the rise of Hitler and the troubles with the Bauhaus (which was closed in 1933) events pressed in on him more personally. He was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dusseldorf Academy, his art was labelled "degenerate" and he was impelled to move to Switzerland at the end of 1933.

The titles of his works of the period - Fire at Full Moon, The Face of the Future, Bewitched-Petrified, Fear - give some indication of his state of mind and so do the paintings, with their compressed shapes and darker hues. A single image, Gaze of Silence from 1932, is deeply disquieting in its sense of menace and fear.

Klee was no Expressionist and it is a mistake to read too much of the personal in his works or to treat him as an ironic observer of the century in which he lived. He didn't really do angst. His reaction to the First World War, in which he lost some of his closest friends and was himself called up to do clerical work, was to make satirical drawings of warfare rather than confront it. A period of depression when diagnosed with illness in 1935 was followed by a surge of excited and open work in his final years. The colours brighten, the lines become more energetic and the show closes with a series of heart-warming flower pictures done with wax paint on burlap.

The Tate boldly declares this as the EY Exhibition, a title imposed, one assumes, as the price of a major three-year sponsorship deal with the company more commonly known as Ernst & Young. The question is whether the money is being used simply to reinforce what the museum expects to be popular or whether it will go to make possible shows that would be impractical without it.

Klee is a big name to start off a big exhibition series. Too big perhaps. The effect of so many rooms and so much wall space around the paintings is to monumentalise an artist who was anything but grand except in his ambitions. Klee's works are ones that draw you in to take part in his inspiration. Draw back too far and you view them as statements not processes of the imagination. You can sense him in as few works as many. Go, pick a few rooms and lap him up. He doesn't need a regimented march across his life story.
The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee - Making Visible, Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk) Wednesday to 9 March

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved.

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See all the wonderful things Callum Woods has made

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George Washington was a founding father of U.S. who had the leading role, both militarily and politically, during the American Revolution and went on to become the first President of the United States. Know why Washington is often referred to as "Father of his Country" by studying his 10 major achievements and accomplishments.

#1 He was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolution

When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Congress created the Continental Army and George Washington was appointed as its commander-in-chief. Washington took enormous duties during the war. He plotted the overall strategy of the war along with the Congress. He organized and trained the army and maintained their morale. Most importantly his stature as well as his political and personal skill was instrumental to make the Congress, the army, the French and the states work towards a common goal.

#2 He led U.S. to victory in the decisive land battle of the American Revolutionary War

Washington actively led his men against the main British forces in 1775 - 77 and then again in 1781. Though he lost battles, he never surrendered his army during the war. In 1781, American and French forces, led by George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau respectively, decisively defeated a British army commanded by Lord Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown. It was the last major land battle of the American Revolutionary War and forced the British government to negotiate an end to the conflict.

#3 Washington didn't seize power due to his commitment to American republicanism

In 1782, peace negotiations began and on September 3, 1783 United States was recognized as a free and independent nation after signing of the Treaty of Paris. Instead of seizing power, Washington resigned as Commander-in-chief and returned as quickly as possible to cultivating his lands. Due to this, historians compare Washington with the ancient Roman aristocrat and statesman Cincinnatus, who served Rome during its crisis but after accomplishing his task resigned despite having near absolute authority.

#4 George Washington became the first President of the United States in 1789

The United States Electoral College elected Washington as the first president in 1789. He received 100 percent of the electoral votes and remains the only president of U.S. to be elected unanimously. He was re-elected, again unanimously, in the 1792 election. He refused to run for the third term hence establishing the tradition of a maximum of two terms for a president, which later became law by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

#5 Washington established many forms in government that survive till today

After becoming President, Washington's first focused on setting up the federal judiciary. Through the Judiciary Act of 1789, he established a six-member Supreme Court with one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. Washington established many forms that became part of American tradition like the cabinet system and inaugural address. He ensured a democratic system with tolerance to opposition voices despite fears that it would lead to political violence.

#6 He suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion

In 1791, to generate revenue to reduce the national debt, a tax was applied by the government to all distilled spirits. Whiskey being the most popular distilled beverage at the time, it became widely known as the 'whiskey tax'. In parts of U.S. there were protests against the whiskey tax and violence was used to prevent its collection. Washington used negotiations and later force to end the Whiskey Rebellion demonstrating that the newly formed government was capable of suppressing resistance to the laws enforced by it.

#7 Through Jay's Treaty, Washington built a strong relationship with Britain

Under the presidency of Washington, the Jay's Treaty was signed in 1795 between U.S. and Great Britain. Britain agreed to vacate the western forts in America in return of U.S. giving them the most favored nation trading status. Negotiated by John Jay and designed primarily by Alexander Hamilton, the treaty resolved issues of the Treaty of Paris, strengthened economic relations between the two countries and most importantly averted war against Britain until America was economically and politically more capable of handling it.

#8 He issued the Proclamation of Neutrality to protect U.S. from war in Europe

On April 22, 1793, Washington issued the Proclamation of Neutrality declaring United States neutral in the conflict between France and Great Britain during the French Revolution. Although it was vehemently opposed, the proclamation not only preserved America's trade relations but also protected U.S. from unnecessary harm as it was still a young nation with a small army.

#9 Washington established the United States Navy

Previously American ships were protected by the British and French navies but after the Proclamation of Neutrality, they became vulnerable to pirate attack. By late 1793, a dozen American ships had been captured, goods stripped and everyone enslaved. Due to this Washington signed the Naval Act of 1794 which established a permanent naval force. This force would eventually become the present-day United States Navy.

#10 His farewell address is one of the most important documents in American history

After nearly 20 years of service to his nation, George Washington signed off by writing a Farewell Address to the people of America. Issued as a public letter in 1796, it remains one of the most influential statements of American political values. Among other things, it stressed on the importance of unity between the people of America. Washington's Farewell Address became common reference during political debates well into the nineteenth century.

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10 Major Accomplishments of George Washington

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George Washington was a founding father of U.S. who had the leading role, both militarily and politically, during the American Revolution and went on to become the first President of the United States. Know why Washington is often referred to as "Father of his Country" by studying his 10 major achievements and accomplishments.

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Abstract Expressionism Albrect Durer Alma Thomas Andy Warhol Animals by Artists Animals by Kids eld Andrew Wyeth Art Hearts Art Nouveau Artist's Self Portraits Artists and their Sketching Artists Using Words Art and Words Assemblage Australian Dot or Dreamtime Paintings Calligraphy Carravaggio Cezanne, Paul Chinese Brush Painting Clouds & Value

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved. Picasso and Matisse seize you with their vision, Klee has the knack of making you feel a partner in it.
Click here or on 'view gallery' to see more of Klee's works on show at Tate Modern
And yet there is something elusive, unknowable indeed, about his compositions, hovering as they do between natural observation and imagination, neither the one nor the other: "Somewhat closer to the heart/Of creation than usual/But far from close enough," as he puts it in the same epitaph. It is a delicacy of feeling that has made him, however popular, seem less imposing than his great Modernist contemporaries and less obviously influential.

Tate Modern clearly intends to change his standing if not his popularity with its autumn blockbuster devoted to his work. The show may not have very much new to say. It is, after all, only 10 years since the last major show devoted to the artist. But this one aims to be the most comprehensive, taking Klee from his first entry on the art scene in 1910 to his death from a wasting disease aged just 60 in 1940. In between we are given, over 17 rooms, every phase of his enormously productive output (he completed nearly 10,000 works) and every twist of his endless innovation.

You can never have too much of Klee. The joy of his work, however small, and however persistent his themes, is that he seems so endlessly fresh in the result, whether you are looking at his first passionate embrace of colour on visiting Tunisia or in the bigger, freer oils of his final spurt in the last year of his life. Whether you come much closer to understanding the springs of this reticent man is more questionable.

For a man who taught with great effect in the Bauhaus schools as they moved from Weimar to Dusseldorf and finally Berlin in the 1930s, and had his lectures published and still read for their lucidity of thought, Klee found it remarkably difficult to express exactly what he sought in his pictures. Trained as a violinist and married to a pianist, he was remarkably precise in the way he organised his work. From very early on he catalogued his paintings and drawings in the way a composer does, giving each a number and date according to their sequence in time, keeping back some as special and taking great care over what he would send to show.

His working methods were equally deliberate. He would, according to visitors to his studio, work on several paintings at once, sucking for long periods on his pipe before going to one easel or another to develop his compositions. Like several of his colleagues in Germany, he believed and sought fundamental scientific principles behind his art.

If this gives the impression of an almost constipated effort, it was anything but. The process of reflection followed by application gave a sense of spontaneity to his work that made him popular with the Surrealists, seeing in him an artist of the unmediated subconscious. That certainly helps explain why the viewer feels so complicit in their working. "Take a line for a walk" was his injunction to students and that is what his lines seem to do.

And yet his paintings have too strong a sense of composition to be passed off as purely autonomic. Not for nothing did Klee earn his way as a professional musician until he sold his first pictures in his thirties. Nearly all his works, even the squared abstracts, have a sense of rhythm to them, a feel of a developing theme over the picture.

The Tate exhibition makes much of his continuous experimentation with technique, the "oil-transfer" method, which he developed in 1919, making drawings in paint by laying a sheet of painted paper on a blank one and then impressing the lines, the graded build-up of colour in the early 1920s and the later pointillist abstracts he produced with such glorious effect in 1932.

But technique was only part of his genius, and not the main one. One of the remarkable things about Klee is the consistency of his imagination. The watercolour of 1915, Brown Striving at Right-Angles, is not so very different in tone or mood from the squared abstracts of the early 1930s, nor the imaginary landscape of Above Mountain Summit of 1917 from the pointillist Plants in the Courtyard of 1932. He moves in and out of abstraction at all points of his careers and often in parallel, just as he skips from lighter to darker palette without any particular sense of sequence.

The exceptions seem to be when he becomes more emotionally involved with his work. There is a remarkable room in the show devoted to his work in 1921-2. It was the time when he first joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar and, free to spend time on his painting, he experimented with newer, more geometric compositions and gradations of colour.

What is so striking about these works is less their formal innovation than the way, for the first time, his compositions seem to be unstable. Even his Room Perspective Pictures of the period have an unnerving feeling of tension, while his oil-transfer drawing In The Wilderness and his later Ghost of a Genius from 1922 have the sense of a self-portrait of an artist out of focus.

He was not to express such unease again until the 1930s. With the rise of Hitler and the troubles with the Bauhaus (which was closed in 1933) events pressed in on him more personally. He was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dusseldorf Academy, his art was labelled "degenerate" and he was impelled to move to Switzerland at the end of 1933.

The titles of his works of the period - Fire at Full Moon, The Face of the Future, Bewitched-Petrified, Fear - give some indication of his state of mind and so do the paintings, with their compressed shapes and darker hues. A single image, Gaze of Silence from 1932, is deeply disquieting in its sense of menace and fear.

Klee was no Expressionist and it is a mistake to read too much of the personal in his works or to treat him as an ironic observer of the century in which he lived. He didn't really do angst. His reaction to the First World War, in which he lost some of his closest friends and was himself called up to do clerical work, was to make satirical drawings of warfare rather than confront it. A period of depression when diagnosed with illness in 1935 was followed by a surge of excited and open work in his final years. The colours brighten, the lines become more energetic and the show closes with a series of heart-warming flower pictures done with wax paint on burlap.

The Tate boldly declares this as the EY Exhibition, a title imposed, one assumes, as the price of a major three-year sponsorship deal with the company more commonly known as Ernst & Young. The question is whether the money is being used simply to reinforce what the museum expects to be popular or whether it will go to make possible shows that would be impractical without it.

Klee is a big name to start off a big exhibition series. Too big perhaps. The effect of so many rooms and so much wall space around the paintings is to monumentalise an artist who was anything but grand except in his ambitions. Klee's works are ones that draw you in to take part in his inspiration. Draw back too far and you view them as statements not processes of the imagination. You can sense him in as few works as many. Go, pick a few rooms and lap him up. He doesn't need a regimented march across his life story.
The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee - Making Visible, Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk) Wednesday to 9 March

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved.

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The Lamb, 1920 - Paul Klee - WikiArt.org

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The Lamb, 1920 by Paul Klee, Early Works. Surrealism. religious painting. Städel, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved. Picasso and Matisse seize you with their vision, Klee has the knack of making you feel a partner in it.
Click here or on 'view gallery' to see more of Klee's works on show at Tate Modern
And yet there is something elusive, unknowable indeed, about his compositions, hovering as they do between natural observation and imagination, neither the one nor the other: "Somewhat closer to the heart/Of creation than usual/But far from close enough," as he puts it in the same epitaph. It is a delicacy of feeling that has made him, however popular, seem less imposing than his great Modernist contemporaries and less obviously influential.

Tate Modern clearly intends to change his standing if not his popularity with its autumn blockbuster devoted to his work. The show may not have very much new to say. It is, after all, only 10 years since the last major show devoted to the artist. But this one aims to be the most comprehensive, taking Klee from his first entry on the art scene in 1910 to his death from a wasting disease aged just 60 in 1940. In between we are given, over 17 rooms, every phase of his enormously productive output (he completed nearly 10,000 works) and every twist of his endless innovation.

You can never have too much of Klee. The joy of his work, however small, and however persistent his themes, is that he seems so endlessly fresh in the result, whether you are looking at his first passionate embrace of colour on visiting Tunisia or in the bigger, freer oils of his final spurt in the last year of his life. Whether you come much closer to understanding the springs of this reticent man is more questionable.

For a man who taught with great effect in the Bauhaus schools as they moved from Weimar to Dusseldorf and finally Berlin in the 1930s, and had his lectures published and still read for their lucidity of thought, Klee found it remarkably difficult to express exactly what he sought in his pictures. Trained as a violinist and married to a pianist, he was remarkably precise in the way he organised his work. From very early on he catalogued his paintings and drawings in the way a composer does, giving each a number and date according to their sequence in time, keeping back some as special and taking great care over what he would send to show.

His working methods were equally deliberate. He would, according to visitors to his studio, work on several paintings at once, sucking for long periods on his pipe before going to one easel or another to develop his compositions. Like several of his colleagues in Germany, he believed and sought fundamental scientific principles behind his art.

If this gives the impression of an almost constipated effort, it was anything but. The process of reflection followed by application gave a sense of spontaneity to his work that made him popular with the Surrealists, seeing in him an artist of the unmediated subconscious. That certainly helps explain why the viewer feels so complicit in their working. "Take a line for a walk" was his injunction to students and that is what his lines seem to do.

And yet his paintings have too strong a sense of composition to be passed off as purely autonomic. Not for nothing did Klee earn his way as a professional musician until he sold his first pictures in his thirties. Nearly all his works, even the squared abstracts, have a sense of rhythm to them, a feel of a developing theme over the picture.

The Tate exhibition makes much of his continuous experimentation with technique, the "oil-transfer" method, which he developed in 1919, making drawings in paint by laying a sheet of painted paper on a blank one and then impressing the lines, the graded build-up of colour in the early 1920s and the later pointillist abstracts he produced with such glorious effect in 1932.

But technique was only part of his genius, and not the main one. One of the remarkable things about Klee is the consistency of his imagination. The watercolour of 1915, Brown Striving at Right-Angles, is not so very different in tone or mood from the squared abstracts of the early 1930s, nor the imaginary landscape of Above Mountain Summit of 1917 from the pointillist Plants in the Courtyard of 1932. He moves in and out of abstraction at all points of his careers and often in parallel, just as he skips from lighter to darker palette without any particular sense of sequence.

The exceptions seem to be when he becomes more emotionally involved with his work. There is a remarkable room in the show devoted to his work in 1921-2. It was the time when he first joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar and, free to spend time on his painting, he experimented with newer, more geometric compositions and gradations of colour.

What is so striking about these works is less their formal innovation than the way, for the first time, his compositions seem to be unstable. Even his Room Perspective Pictures of the period have an unnerving feeling of tension, while his oil-transfer drawing In The Wilderness and his later Ghost of a Genius from 1922 have the sense of a self-portrait of an artist out of focus.

He was not to express such unease again until the 1930s. With the rise of Hitler and the troubles with the Bauhaus (which was closed in 1933) events pressed in on him more personally. He was dismissed from his teaching post at the Dusseldorf Academy, his art was labelled "degenerate" and he was impelled to move to Switzerland at the end of 1933.

The titles of his works of the period - Fire at Full Moon, The Face of the Future, Bewitched-Petrified, Fear - give some indication of his state of mind and so do the paintings, with their compressed shapes and darker hues. A single image, Gaze of Silence from 1932, is deeply disquieting in its sense of menace and fear.

Klee was no Expressionist and it is a mistake to read too much of the personal in his works or to treat him as an ironic observer of the century in which he lived. He didn't really do angst. His reaction to the First World War, in which he lost some of his closest friends and was himself called up to do clerical work, was to make satirical drawings of warfare rather than confront it. A period of depression when diagnosed with illness in 1935 was followed by a surge of excited and open work in his final years. The colours brighten, the lines become more energetic and the show closes with a series of heart-warming flower pictures done with wax paint on burlap.

The Tate boldly declares this as the EY Exhibition, a title imposed, one assumes, as the price of a major three-year sponsorship deal with the company more commonly known as Ernst & Young. The question is whether the money is being used simply to reinforce what the museum expects to be popular or whether it will go to make possible shows that would be impractical without it.

Klee is a big name to start off a big exhibition series. Too big perhaps. The effect of so many rooms and so much wall space around the paintings is to monumentalise an artist who was anything but grand except in his ambitions. Klee's works are ones that draw you in to take part in his inspiration. Draw back too far and you view them as statements not processes of the imagination. You can sense him in as few works as many. Go, pick a few rooms and lap him up. He doesn't need a regimented march across his life story.
The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee - Making Visible, Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk) Wednesday to 9 March

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"I cannot be grasped in the here and now," the artist Paul Klee wrote as the first line of his own tombstone epitaph. Which in one sense is the opposite of the truth. There are few among the leading Modernist painters who are not more readily known than Klee, with his spindly lines and squared block colours, and even fewer who are more readily loved.

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Un village écoute désolé
Le chant d'un oiseau blessé
C'est le seul oiseau du village
Et c'est le seul chat du village

Qui l'a à moitié dévoré
Et l'oiseau cesse de chanter
Le chat cesse de ronronner
Et de se lécher le museau
Et le village fait à l'oiseau
De merveilleuses funérailles

Et le chat qui est invité
Marche derrière le petit cercueil de paille
Où l'oiseau mort est allongé
Porté par une petite fille
Qui n'arrête pas de pleurer
Si j'avais su que cela te fasse tant de peine
Lui dit le chat
Je l'aurais mangé tout entier
Et puis je t'aurais raconté
Que je l'avais vu s'envoler
S'envoler jusqu'au bout du monde
Là-bas c'est tellement loin
Que jamais on n'en revient
Tu aurais eu moins de chagrin
Simplement de la tristesse et des regrets

Il ne faut jamais faire les choses à moitié

chichou 41 et mma

Published by bestiaire-poetique.over-blog.com

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le chat et l'oiseau - bestiaire-poetique.over-blog.com

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Un village écoute désolé Le chant d'un oiseau blessé C'est le seul oiseau du village Et c'est le seul chat du village Qui l'a à moitié dévoré Et l'oiseau cesse de chanter Le chat cesse de ronronner Et de se lécher le museau Et le village fait à l'oiseau...

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Un village écoute désolé
Le chant d'un oiseau blessé
C'est le seul oiseau du village
Et c'est le seul chat du village

Qui l'a à moitié dévoré
Et l'oiseau cesse de chanter
Le chat cesse de ronronner
Et de se lécher le museau
Et le village fait à l'oiseau
De merveilleuses funérailles

Et le chat qui est invité
Marche derrière le petit cercueil de paille
Où l'oiseau mort est allongé
Porté par une petite fille
Qui n'arrête pas de pleurer
Si j'avais su que cela te fasse tant de peine
Lui dit le chat
Je l'aurais mangé tout entier
Et puis je t'aurais raconté
Que je l'avais vu s'envoler
S'envoler jusqu'au bout du monde
Là-bas c'est tellement loin
Que jamais on n'en revient
Tu aurais eu moins de chagrin
Simplement de la tristesse et des regrets

Il ne faut jamais faire les choses à moitié

chichou 41 et mma

Published by bestiaire-poetique.over-blog.com

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le chat et l'oiseau - bestiaire-poetique.over-blog.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Un village écoute désolé Le chant d'un oiseau blessé C'est le seul oiseau du village Et c'est le seul chat du village Qui l'a à moitié dévoré Et l'oiseau cesse de chanter Le chat cesse de ronronner Et de se lécher le museau Et le village fait à l'oiseau...

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Abstract Expressionism Albrect Durer Alma Thomas Andy Warhol Animals by Artists Animals by Kids eld Andrew Wyeth Art Hearts Art Nouveau Artist's Self Portraits Artists and their Sketching Artists Using Words Art and Words Assemblage Australian Dot or Dreamtime Paintings Calligraphy Carravaggio Cezanne, Paul Chinese Brush Painting Clouds & Value

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Andy Warhol was an American artist who was the leading figure of the Pop Art movement. Such was his impact that he is called the Pope of Pop Art. The subject of his works varied from iconic American objects to celebrities to fictional characters to traditional subjects like flowers. His paintings revolutionized the perception of art. Here are 10 of the most famous pop art paintings by the pre-eminent pop artist.

#10 Banana

In the 1960s Andy Warhol was associated with the band The Velvet Underground and he became their manager in 1965. This print of banana featured on the cover of the debut album of the band, titled The Velvet Underground & Nico. The album was called the "most prophetic rock album ever made" and ranked 13th greatest album of all time by the Rolling Stone magazine; and Warhol's Banana became one of the most recognizable pieces of pop artwork.

#9 Mickey Mouse

Warhol created a Myths-series which contained a series of silkscreened portraits of ten fictional characters taken from popular culture. All the portraits were inlaid with diamond dust which made them shine with soft, wavering light. Disney's Mickey Mouse was one of the characters he picked and its prints became hugely popular.

#8 Big Electric Chair

In 1963, the last two executions by electric chair in New York State took place. The same year Andy Warhol obtained a photograph of the empty execution chamber. He used it to create a series of paintings depicting the electric chair as a metaphor of death and thereby commenting on the controversy surrounding the death penalty in the 1960s. Big Electric Chair is the most famous painting of the series.

#7 Flowers Series

This is one of the seven monumental-scale paintings from Andy Warhol's famous Flowers series. The source image for the series was photographs published in the 1964 issue of Modern Photography taken by the nature photographer Patricia Caulfield. At a time when Warhol was concentrating on consumerism, celebrity, death and disasters, the series was a departure as it depicted a more abstract and philosophical subject. The paintings were immediately sold out when they were put on show.

#6 Coca Cola (3)

A symbol of modern mass consumerism, the Coca Cola bottle is an iconic American object which caught the fancy of Warhol. In fact one of his most famous quotes revolves around it. Warhol created several works on the Coke bottle. Coca Cola (3) is a hand painted work unlike his later silkscreens. The painting was sold for $57.2 million making it one of Warhol's most expensive paintings ever sold.

#5 Mao

Warhol began painting portraits of Mao in 1972, the year U.S. President Richard Nixon made his first visit to China. He created hundreds of images of Mao using a photograph from Mao's famous Little Red Book. This huge painting is about 15 feet tall and is the most well-known Mao portrait by Warhol. Warhol has used strong, colorful brushstrokes applying garish colors like makeup on Mao's face. It exhibits Warhol at his most painterly self and is considered one of the best paintings created by him.

#4 Self-Portrait

This famous work belongs to the last series of self-portraits which Warhol painted in the year before his death. It is one of the five versions (green, blue, purple, yellow and here, red) of the set. The image of the time-worn artist with the remarkable fright-wig is one of the iconic images of the twentieth century.

#3 Eight Elvises

A 12 foot painting of eight identical, overlapping images of Elvis Presley in cowboy attire, Eight Elvises is a unique painting, i.e. it was not mass produced like many of Warhol's work. In 2008, it was sold for US$100 million to make Warhol only the fifth artist to have a painting sold for at least $100 million. The sale broke the record for a Warhol painting and the price paid for Eight Elvises is still the maximum for a painting by Warhol if you adjust for inflation. It remains one of the most expensive paintings ever sold and is considered one of Warhol's masterpieces.

#2 Campbell's Soup Cans

Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans consist of thirty-two canvases, one of each of the 32 varieties offered by the company at the time. It is the work of art that led to pop art becoming a major art movement in the USA. The non-painterly style and the commercial subject of the painting initially caused offence as it affronted the technique and philosophy of Abstract Expressionism, the then dominant style in the United States. The resulting debates on the merits and ethics of such work made Andy Warhol the leading and most well-known pop artist.

#1 Marilyn Diptych

Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. In the following weeks, Warhol made this masterpiece which contains fifty images of Marilyn, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. The 25 images on the left side of the work are vividly colored while the 25 on the right are in black and white with an effect of fading. Critics suggest that the contrast is suggestive of the star's mortality. Considered an iconic symbol of pop art, Marilyn Diptych was named the third most influential piece of modern art in a survey by The Guardian.

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10 most famous paintings by Andy Warhol including masterpieces which made Pop Art a phenomenal art movement. Know about the best works of the Pope of Pop Art.

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Wassily Kandinsky - Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913

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Squares with Concentric Circles (Farbstudie - Quadrate und konzentrische Ringe), perhaps, Kandinsky's most recognizable work, is not actually a full-fledged picture. This drawing is a small study on how different colour combinations are perceived that the painter used in his creative process as a support material.