Paul Klee. Making visible.

This extensive exhibition on Paul Klee at the Tate Modern takes you through his life as one of the most important artists of the early twentieth century and a influential writer and teacher at the Bauhaus.

Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1879 into a musical family Klee financed his early art career as a violinist in a Bern orchestra. The exhibition traces his early life as a art student in Munich and his break with the traditional work of the past and his move to abstraction. The exhibition is spread over 17 small galleries and the work, much of which is on a small scale has been lent from collections from around the world.

Klee was renowned for his use of subtle colour and the Tate shows this in the wide range of his paintings and  experiments in drawing, watercolour, oil painting and oil-transfers. He was friends with many leading artists including Franz Marc, Kandinsky, Muche, Feininger, Jawlensky and the architect Walter Gropius.

He worked during the troubled years between the wars and taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 until its closure by the Nazis in 1933. He died after a long illness in Locarno, Switzerland in 1940.

The Tate book shop has a wide range of excellent publications to back up the exhibition.

Many of his major pictures are on show and include paintings made right up to his early death in 1940.

Clive Dand