In a brief memoir of his childhood in the Swiss capital Bern, Paul Klee describes taking to a field a little girl “who was not pretty and wore braces to correct her legs” and deliberately pushing her over. “It tumbled,” Klee, then five or six, told the child’s horrified mother. “I played this trick more than once,” he writes.
Looking back 30 years later, the artist recalls this incident and various other boyhood cruelties and kindnesses, his fantastical imagining of the maid’s pudenda, his terror of tramps and monsters, with a deadpan detachment, evoking the way he saw them at the time, without the benefit – or hindrance – of adult moralising or interpretation.
In the marble table tops of a restaurant owned by his uncle, “the fattest man in Switzerland”, the young Klee would discern “a maze of petrified layers in which one could pick out human grotesques and capture them with a pencil.” Anyone even slightly familiar with the translucent layers of his watercolours, his propensity for “taking a walk with a line”, will feel a sense of recognition at his first conscious discovery of the visual world.
His entire subsequent career – mapped out in a new survey of his work at Tate Modern – might be seen as an attempt to capture the honesty of a child’s vision. I say “might”, as of all the leading figures to emerge in that extraordinary period in the early 20th century when art and a great many other things were turned on their heads, Klee is at once perhaps the best loved and the least understood.
There’s a certain mood that comes with the name Paul Klee, often characterised as childlike or fairy tale – rich colour and pattern seen on an intimate scale, dotted with whimsical hearts and arrows. Yet beyond this superficial prettiness it becomes difficult to pick a path among his bewilderingly diverse forms of expression: serene studies in colour harmony, graffiti-like scratchings, off-the-wall extemporisations on perspective and visual space with darker resonances that belie the apparent cutesiness that has made him a perennial favourite in the world of ready-framed pictures for the first-time buyer.