ast winter, the Paul Klee Centre in Berne had a brilliant idea for an exhibition. They partnered a large selection of works by Klee with a broad sampling of the work of Klee's contemporary, Johannes Itten. When I saw it at the Martin-Gropius-Bau museum in Berlin, it was quietly devastating. Itten is one of those figures always referred to as "very interesting" by art historians, meaning almost the opposite. He was a contemporary of Klee's, and, briefly, a colleague when they both taught at the Bauhaus in its Weimar years from 1919. Itten was a curious person: he led a mystical religious movement at the Bauhaus called Mazdaznan, whose followers wore purple robes and ate nothing but garlic (Alma Mahler said that you could tell when you had walked past a Bauhaus student in those early years). Both Klee and he were somewhat mystically inclined, and thought deeply about the significance of colour. Both were restless creators, and their work changes dramatically every two or three years. They ought to be very good companions in a gallery survey.
Instead, you felt intensely sorry for Itten. Every shift in style in Itten's work was expertly achieved, closely argued-for and deathly dull. His grid-pattern abstracts are so tedious they give the impression of boring even their creator. Strikingly, every time Itten moves from one pictorial manner to another, he seems to leave everything behind. There is nothing that would convince you that one of his 1960s abstracts, such as Adieu (1965) was painted by the same artist that reduced a leaning woman to a pattern of lines in Woman with Birds (1945) or a still life of vases in 1922. There is no character there at the core. But Klee has an irreducible centre, and though he changed his style and approach many times in the 40 years of his mature career, there is always something there that makes you say "Klee" without hesitation. When Klee appears in a photograph, I've observed that even people who don't recognise him are drawn to his extraordinary, warm, humorous face – there is an unforgettable one of him with his Great War regiment, his expression turning the spiked Pickelhaube he wears into a moment of pure comedy. His work is much the same. At the calm centre of his enormous fantasy, there is an ego-denying self, looking outwards into the world.