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O "One eye sees," the artist Paul Klee once wrote, "the other feels." PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NICHOLSON/CORBIS How better to capture the challenge of an artist, confronting the intellectual and the emotional—a century ago or today? Klee, the Swiss-German painter who helped usher in pure abstraction in the early twentieth century, was modernism's philosopher-artist, equally eloquent—and frequently witty—with words and paintbrush alike. Though he was a crucial member of Europe's avantgarde and played a prominent role in the Bauhaus, Klee's work has resisted easy defnition. It's not hard to discern elements of cubism, expressionism, and surrealism in his fuidly drawn lines, imaginative creatures, and riots of color, but they are trumped by Klee's playful idiosyncrasy. His many innovations ranged from childlike drawings and paintings with text to an embrace of the modernist grid, and echoes of his work can be seen in the work of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, and Keith Haring. But perhaps his most lasting contribution was his steadfast devotion to innovation itself. In October, the Tate Modern in London will mount a major exhibition of Klee's oeuvre, the frst important study of him in the UK in more than a decade. Gathering his drawings and paintings from collections all over the world, the show will trace his arc as an artist: his emergence in Munich in the 1910s; his prolifc years at the Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s; his return to Switzerland when the Nazis came to power the following decade. The show's title, Paul Klee: Making Visible, alludes to one of the artist's most resonant declarations: "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible." The statement captures the unique position that Klee and his peers found themselves in as the world entered the age of photography: The artist's role was no longer to replicate but to elucidate. He would spend his life wrestling with how. Born in 1879 in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, he was three years old when his grandmother is said to have given him a set of colored pencils. Klee, though, was born not to be a painter but rather, a musician. His father, Hans, played piano and violin, and his mother, Ida, studied voice. The young Paul began to study violin at the age of seven and was accomplished enough by eleven to perform regularly with an orchestra. Fall 2013 . Tempus-Magazine.com 55