In an ideal world you would be able to walk around the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern choosing Christmas presents for your family and friends… the pictures are such desirable objects, almost everybody finds them charming and most pieces would not require more than a single sheet of wrapping paper.

It is the modest scale and sweetness of Klee’s work that has stopped him from being valued as highly as his Modernist contemporaries and yet his imagination and invention surpasses all but a few of them. He was abstract before almost everybody else, he was surreal before the Surrealists and he explored technique for its own sake in a way not seen again until the Minimalists.

The extensive Tate exhibition is a pleasure from start to finish, which is not to say the art lacks darkness; on the contrary, a sense of the sinister or uncanny is present in almost every work on show. Klee’s childlike drawing and paintbox use of colour don’t conceal but rather reveal an extraordinary, elegant and sophisticated personality. He said “I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing… ” He would have been 134 years old yesterday.

Paul Klee – Making Visible continues at the Tate Modern until 9 March 2014, more information and book here.

Written by a Thoroughly Modern Man, Chris Kenny.