Paul Klee, Tate Modern

Modernist painter Paul Klee’s first large-scale UK show in 10 years opened at the Tate Modern this autumn. It’s the first exhibition in the Tate’s historic three-year partnership with Ernst & Young (announced this July),and curator Matthew Gale’s newest effort brings 100 of Klee’s works together for the first time since 2003.

One of the radical masters of 20th century abstract art, his vibrant pre-WW1 patchwork paintings are often credited as having influenced the Surrealist Joan Miró and Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko.  But it’s his decade-long relationship with the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, that forms the core theme of the exhibition.

A defining influence on modern German art and architecture, the Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by the seminal sculptor Walter Gropius in the wake of Germany’s disastrous World War One defeat. Focussing on simplicity in design and a holistic, utopian approach to the teaching of photography, sculpture, painting and architecture, Klee taught at the school alongside his close friend Wasilly Kandinsky, Hungarian painter László Moholy-Nagy and sculptor Marianne Brandt, to name but a few, until it was forced to close under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.

Look out for the beautiful abstract canvases Fire in the Evening (1929) and Maibild (1925) which were born of his time there and propelled him to new heights of fame. This is also a great chance to see works from Klee’s post-Bauhaus repertoire: a series of lesser-known pieces created in Bern in his native Switzerland prior to death in 1940, and branded‘entartet’ by the Nazis.

Ticket price: £16.50