Size matters or when big is too big and too small is just right

Let's get this over with fast: Paul Klee (1879-1940) painted small pictures. The rooms (do I have to call them spaces) in Tate Modern were not designed with small in mind. They were intended for painters and sculptors creating for museums not places where people live.  "Red green and Violet-Yellow" painted in 1920 is immediately attractive, even pretty, But sit alone with it for half an hour and worlds open up. Fat chance of doing that in this place. The painting is 14 3/4 by 13 1.4 inches (37.5 by 33.7 cm.) -a stretched out one-foot square. This is not a miniature but it looks like one on the walls of Tate Modern. In fact it looks like a postage stamp. The whole show looks like a line up of 3-D stamp albums.  "Revelatory," calls this show. They want us to pay more attention to Klee. 

The artist was slow to find his way until 1911 when he became attached to the Blue Rider group in Munich. See my story "Eye Music" about the Blue Riders in 25 May issue of The Economist .But what really gave him the push to be the Paul Klee we know--or might like to know better if we could concentrate on the works, was his visit to Tunisia in 1914. He and color fell in love. That is when he knew painting was for him.
   This show does not help; it undermines. Either it should have been staged in a more intimate place or a small, cozier space should have been built inside that hulking cavern. Which brings me to Whistler.












There is no one size that James Abbott Macneill Whistler (1834-1903) favored but many of the works on view in "Whistler and the Thames," at the Dulwich Picture Gallery range from sketches smaller than a sheet of paper to paintings you could easily tuck under one arm.  The museum's limited special- exhibition space, two modest rectangles connected by a long narrowish corridor are just the right for the size and scale for these often moody, poetic works; the drawings for them and the Japanese prints that inspired him.
"Nocturne: Blue and Gold--Old Battersea Bridge," (1872-79) to the left, was painted about a dozen years after the American settled in London.  It measures about 36 by 30 inches. "Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea" (1871-2) measures 24 by 13 inches.  You get the idea. These rooms are not so small that the pictures looked cramp or the viewer gets claustrophobic. Instead they and their proportions, and for that matter with all the numbers that have already appeared here, 

you forget all that sort of stuff and just look and wonder and envy Whistler a little too, his walks along the river; the models dressed in Japanese kimonos with cherry blossom branches strewn on the balcony overlooking the Thames; fishermen drinking in "The Angel" at Bermondsey; London a port and the Thames crowded with working boats. "The Pool," 1859 just east of London Bridge. Go out to Dulwich--it is worth the trip which they claim takes only 20 minutes. You will quickly enter Whistler's world--and the river at whatever time of day and season. It is a lovely show. And if you can't make it, the accompanying book is a treat. In addition to all the paintings, etchings and sketches there are photographs of the river and London's riverside and one of Whistler at work; against one wall  is propped a larger than life-sized portrait of his lover Maud Franklin. His studio had plenty of space for such a work. Dulwich is picture perfect for Whistler's Thames.