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Abstract
This contribution illuminates the meaning of the systematic confrontation with nature in the artistic and art-theoretical thought of Paul Klee. Klee's specific interest lay in the analysis of the morphological and structural principles of plants as well as in the study of the processes of growth and form in nature. A central element of this confrontation-which also manifested itself in nuanced ways in Klee's teaching at the Bauhaus and in his artistic creations-is the reduction of the manifold natural world of appearance to structural and morphological principles which can be freely and creatively reassembled. These principles form the foundation for Klee's process-oriented understanding of nature and art.
Keywords
plants, nature, art, process, Paul Klee, structure, morphology
The examination of nature runs like a thread through Klee's entire work; from his childhood until 1940, his final year of creative work, in which 31 pictures, even though often in a poetically alienated way, refer to plants or flora. In his youth, Klee's relationship to nature was, on the one hand, emphatic, if not even romantic, on the other hand, however, it was likewise characterized by careful observation and a classificatory system, which he had acquired in his zoology and botany lessons at high school. Like all the students at Bern's Municipal High School, Klee had already learned the systematology and classification of animals and plants early, and, as all his school books testify, he had achieved a scientific meticulousness in illustrating not only the outward appearance of animals and plants but also their build and structure. (Fig. 1)
On the other hand, as an adolescent Klee felt excluded from the adult world and regarded the natural world as a place to which he could escape and retreat, and the emotional conflict between his fascination for it and his fear of its chaotic entropy would become a formative experience of his youth. There are numerous entries in his diary that deal with an intensive, almost hallucinatory experience of nature, their themes reminiscent of the German Romantics. "For a long time 1 had not bothered to look at the landscape. Now it lay there in all its splendor, deeply moving!"1 And: "In earlier days (even as a child), the beauty of landscapes was quite clear to...