Natural Beauty, Unnatural Balance

The most profound investigation by an artist into the world of plants is Paul Klee’s “The Nature of Nature,” the second of his posthumously published two-volume Bauhaus teaching notebooks. Klee’s notebooks, the first of which is “The Thinking Eye,” are no substitute for his art. They do, however, provide entrance into the metaphors, processes, and structures of abstract painting. In “The Nature of Nature,” Klee, a cosmologist as much as a botanist, analyzes the world not to describe nature but to discover its functions, actions, and interactions. Rather than paint a bowl of fruit (a still life), Klee suggests that we consider a more comprehensive and dynamic view — an abstract picture in which we explore simultaneously “an apple tree in blossom, the roots, the rising sap, the trunk, a cross section with annual rings, the blossom, its structure, its sexual functions, the fruit, the core, and seeds. An interplay of states of growth.”