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Lot Essay
Executed in 1934 soon after his return to Bern, Spärlich Belaubt (Barely in Leaf) is a radiant and extensively worked painting of newly sprouting leaves that Klee has rendered in such a way as to suggest an entire cosmos of growth and natural form. Set against a rich and seemingly infinite warm red background and extending in a planar graphic pattern of line, color and shape as if they were symbols, letters or glyphs from some unknown calligraphic language, these joyous and shimmering leaves seem to articulate the hidden patterns and codes of nature.
For Klee, the hidden structures and rhythms of nature were very real and powerful chthonic forces that he believed could be rendered, albeit in approximation, by the artist. In a lecture given in 1924 he famously likened the artist, as a creature of nature, to a tree, explaining that if the artist allowed himself to "burrow" deeply into "nature and life" then these forces would "flow through the artist's eyes and mind" and the "force of this flow" would move through him and "transmit" themselves through his work (quoted in H. Jaffe, Paul Klee, London, 1971, pp. 27-28). The resultant work of art, he explained, reflects the forces that have flowed through the artist and given birth to its forms, but they are not identical. "Art does not reproduce the visible," he famously remarked, "rather, it makes visible."
In this panoramic and seemingly holistic portrait, Klee invokes nature with disc-like leaves imitating stars and planets set against the background while the radiant blues and greens of these schematic leaves in turn suggest the more terrestrial forms of life.
For Klee, the hidden structures and rhythms of nature were very real and powerful chthonic forces that he believed could be rendered, albeit in approximation, by the artist. In a lecture given in 1924 he famously likened the artist, as a creature of nature, to a tree, explaining that if the artist allowed himself to "burrow" deeply into "nature and life" then these forces would "flow through the artist's eyes and mind" and the "force of this flow" would move through him and "transmit" themselves through his work (quoted in H. Jaffe, Paul Klee, London, 1971, pp. 27-28). The resultant work of art, he explained, reflects the forces that have flowed through the artist and given birth to its forms, but they are not identical. "Art does not reproduce the visible," he famously remarked, "rather, it makes visible."
In this panoramic and seemingly holistic portrait, Klee invokes nature with disc-like leaves imitating stars and planets set against the background while the radiant blues and greens of these schematic leaves in turn suggest the more terrestrial forms of life.