Exotischer Garten

Throughout his artistic career, Paul Klee regarded the study of nature—its eternal rhythms and cycles, processes and structures—as the very foundation of his art. He believed that by reaching into nature the artist was able to absorb impressions of the world, which could then be channeled into a vision that expressed the inherent truths of the universe. Comparing the source of an artist’s creative impulse to the growth of a tree, Klee explained: “From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he molds his vision into his work” (quoted in E.-G. Güse, ed., Paul Klee: Dialogue with Nature, Munich, 1991, p. 26). However, as with the tree, the resulting image could not be an exact reflection of its source material. The “crown” of the tree must diverge from the pattern of its roots and develop its own identity, allowing a space for the artist’s creativity to blossom in a new, subjective manner.
Painted in 1926, Exotischer Garten offers a colorful illustration of Klee’s ideas, as he explored the unseen patterns, tensions and rhythms that underpin the natural world. His passion for plants had been fostered from an early age by his parent’s colorful and extensive garden, and he proved extremely sensitive to the timbre of various landscapes, often documenting his response to different terrains in his diary. Over the years he assembled a diverse collection of botanical materials, which served as visual aids in his studies on form and included various flora, stones, shells, butterflies and sea urchins, which he had gathered on his many wanderings through the countryside. Together, these organic objects fueled his interest in the processes of growth, change, metamorphosis, and regeneration, while also providing him with models from which he could build his at times fantastical imagery.
In Exotischer Garten the picture plane is divided into a series of carefully delineated, rippling horizontal bands of color, from which the plants spring upwards and outwards in a contrasting network of flowing lines. As the title indicates, the artist was drawn to the unusual, exotic plant-life that blossoms within this scene, which resembles a grove of flowering cacti, and may have been inspired by Klee’s memories of a similar garden that he had discovered on one of his seminal trips to North Africa a decade prior. Here, the rippling lines pictorially suggest an inherent connection and harmony that courses through the landscape, tying all aspects of nature together with an assured regularity, despite the vast differences in form that marked the various types of vegetation.
At this time Klee was entering his fifth year as a professor at the Bauhaus, the revolutionary art school which had begun in Weimar, before relocating to Dessau in the mid-1920s. During his tenure, he had diligently developed his teaching methods, consolidating his own personal experiences as an artist and clarifying the techniques he had previously adopted instinctively, in order to define and communicate the methodological and theoretical foundations of his art to his students. The increasing rationalization of design at the school following its move to Dessau appears to have directly influenced the tenor of Klee’s writing and teaching, as he began to link his analysis of the dynamic organic growth processes in leaves, blossoms and fruit with the development of geometric, elementary forms, a theme he would explore at length in his seminars on Planimetrische Gestaltung (planimetric construction). This shift in Klee’s approach to form can be felt in Exotischer Garten, where the regular linear rhythms and structuring of the scene suggest an underlying order and uniformity to the riotous growth and vitality of the garden.