Painted in 1929, Blumen in der Vase (Flowers in the Vase) is a magnificent watercolour made during Paul Klee’s last year at
the Bauhaus. As is typical of Klee’s art, the picture depicts not the outward appearance of its subject though this itself is discernible in the work’s harmonious but near abstract patterning of colour and form but its inner nature or ‘essence’ as Klee called it. As Klee had repeatedly taught his students at the Bauhaus, it was not the look of the object or its outer form that he wanted them to convey in their work, but its true self. 

As one of his students recalled, Klee ‘made us sense how life streamed through its main and subsidiary veins, how its form was determined by this and how the cellular tissue embroidered itself lightly and yet firmly like a net around the veins… we felt this so strongly that the pencil in our hands became heavy and we had to admit that the first thing we had to do was to learn to see before we could draw another line’ 

(L. Grote, ed., Erinnerungen an Paul Klee, Munich, 1959, p. 64).

Like the similar work from this time, Belichtetes Blatt (Illuminated Leaf), in which Klee famously articulated the inner life force of a leaf seemingly radiating outwards in a similar manner to the blooming and wilting flowers in the present work, Blumen in der Vase presents a pictorial combination of ‘outer form’ and inner generative impulse. Outward appearance is here linked to ‘essence’ in a masterfully eloquent form of visual poetics that, as Richard Verdi has pointed out, ‘could only have come from the mind of an artist deeply immersed in the workings of nature one who, only a year later, offered the following advice to the teacher of a group of young artstudents:

“When they are ready to move onto higher things, guide your pupils towards nature into nature. Make them experience it, how a bud is formed, how a tree grows, how a butterfly unfolds, so that they may become just as resourceful, flexible and original as great nature. Looking is revelation, is insight into the workshop of God. There, in nature’s womb, lies the secret of creation”’ (R. Verdi, ‘The Botanical Imagery of Paul Klee’, in E.G. Güse, ed., Paul Klee; Dialogue With Nature, Munich, 1991, p. 29).