On Modern Art - Paul Klee

tree quote

May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? the artist has studied this worl of variety an hs, we may suppose, unbstrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life. this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of this tree.

Form 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 moulds his vision into his work.

As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and in space, so eith his work.

Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce vital divergences.

But it is just the artist who at times is denied those deprtures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.

And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules - he transmits.

His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.