Vegetable-Analytic

Stand this one on its end and it makes more sense: it is a tall, narrow strip, more than twice as high as it is wide, like a single plant climbing up a page. Klee gave it a dry, laboratory-sounding title, Vegetable-Analytic, and that is close to how he thought. He spent years studying how plants actually grow, root to shoot, and taught it as a kind of science of form, so a picture like this reads as growth broken down into stages and cells rather than a plant you could name. He made it in 1932 in watercolour, on cardboard prepared with a chalky ground. The strip is about 53 centimetres tall and only 19 across.