Navel Gazing with Paul Klee: A Meditation

 “To be empty of things is to be full of God.” - Meister Eckhart
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” - Paul Klee

Breathe in
Breathe out
Breathe in
Breathe out

Paul Klee (1897 – 1940) said in 1924 “It is the artist’s mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution…In the womb of nature in the primal ground of creation where the secret key to all things lies hidden.”

Breathe in
Breathe out
Find the center

Klee’s painting – Omphalo-Centric Lecture (1939) – is a visual description of this quest – looking inward, looking deeper, looking into the mystery at the center of the universe, what lies before and what lies beyond. It is, quite literally, navel-gazing. 1

The mysterious figure in Klee’s painting stares out at us, as if inviting us to join the artist in this quest to find the center of things. She (?) cups in her hand a glowing navel, radiating with a sort of divine light – a light from which all knowledge spreads.

For Klee, who suffered from scleroderma (an autoimmune tissue disorder that causes a thickening and hardening of the skin and of blood vessels and internal organs) the Omphalo was a symbol of life and death. He dealt continually with images of death in the last full year of his life. But Klee did not consider death to be the end. The epithat on his tombstone (which he composed) reads:

I cannot be grasped in the here and now
For I live just as well with the dead
as with the unborn
Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual

But far from close enough

The 1932 painting “The Fruit” is another example of this quest for the mystic center. A spiraling cord – an umbilical cord – leads us forward and backward through space and time to the intense white light at the center – the seed, the embryo from which all will grow.

In 1936 he painted “Southern Gardens.” He painted few works that year because of his illness. Yet despite his illness this work is filled with joyous light and warmth. It depicts a Mediterranean landscape – a garden. And in the center of this garden is the Omphalo. It becomes then, not just any garden, but the mythic and mystic Garden of Eden where men and women walked with God in the cool of the day.

The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel described Jerusalem as “the Navel of the World.” 2 Later rabbis would expand upon this to declare that the Ark of the Covenant within the Holy of Holies sat squarely upon the center of the earth, the axis mundi, the place where earth meets sky and man meets God. It is Jacob’s ladder, leading us upward and inward into the presence of God. There we find the Cross of Calvary and the Tree of Life.

Breathe in
Breathe out
Breathe in
Breathe out
Find the center

1 “Omphalos” is the Greek word for navel.
2 Ezekiel 38:12 – see also Judges 9:37