On February 4, 1928, Walter Gropius wrote a letter of resignation to Mayor Hesse. He recommended Hannes Meyer to succeed him.
THE EVENING AFTER WALTER GROPIUS’S letter of resignation was presented to the mayor by a magistrate of the court, the Bauhaus students were having a dance. Gropius felt he had no choice but to interrupt it with the announcement that he was leaving. It was as if he had told them someone they all loved had just died. The band refused to resume playing, and most of the students simply fell silent. Gropius again took the floor. He urged the students to enjoy themselves and continue dancing, but nothing could lift the pall.
One of the forlorn students, Fritz Kuhr, spontaneously made a speech. “For the sake of an idea we starved here in Dessau. You cannot leave now,” Kuhr shouted. He expressed the fears of most everyone there that night. Reactionaries would take over the Bauhaus; Hannes Meyer as director would be “a catastrophe.”183
Gropius assured his acolytes that this was all for the best. But he could not resist trying to exact a certain sympathy as embattled martyr. He told the students that his successor would “not be hampered by all the personal difficulties” that had been thrust in his path over the preceding nine years. He had, he told them, been forced to use 90 percent of his time and energy “defensively.”184
But then he put ideals above his own concerns. The Bauhaus had become, he said, “one of the leading members of the ‘modern movement,’ and I can serve the cause far better if I continue working for it in another part of the movement.” Gropius insisted that the institution he had founded would be in a more desirable situation if he was out of the picture. He urged them “to work constructively and positively.”185
The feeling on the dance floor that night was that Hannes Meyer had forced Gropius to quit, not that Gropius had anointed him. In the following days, when Meyer announced the ways he intended to reorganize the Bauhaus, and allowed that he had made these plans long before—having realized that the school clearly suffered from a “neurosis of inertia”—that sentiment only intensified.186
WHILE GROPIUS QUICKLY RELOCATED his architectural office in Berlin, he became possessed by the idea of traveling to the United States. When the city of Dessau agreed to reimburse him for the furniture he had built into the director’s house, it looked as if he had the necessary funding for the trip. But the funds were slow in coming, and it took his old patron Adolf Sommerfeld, who wanted to learn about new construction methods being developed in America, to foot the bill. At the end of March 1928, Gropius and Ise, together with Renée Sommerfeld, Adolf’s wife, sailed for New York.
In New York, they stayed at the Plaza Hotel. America made a mixed impression. The food was “unlovingly prepared; though the pastry makeup was tremendous, the quality of the chocolate was poor; the fruit was marvelous, but the waiter’s service slow.” At West Point, a dress parade was “informal in comparison with Germany.” What they found more impressive was New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where the nursing staff resembled “the famous Tiller Girls in beauty and manner;” the reference was to a dance troupe that performed in the Ziegfeld Follies and was famous for their “tap and kick” routine. By contrast, the nurses in Europe “came from less privileged and less educated classes.”187
Gropius and Ise took the train to Washington, D.C., where he met with federal committees involved in building construction. The planning of America’s capital struck him as “inadequate and inconsistent … with separate standards for the political and social elite, for government employees and the middle class, and for negroes.” Then the Gropiuses headed west on a tour that included Chicago and Los Angeles, but whose high points occurred in New Mexico and Arizona, especially on the Indian reservations; a visit with the Havasupai Indians was the “most beautiful day and greatest adventure in the United States.”188 They had no inkling that America would eventually become their home.
When he and Ise returned to Berlin seven weeks later, Gropius still had not received payment for the furniture in Dessau. On June 15, he wrote Mayor Hesse pressing for the transfer of five thousand marks to his account at the Municipal Savings Bank, saying he had “paid for the materials out of my own pocket and the city has taken them over,” and that he was strapped because of what he had had to lay out to cover his moving expenses.189 It was his last communication with a government official concerning the Bauhaus.
Walter Gropius in Arizona, 1928. One of the first things he did after leaving the school he had created was to travel to the United States for the first time.
17
In 1934, Walter and Ise Gropius, aided by the London-based architect Maxwell Fry, moved to England. Many people felt that the reason Gropius was desperate to flee Berlin, abandoning a practice that had enjoyed considerable success after he left the Bauhaus, was not just to get away from Nazi Germany but to separate Ise from Herbert Bayer—the same desire that had motivated him when he had left the Bauhaus six years earlier.
In 1937, with Marcel Breuer, the Gropiuses moved to the United States so Walter could teach at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He became an American citizen in 1944, and the following year founded The Architects’ Collaborative, known as TAC. Until his death, at age eighty-six, in 1969, he would spread his architectural vision not just across the United States, but throughout the world, although sometimes the results, like New York’s Pan Am Building, revealed hubris more than delicacy.
A younger architect at TAC described Gropius near the end of his life, when the Bauhaus founder, now in his eighties, was working on a gallery design in West Virginia:
Gropius had an unusual degree of determination and energy for his age, which was amply demonstrated the day we presented the schematic design to the Building Committee at the Gallery. The design was well received and Gropius then suggested that we all get stakes and string and lay out the building addition to see how it would “fit” on the landscape. The members of the Building Committee were surprised. It was midday in midsummer with the temperatures in the humid 90s, a time of year and time of day when most West Virginians would prefer to remain in the shade. Nonetheless, we found ourselves out in the noonday sun hammering stakes and measuring, urged on all the while by the untiring elderly architect with fire in his eye.
As a young associate at TAC, I was aware that Gropius did not always think of himself as an ordinary man who had to live by ordinary rules. He occasionally passed me on Route 2 on the way to work in his Nash Rambler, rather speedily I thought, his black french [sic] cap jauntily in place, and would disappear around the bend ahead of me in short order. He had loyalty to the Nash, not the most glamorous of cars, because Rambler had utilized the reclining front seats, the idea that he had originated in the design for the Adler car in Germany in the 1920s. But it was not until I began to travel with him for the Gallery that I became familiar with some unusual habits of his.
Gropius had an unrestrained compulsion to be first. He needed to be first on and first off airplanes, and he was unable to wait his turn on line. He would simply barge in front of everyone else impervious to embarrassment. …On board, Gropius invariably caused a flurry by unsnapping his seatbelt at the first screech of tires during those terrifying seconds when the plane is touching down, and he would head for the door while we still hurtled at break neck speed down the runway. He was first at the door despite admonitions by the attendants to remain in his seat until the plane had reached a full stop.190
Walter Gropius always lived according to his own rules.
Paul Klee
1
Paul Klee specified the text for his tombstone:
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 ENOUGH1
By the time he arrived at the Weimar Bauhaus at the end of 1920, this totally original, free-spirited artist had demonstrated jus
t how close to the heart of creation he was. A profusion of watercolors and oils in which plants burst into flower, and the seas and heavens explode into life before our eyes, are like moments of birth.
With his extraordinary mind occupying that realm in which life is generated, in his daily life Klee inhabited territory distant from the usual stage of human conduct. When Anni Albers, who was first his student and then his neighbor, said that Klee was like “St. Christopher carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders,” it was both because he was in his own orbit and because he was preoccupied with his task of making art.
Will Grohmann, an astute art historian who often visited the Bauhaus, writes that the reticent Klee “held the world at arm’s length.”2 Neither at meetings of Bauhaus masters nor on the rare occasions when he had ordinary conversations did he ever commit himself to strong opinions about how people should act.
The painter Jankel Adler describes what Klee looked like from afar:
I have often seen Klee’s window from the street, with his pale oval face, like a large egg, and his open eyes pressed to the windowpane. From the street he looked like a spirit. Perhaps he was trying to decipher the language of the branches across his Windows.3
Adler gives a picture of Klee at work:
He used to gaze for a long time at his prepared canvas before he began the drawing. …I have never seen a man who had such creative quiet. It radiated from him as from the sun. His face was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. He did not speak about these things. He had no tongue to tell of them. Our language is too little to say these things. And so he had to find a Sign, a color, or a form. … Klee, when beginning a picture, had the excitement of a Columbus moving to the discovery of a new continent. He had a frightened presentiment, just a vague sense of the right course. But when the picture was fixed and still he saw that he had come the true way he was happy. Klee, too, set out to discover a new land.4
Paul Klee in his studio at the Weimar Bauhaus, 1922. Klee worked on many paintings simultaneously.
KLEE’S NATURE AND COMPORTMENT are evoked by Dostoyevsky’s description of the remarkable Prince Myshkin, hero of The Idiot: “For a long time he seemed not to understand the turmoil that was seething around him, or rather, he understood completely and saw everything, but stood like a man isolated, not taking part in any of it, who, like the invisible man in a fairytale, has made his way into the room and was observing people who had nothing to do with him, but who interested him.”5 This man of few words and consistently calm demeanor was often seen walking alone in Weimar, absorbing nature in solitude. If he separated himself from the quotidian lives of those around him, he responded deeply to the pulse of life within every bird or flower. The lusty appreciation and unguarded enthusiasm that emerged in his copious artistic production echo Myshkin’s encomium for life: “You know, I cannot understand how one can walk past a tree and not be happy that one’s seeing it? …How many things there are, at every step, so lovely that even the man at his wit’s end will find them lovely! Look at a child, look at God’s dawn, look at the grass growing, look into the eyes that look back at you and love you.”6
Photograph of Paul Klee taken by his son, Felix, at their house in Weimar on April 1, 1925. Most people found it hard to fathom what was going on in Klee’s mind.
For Klee, artistic creativity was steered by the same mysterious force by which the universe came into being and all life begins. One of his favorite words, in his teaching at the Bauhaus as in the texts he wrote when he was there, was “genesis.” He lived at the miraculous moment of everything emerging for the first time.
2
Ernst Paul Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in a small village near Bern, the capital of Switzerland. His father, the son of an organist and from the same region of Germany as Bach, had intended to be a singer, but ended up a schoolmaster instead. Frustrated by not doing what he wanted, Hans Klee was notably edgy and sarcastic, which took a continuous toll on his son since he lived almost to the end of Paul’s own life. Paul’s mother, Ida Frick, a Swiss from Basel, had ancestors from southern France and, according to rumors, from North Africa; she was trained as a musician in the conservatory in Stuttgart, but never worked.
A few months following their son’s birth, the family moved to Bern. Paul was an imaginative little boy, attracted by the bizarre; he would run to his mother “when the evil spirits that I had drawn (three to four years) suddenly acquired real presence.” He also told his mother “that little devils had peeked in through the window.”7 Paul had an uncle who owned a restaurant, where the marble tabletops seemed full of grotesque faces and the veining of the stone assumed the forms of contorted figures, and he was so mesmerized that he made drawings of this lively world. At age three, he had a dream in which he saw what he believed to be the sexual organs of the family’s maid, which consisted of four infantile penises arranged like a cow’s udder; he never forgot the image.
It was normal at the time for little boys to wear skirts, but this was one little boy who was particularly eager that they look just right. Klee would remember, “I developed very early an aesthetic sensibility; while I was still wearing skirts I was made to put on underwear that was too long for me, so that even I could see the grey flannel with the wavy red trimmings. When the doorbell rang I hid to keep the visitor from seeing me in this state (two or three years).” Subsequently, he “was sorry I was not a girl myself so I could wear ravishing lace-trimmed panties (three to four years).”8 Paul liked playing with his older sister’s dolls at that same age.
He was even closer to his doting maternal grandmother, Anna Frick, than to his mother. Frau Frick gave him a box of brightly hued chalks, and he made lively, playful drawings of stick figures and animals, which, while typical of children’s art, were remarkably controlled and articulate. Paul gave his grandmother most of these drawings, and she encouraged him to make art however he wanted. She also drew, and together they would pore over the luminous, commercially produced religious prints that she considered great art. Paul marveled at the intensity of these reproductions.
Frau Frick’s death devastated him. He subsequently wrote, “After my grandmother’s death when I was five years old, the artist in me was orphaned.”9
Mathilde Klee, the artist’s sister, remembered: “My brother was left handed, incidentally; except for his writing he did everything (including painting and drawing) with his left hand. One of our aunts thought ‘this left-hand nonsense ought to be knocked out of him.’ My grandmother flared up: ‘Absolutely not! The child will use the hand that he feels he can use better.’”10 His grandmother was his protector as well as his inspiration; she was also the source of a physical and emotional comfort he later described in his childhood recollections: “She used a particularly soft kind of toilet-paper on me, so-called silk paper!”11
THE CHILD WHO REGARDED the loss of his grandmother as his artistic orphanhood reacted to death in his own way. He was already aware of being different because he did not believe in God, while “other little boys were always saying, parrot like, that God was constantly watching us.” When another child’s grandmother died in their barrack-like apartment house, and the other boys in the building said that “she was now an angel, I wasn’t the least convinced.” He was equally matter-of-fact after Anna Frick died and he and other family members went to view her body in the hospital. Although he was not allowed to go close, Paul was aware that the corpse bore “no resemblance” to the woman he had adored. He learned “that the dead could terrify us,” but he shed no tears, believing that crying was “reserved for adults.”12
In grade school, Paul made imaginary advertisements for the school newspaper, showing things for sale, and signed them “Luap Elk”—his name spelled backward and shortened, with the “Ernst” dropped. He filled sketchbooks with vivid imagery that betrayed rare dexterity, and knew even then that he wanted to be a painter. But he was almost as obsessed with playing music as with drawing. His mother
had had him start to learn violin at age seven. At ten he went with her to a performance of Il Trovatore, and the next year he joined the Bern Musical Orchestra.
After attending a ballet performance at age eleven or twelve, Klee was inspired to make some “pornographic drawings … a woman with a belly full of children;” another in which “a rather plump elf” bends down to pick up a strawberry and reveals his bottom as “the deep valley between swelling hills;” and one of a woman in an obscenely low-cut dress. Klee was “scared to death” when his mother found them and scolded him for being immoral. It was a time of setbacks; after he met a nine-year-old girl, “a delicate beauty” named Helene, from Neuchâtel, and pulled her violently toward him and began kissing her, she fought him off and told him, “You’re bad.”13
FOR MOST PEOPLE, adolescence puts the brakes on the disinhibition of childhood. Yet Klee never—either in his teenage years or later on—thought to conceal what was childlike, or possibly mad, in his character; he simply expressed his fervor in his art. A pencil drawing he made when he was seventeen reveals how overcome he was by trees on a riverbank. It was as if Klee lived inside nature, and the viewer joins the artist in being subsumed by a dense profusion of branches and leaves. The grass along the river’s edge is thick and high, its lushness intensified by its reflection in the water.
We feel Klee’s immense tenderness toward his subject; he draws like someone seduced. Still an adolescent, he rendered foliage with the emotional fervor with which certain nineteenth-century writers describe young love and evoke the torrents of springtime and of seasonal renewal. Even when he was the most influential teacher at the Bauhaus, Klee would not be so much a modernist or a theorist of any sort as a romantic and a naturalist.
The Bauhaus Group Page 14