The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Trees would be a recurring theme for the rest of the artist’s life. He would draw gardens and forests, sometimes painting leaves abstractly with broad brushstrokes, on other occasions evoking branches by using a ruler to make schematic patterns of thin lines. The fealty to the riches of the cosmos that vividly imprinted itself on his consciousness when he was a child would only grow stronger. The advanced students at the Bauhaus who worked with him in his studio were given, as their first task, an assignment to draw trees.

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  In 1898, shortly before his nineteenth birthday, Klee moved to Munich to study art and to play violin in a string quintet.

  He rented a room in the home of a doctor’s widow, began playing music, and found someone to teach him figure drawing. But he quickly had different priorities from what he anticipated: “Life, of which I knew so little, attracted me more than anything else. …In short, I had first of all to become a man: art would follow inevitably. And, naturally, relations with women were part of it.” He met a young woman whom he considered “free and fitted to introduce me to those mysteries around which the world, ‘life,’ for better or worse revolves.” She was “a blonde, blue-eyed thing.” He “carried a bag of apples for her,” and when she offered him an apple, he assumed he was on his way to experience “the Holy of Holies.” In his diaries, Klee would tell the story of his pursuit, stage by stage, but also of his failure, leading him to feel that “I had some defect or other that kept me from being successful with women.”14 His main ambition was to make himself a proficient lover. “I hardly think about art. I only want to work at my personality.”15

  Nineteen-year-old Klee kept “a little ‘Leporello catalogue’ of all the sweethearts whom I didn’t possess.” The one who interested him the most was Lily Stumpf, whom he met in the autumn of 1899, on an evening when she played piano and he played violin. By February 1900, he wrote in his diary, “Flower of fire, at night you replace the sun for me and shine deeply into the silent human heart. … I want to hold your head in my hands,

  tightly in both hands, and never allow you to turn away from me.” But Lily would not allow him to satisfy his “curiosity about the sexual mystery.” To do so, he had, in his words, “begun an affair with a girl who was my social inferior.”16 Stumpf, whose father was a doctor, was, by contrast, a notch above him in the class system.

  By the time he achieved his goal of losing his virginity, he was twenty years old, and a new century had begun. His own droll observer, especially about his debauchery, Klee noted in his diary, “Alcoholic excesses were an important part of the whole process. Entries made in a state of drunkenness that followed long nightly parties must be deleted here, for they invariably turned out to be completely incomprehensible.” There was one “May wine orgy” after which he passed out cold. But when he was sober, he was very serious. Even though writing was “the only other thing” that “attracted” him, he was increasingly convinced that he wanted to make painting his occupation. Besides struggling to determine his professional future, he was grappling with his personal life. Klee felt guilty about Lily. Every time he had sex with his mistress, he found himself “really disgusted” that he could not combine physical pleasure with love.17

  Klee kept one account of his drunkenness, a spectacular example of in vino Veritas: “The only extant alcoholic entry. I know. I don’t believe. I first want to see. I doubt very much. I do not envy. I do not turn back. I act. I oppose. I hate. I create in hatred. I must. While I admit. I weep. Nonetheless. I persist. I complete. I wager. Only quiet, only quiet!”18

  THAT SPRING, there was a significant turn of events. On April 26, 1900, Klee recorded, “The most agitated days pleased me especially. I drew compositions in the morning (‘Three Boys’). Then my mistress visited me and declared herself pregnant. In the afternoon I took my composition and studies to Stuck, who accepted me in the autumn class at the Academy.” That evening at a concert, he met yet another young lady he liked. He slept especially “deeply and soundly that night!” Stuck was Franz von Stuck, an academic painter who taught figure drawing in his lavish villa and who, true to late-nineteenth-century tradition, mainly painted emotionally wrought women. At the Bauhaus, Stuck’s classes would become territory that Klee, Kandinsky, and Josef Albers had in common. Albers later recalled that when the three discovered that each had studied with Stuck, albeit at different times, they agreed that they had gotten no benefit from “all that drawing of nude women.”19

  Klee’s mistress’s pregnancy had little visible effect on him. The mother of his future baby remained unnamed in his diary. He was attracted to one woman after another: boating on “the mirror-smooth lake” of Thun with “Fräulein Schwiago;” obsessing over “Eveline;” meeting, on a steamer, a “pretty damsel,” named “Fráulein Helene M,” who had in his childhood been “the object of my first passion.” But he was not pleased with himself. His own harsh judge, Klee wrote: “Often I am possessed by the devil; my bad luck in the sexual realm, so fraught with problems, did not make me better. In Burghausen I had teased large snails in various ways. … Innocence irritates me. The bird’s song gets on my nerves, I feel like trampling even worms.”20

  KLEE’S WRITING during this brief period of his life when he was recording random thoughts points toward the art he would make at the Bauhaus. In Weimar and Dessau, he would randomly mix incompatible flora and fauna and landscape elements, jump from the serious to the larky, and juxtapose eagerness and trepidation. His art would reveal the unexpected admixtures of the mind.

  Part of Klee’s gift as an artist, which he would pass on to his students, was his ability to achieve such freedom through painting. In 1900, he liberated himself more with words than with a paintbrush; by the time he reached the Bauhaus, he had become notably silent, pouring everything into his art.

  Klee’s diary entry one August day in 1900, when he was in the mountains, in Oberhofen, could be the narrative for the watercolors he would paint a quarter of a century later: “Nowhere I wanted to stay; of what use, then, was a delightful landscape? The dryads’ chatter bored me. The bells of the herds up in the mountains had sounded there before. On the water the despair of loneliness lurked around me. Unconsciousness was what I needed, not recreation.”21

  That prizing of the unconscious, in combination with vivid imagery, was one of Klee’s great contributions to the Bauhaus. Gropius, after all, cared mainly about functionalism and wanted to infuse design with rationalism; the torments of his own soul were isolated from his professional life, and he advocated that same separation in the workshops. Klee, on the other hand, in the way he taught art, and above all in his own work, accepted, and even embraced, desire, frustration, and doubt. He readily endorsed the expression of intense human cravings—so long as the form was correct, and the feelings, however violent, were displayed in a balanced, artistic way.

  After declaring his desire for the unconscious, he wrote, “I felt drawn to the city. I shall never be capable of entering a brothel, but I know the way to reach it. I wrongly lead a vegetable life, like the blossoms of the flowers behind the iron fence in the castle of Oberhofen. I am a captive animal. … In a poem I sang a song to sorrow with such pathetic conviction that it personified itself in the desired woman, in whose entrance I was good to die.”22

  No one else’s mind worked quite like this. Even though Klee mellowed in the two decades between writing those diary entries and accepting Gropius’s invitation to Weimar, the way the Bauhaus was so hospitable to someone of such unique imagination was part of its force.

  AT THE BAUHAUS, both in Weimar and in Dessau, Klee would openly discuss his conversations with snakes on his walks through the parks. It was during this earlier period in Munich that he first acknowledged his connection to a range of species in the greater cosmos:

  Worms want to console me. … Only the smallest creatures are still zealously active, ants, flies, and beetles.

  But me, the midday peace paralyzes. I burn on a dry bed, I am all fire on the thin
carpet of thyme and brier.

  I still recall the moon’s mildness. But now flies copulate on me, and I must look on it. The snow melts from the mountains, even there I shall not find coolness.23

  If this was madness (in the course of Klee’s lifetime, there would be doctors who publicly diagnosed the artist as schizophrenic), it was never treated. He channeled his disturbing visions into his art, creating rich results and giving himself relief.

  Klee recognized that need early on: “When reality is no longer endurable, it seems like a dream dreamt with open eyes. … Religious thoughts begin to appear. The natural is the power that maintains. The individual, which destructively rises above the general, falls into sin. There exists, however, something higher yet, which stands above the positive and negative. It is the all-mighty power that contemplates and leads the struggle.”24

  That abhorrence of “the individual”—which meant a fascination with oneself and one’s personal experience—would at the Bauhaus ally Klee with Gropius in the dispute with Johannes Itten, and would be something he shared with Kandinsky and the Alberses. It would also endear Klee’s work to some other modernists, like Le Corbusier, who were not directly connected with the school but who admired Bauhaus ideals—in opposition to those of their contemporaries who were deliberately and specifically self-revelatory in their work. Artists who shared Klee’s fundamental beliefs, such as Mondrian, were searching for universal truths, often derived from nature and having “all-mighty power.” For some, a traditional notion of God was part of this; for others, it was of no consequence. What mattered was not the precise character of the object of worship, but the shared belief in its superiority to the cult of self.

  ON DECEMBER 24, 1900, before going to a Christmas tree party at Lily’s parents’ house, Klee stopped in at the studio of Herr Knirr—for whom he had no first name—with whom he had studied art before taking classes with Franz von Stuck. The platform on which the model normally stood was covered with wine bottles, and the model, drunk, was crawling around animatedly on her hands and knees. Then Herr Knirr disappeared and “returned triumphantly with a bucket and a few bottles of champagne. This refreshed the girls and made us slightly drunk.” Klee remained with two of the girls. They were the last three people “on the field of the orgy,” and, by the time they left, both women needed to lean on him. The three then repaired to Klee’s rented room. “They lie down and I have the proud feeling of holding two women in my power.” Following “the last moments, … leave must be taken, and I show up at Lily’s slightly befuddled.”25

  He concludes his diary entry for that day: “Now I had achieved quite a good deal. I was a poet, I was a playboy, I was a satirist, an artist, a violinist. One thing only I was no longer: a father. My mistress’s child had proved unfit for life.”26

  Klee’s illegitimate son, who had been born in November, was a few weeks old when he died. We know nothing more; while he had mentioned the pregnancy and recorded the baby’s death, he never referred to his birth or brief life in his diary. The infant’s demise is presented without emotion. Klee was more excited describing an affair that began on December 28 with Cenzy, a sixteen-year-old model, explaining that because of their class differences he addressed her as “du,” while she used the more respectful “Sie” for him. In his diaries, Klee includes the full text of a letter she wrote him after their first night together. She reported that her father greeted her with “a long sermon on morals, which I did not enjoy very much,” and begged Klee “to be very discreet,” especially in front of “Herr N,” whose mistress of long standing she was; next she instructed Klee to “forget what took place last night,” and then, contradictorily, assured him “we shall see each other again next week. I shall visit you.” She signed off as “Your obedient Cenzy R.”27

  IN 1901, KLEE AND A FRIEND, the Swiss sculptor Hermann Haller, took off together for six months in Italy. By then Klee had formulated his idea of what counted: “first and foremost the art of living; then as ideals: art, poetry, and philosophy.”28 For his profession, he would be a sculptor, but if that did not enable him to earn a living, he would make extra money as an illustrator. He felt that Italy was where he could get the best education in the fields he had chosen.

  Klee was more drawn to the Italian primitives than to the better-known masters of the high Renaissance. That attraction to what was pure, direct, and spontaneous was something he would have in common with many of his Bauhaus colleagues. Kandinsky loved both Russian and Bavarian folk art; Josef Albers preferred Duccio to Giotto and both of them to Botticelli; Anni Albers turned to Inca textile fragments rather than to Renaissance tapestry. They favored heightened emotional charge over formal complexity dependent on stringent guidelines.

  FOLLOWING THE TRIP to Italy, Klee settled in Bern, but he continued to travel to Munich to see Lily Stumpf, and in 1902 they announced their engagement. They did not marry until 1906. It was only then that Klee moved back to Munich to join her, and his artwork hit a new stride with the change of his way of life.

  Once they were husband and wife, Klee painted and made etchings, while Lily taught piano to support them. In his prints, Klee used a highly realistic style to evoke a world of grotesques. He invented comedians with oversize jaws and enormous, lethal-looking teeth, and a muscular and forbidding naked woman with gigantic limbs sprawled on a bare branch and called, ironically, Virgin in a Tree. He titled an image of two stooped-over, Uriah Heep—type characters (physically resembling greyhounds, they stare at each other unpleasantly with unctuous faces) Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank. This acerbic vision of the world softened when Lily became pregnant; Klee suddenly switched to making paintings on glass that tenderly depicted maternal themes, among them charming evocations of beasts suckling their young.

  On November 30, 1907, Lily gave birth to a son. Felix would remain her and Klee’s only child. When he was about sixteen months old, he became so ill that his father, who was the parent at home, began to devote himself fulltime to child care. At the Bauhaus, he continued to be the more involved parent, as Lily was often away, either dealing with her own failing parents or undergoing treatment for her “nervous disorders.”

  Nothing could keep Klee from painting, however. The making of art was such a necessity for him that he always found the means to do it. While he was at home with the unwell Felix, he could work on only a small scale, but he further developed his highly personal style. Like child’s play, the oils and watercolors were both intense and whimsical, the product of total concentration.

  Klee also began to write frank and lively diaries, and, for a while, to keep a “Felix Calendar.” This record of his son’s life, starting in babyhood, perfectly reflected the same powers of observation that would nourish Klee’s teaching at the Bauhaus as well as his painting. “Felix imitates rotating objects onomatopoetically by woo-woo-woo; dogs by hoo-hoo-hoo!; horses by co!co!co!—with his tongue clicked against the hood palate; ducks: heh!heh!heh! hoarsely in the back of his throat.”29 Klee did not think in the usual clichés of “neigh” and “bow-wow” and “quack.”

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  In 1911, Klee was introduced to August Macke, another artist working in a fresh and original manner, totally removed from the dry style promulgated at the academies. That autumn, Macke brought his neighbor Wassily Kandinsky to meet Klee. Klee’s first reaction to the Russian painter three years his senior, who had broken the boundaries of art by making paintings that did not refer at all to the known visual world, was that he “inspires a certain deep confidence in himself. …He is ‘somebody,’ and has an exceptionally handsome, open face.”30 They immediately understood each other and started spending time together.

  Kandinsky and Klee often discussed Wilhelm Worringer’s recently published Abstraction and Empathy, a short book that enabled them to understand why the balance and clarity that were the goals of their abstract art compensated for the lack of those same qualities in their everyday lives. Precise representation would have o
nly echoed their emotional tumult; they were actively seeking an alternative.

  With Franz Marc and Alexey Jawlensky, two other highly competent artists who painted bold forms in vibrant colors, Klee and Kandinsky created Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider Group). While most people were vehemently opposed to their bold, seemingly haphazard colors and energy-laden forms, comparing them to the equally scandalous French Fauves, the Blue Rider artists encouraged and stood up for one another. When others attacked Kandinsky for the work he showed in an exhibition devoted to the Moderner Bund at the Zurich Kunsthaus, Klee wrote a review defending the abstractions that shocked the general public. They were developing a camaraderie and a friendship that would blossom at the Bauhaus.

  IN 1914, KLEE AND MACKE went to Tunisia. Their lengthy stays in Tunis, Carthage, and Hammamet opened Klee’s eyes to the spectacular Mediterranean sunlight and the marvels of Moorish architecture. Minarets, cacti, tropical flowers, and blue water, all in glistening sunshine, began to appear in Klee’s work. As if seen through a prism, subjects exotic and mundane were rendered in luminous pastel tones, in vibrant pictures divided geometrically like animated, irregular checkerboards.

  These joys of life came to an abrupt halt, however, once Klee returned to Munich later that year. Kandinsky, as a Russian, had to leave Germany and return to his homeland. Jawlensky was also forced to leave. Worst of all, Klee’s traveling companion, Auguste Macke, was killed fighting in France, at age twenty-seven.

  Klee found a solution for his torment and nightmares: “In order to work my way out of my dreams, I had to learn to fly. And so I flew. Now, I dally in that shattered world only in occasional memories—the way one recollects things now and again.” His only means of surviving was to escape reality. In 1915, Klee declared, “The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.”31