Klee provided Lily with a vivid image of the students seated on three-legged piano stools with red wooden seats and iron legs. Each was working away at a drawing table with an enormous piece of charcoal in his or her hand. Itten, pacing back and forth in that deep red suit, looked like a clown. The ridiculous getup had voluminous, oversize trousers that he wore very high, and a tunic top that was kept closed by a belt of the same material with a large buckle at chest height. The effect of his clothing was secondary to his facial expression, which Klee depicted as a pout, but which could be misconstrued as a look of real scorn. “The head: half schoolmaster, half pastor … and let’s not forget to mention his eyeglasses,” Klee wrote Lily.47
For Klee, eyeglasses had great significance, as did Itten’s gaze. The art of seeing dominated his conscience. He felt as if he was always being looked at, just as he was observing everything. The birds and cats, the leafy plants and crenellated architecture, that he represented in his art, were gazing at him.
KLEE WATCHED WITH FASCINATION as Itten took a piece of charcoal, concentrated his body, and, in a sort of frenzy, drew abstract lines and elementary forms. Itten then gave the students ten minutes in which to draw a representation of a storm. Even if the master’s antics and deliberate theatricality were alien to him, Klee was riveted to this new approach to artistic representation and a teaching method so opposite to the academic tradition in which he had been trained.
At 5 p.m. that same day, Itten gave another course in a large lecture hall constructed like an amphitheater, where people sat on the steps rather than on seats. This time the master projected on the wall a large image of Matisse’s La Danse and had the students draw its essential compositional elements in the dark. Itten’s wife sat at his feet, with everyone else huddled in close. The sole exception was Klee, who sat as far away as possible, at the very top of the amphitheater, in a proper chair. Looking on from this perch, he smoked his pipe.
This was how Klee would always be at the Bauhaus. At dances as at all large gatherings, he maintained his distance. Nursing his pipe in a sort of reverie, he observed and may have felt seen, but he kept to himself.
Half a century later, Ludwig Grote, who was a great friend of many Bauhauslers, told Felix Klee his firsthand impression of Paul Klee in that milieu:
Klee seemed very well-groomed/cultivated in his habits, clothes and demeanor, just as you imagine a citizen of Bern. But you only had this impression if you didn’t see his face, his eyes. One was deeply touched by the aura that emanated from him and instantly seized by the feeling of standing in front of a person who had deep insights. One could feel that he knew more than all of us and that he was very wise. I was always moved by reverence/awe when we met, I felt my own inadequacy and often didn’t dare to speak—although Klee didn’t emanate anything priest-like or overly self-confident.48
Grote also noted what he considered an Arab aspect: “The enjoyment of language, jokes and laughter were an integral part of Klee and his household. He likes participating in the Bauhaus parties. We once lent him a real Tunisian, he brought out the Mediterranean really well. Paul Klee became the ideal of a noble Arab of delicate figure.”49
If that transcript of a conversation recorded in 1972 begs for clarification of the ideas that Klee was lent “a real Tunisian” and “brought out the Mediterranean,” the mix of vivid imagery and unknowability suits Klee well.
THE DAY FOLLOWING the visit to Itten’s class was a Sunday. Klee used it to repair to his new studio to compensate “for the time lost yesterday at the Bauhaus.”50 What Gropius had offered him, and the reason he was in this new place, was, after all, the chance to paint as much as possible.
The work Klee did after arriving in Weimar at age forty-one gave no evidence of his change of location. He lived inside his own mind, or in the entire universe: what city he was in rarely had bearing. He made an idiosyncratic image, Adam and Little Eve, that shows Adam, his large eyes askew, his face a sort of flat mask, as a cad, and Eve as something between a little girl and a doll; he painted pears and flags and birds and goats, as well as invented landscapes and pure abstractions, that could have been created anywhere. The exception is The Potter, a superb watercolor of vases, the simple, bulbous shapes of the unadorned vessels being made in the Bauhaus ceramics workshop (see color plate 2). These forms, generous in scale and painted in subtly luminous colors, are abstracted almost beyond recognition; they are in many ways the product of Klee’s particular imagination, but they still have their basis in what he observed firsthand in the workshop. A large head, with popping eyes and a fish-shaped mouth in which enormous teeth are bared, depicts the potter. He or she—the gender is unclear—is the quintessential Bauhausler for being absorbed so totally with the process of making those vases.
THE PENSION WHERE KLEE was staying until the family’s apartment was ready in April was run by the Count and Countess Keyserlingk. Klee was delighted by these young aristocrats and their eleven-year-old son, Hugo. He admired both their refinement and the absence of stodginess, which was surprising given their backgrounds, and although the temperatures in Weimar returned to their winter frigidity after that first weekend, Klee was content with his new life. Since he would not receive his first paycheck until February, he bought nothing other than those initial art supplies, and he lived simply, but the Keyserlingks were enjoyable company, and his new situation enabled him to paint with renewed energy and concentration. Churning out watercolors and small oils without interference, he was where he wanted to be.
The high point of Klee’s social life was a tasty vegetarian meal made by the sister of Georg Muche at the Ittens’. Mostly, Klee kept to himself, declining invitations even to the most tempting concerts. After what had been a slack period, this precious chance to engage in his painting free of worries afforded him a productive calm he did not want to interrupt. At the end of his first fifteen days in Weimar, the night before his return to Munich, he wrote his parents and sister that he was extremely pleased with what he saw as the Bauhaus’s gift to him. He was delighted to have finished some paintings, and he anticipated that his Weimar studio would be even better in summer.
After this first two-week stint at the Bauhaus, Klee could hardly wait to be reunited not just with his wife and teenage son, but with Fritz the cat. Knowing he would arrive at midnight the following Saturday after a ten-hour train trip, he delighted in the little details of home one savors when contemplating a return, instructing Lily not to use the inside security chain. The structure of his life was the complete opposite of Gropius’s: devoid of external drama, based on orderly domestic routines and a steady marriage.
However, when he returned to the Bauhaus in the second week of February after his time in Munich, Klee was thrown off course by a series of logistical problems. The apartment for his family, which was also where he was supposed to teach, was not going to be ready as planned, so Klee would have to conduct classes in temporary headquarters in the main Bauhaus building, where he had observed Itten. He wrote Lily that if the situation was not straightened out by fall, he would have to resign from the Bauhaus.
TO COUNTERBALANCE THE CONTINUOUS FLUX of his own mind, Klee needed maximum stability around him. After telling Lily about the problems with accommodations, he restored that essential equilibrium by reporting that there was, in Weimar, an Indian “salon de thé” that had delicious cakes. Again, he reported that he had everything he needed, and that while the temperatures below freezing were hard for him, he hoped that they would not last.
Gropius now decided that until the flat and its studio were ready, Klee did not have to teach. Mathilde continued to deal with Klee’s finances, even paying the bills to the gardener and the dentist, and organized the shipping of his art to exhibitions. Her assistance provided the necessary support for him to work away in Weimar—in his own words, “like a monk in his studio.”51 While the other Bauhaus faculty members partied and had lively social lives, Klee painted from 8 a.m. to noon and 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. every day
.
Klee was determined to use the luxury of this new life with its guaranteed salary and free studio space to advance his work into new realms, to which he would be guided more by intuition than by preestablished goals. He considered this a period of searching—a time when he could try “to construct scrupulously the tonality” of watercolors based on only two colors,52 and could pursue other tasks with self-imposed limitations. In this fecund period of happy experimentation, he made further advances in his watercolor technique, presenting dreamlike scenarios in a style that appeared newly carefree and was at the same time highly adept. He was not, however, achieving the results he wanted with his oil paintings.
The combination of splendid artistry and emotional legerdemain, enhanced by Klee’s unique imagination concerning both subject matter and painting methods, quickly found ardent devotees, even though Klee neither sought them out nor even seemed aware of them. While he was working away at the Weimar Bauhaus, this painter, who belonged to no movement and conformed to no style, had no idea of the ripple effect his work was having worldwide. That February, Rainer Maria Rilke, considered by many the greatest living poet in the world, wrote his mistress, the painter Baladine Klossowska, that he was sending her a new book devoted to the work of Klee. Rilke characterized Klee as a “painter-musician” who would interest not just Baladine but also her sons, Pierre and Balthazar, then ages seventeen and fourteen. Pierre Klossowski was already becoming known as a translator and writer, “Balthus” as a draftman of incredible talent—Rilke had just written the preface for a book of drawings the prodigy had made depicting the disappearance of a cat—and Rilke knew that Klee’s work would astonish them.
Rilke said Klee had “an artistic experience which, by dint of being sincere, isn’t afraid of the absurd; you can judge it.”53 The world of the Bauhaus enabled Klee to revel fearlessly at an apogee of freedom that was unprecedented even for him.
ON APRIL 18, KLEE bought a new easel for eighty marks and wrote Lily that now he truly had everything he needed. It was an unusually windy spring, and sometimes so bitterly cold that Klee had to wear his fur coat, but nothing detracted from his overall well-being. To fourteen-year-old Felix, he wrote that he worked all day long, and that the only time he spoke with anyone was on Thursdays, when the Masters’ Council met.
This was about to change. Although the family’s flat was not yet ready, Klee could no longer put off the inevitability of teaching. Thirty people had signed up for the course he was to give starting in mid-May. The number quickly grew to forty-five, at which point Klee insisted it be reduced to the original thirty. Even though he was to teach in one of the large classrooms at the Bauhaus rather than in his studio at home as originally planned, he did not want to lose a certain intimacy.
Klee gave his first lecture on the afternoon of Friday, May 13. The date that some considered a portent of bad luck pleased the man who liked to paint hooligans and demons. “Something incredible happened!” he wrote Lily. “I spoke freely with the people there for two hours.”54
Klee was astonished that, even before the class officially began, he felt open and relaxed with the students. In this sympathetic atmosphere that was without precedent in his life, he began by passing around ten of his recent watercolors. Just as he was discussing their formal elements in relation to their overall composition, there was a real “Friday the thirteenth” sort of event. Klee was in the middle of explaining the constituents of dark tones as opposed to light ones, and was using as a comparison baths of different temperatures, when someone knocked at the door and bounded in. It was a policeman who, in a heavy Saxon accent, proceeded to reproach a student who had not registered at city hall. Everyone in the class burst out laughing.
It was a moment Klee adored. He urged Lily to picture him in front of a herd of students too elated by his teaching even to feign respect for the angry cop. He wrote that he felt stuck between his mirth and his obligation to behave like an authority figure.
A MORE SERIOUS ISSUE, from which Klee stayed further removed than most people, was beginning to cause an emotional firestorm at the Bauhaus. Klee’s apparent impartiality would be a calming force.
This was the period when Johannes Itten was polarizing the faculty and student body into two warring camps. For Klee, the issue was not, as Gropius saw it, primarily the opposition between artists focusing on their individual creation and people developing designs for industry and the public at large. Klee believed the essential problem was Itten’s role as a holy figure whom many people dared approach only with a whisper. Itten had this stature above all because he was a leader of the Mazdaist sect, of which there were many members at the school.
Alma had hated the smell of garlic emitted by the Mazdaist adherents, and Gropius acknowledged the rift between believers and nonbelievers, but Klee, in his role of perpetual observer, considered the sect’s divisiveness far more profound than they acknowledged.
Mazdaism deeply upset a number of people who were not its proponents. Klee not only recognized their pain, but shared it. With his strong personal spiritualism, he hated what he considered false spiritualism. He also deplored anything that distracted from the making of art and from the study of nature that he considered essential to creativity.
Rigorous ideas on nutrition, breathing, and movement dominated the everyday lives of the devotees of Zoroaster. In the spring and autumn, sect members underwent major fasts that began with the taking of a powerful laxative. They would subsequently go for as long as three weeks eating or drinking nothing whatsoever except for hot fruit juices. During the fast periods, they would repair to an orchard they owned on a hill on the outskirts of Weimar, and there they would sing piously and weed the land surrounding their hundreds of raspberry bushes and fruit trees. They considered their labor a perfect analogue to what they intended to do universally, “since we were dedicated to rooting out the weeds of the whole world, the enemies of creativity.”55 Itten and his followers also took ritual baths, piping hot, in the public bathhouse of Weimar and then rubbed themselves with ashes or charcoal, purifying their skin as they had their insides.
During the fasts, the Mazdaists used a needle machine to puncture their skin before having their bodies rubbed with the same oil they had taken as a laxative. The oil was said to draw the impurities (today’s “toxins”) out of their blood, causing the pinpoints in the skin to scab or turn into pustules, which would be bandaged. The believers then engaged in strenuous exercise to bring on as much sweat as possible so that the ulcerations would dry and heal. That process caused them to be tormented by itching for months afterward.
Diet became the crux of a feud between Itten and Gropius so intense that everyone at the Bauhaus had to take a side. Itten managed to have the Bauhaus kitchen follow Mazdaist laws and wanted to require that his students adhere to the doctrine with complete fidelity. Gropius wanted Itten only to teach. As Oskar Schlemmer described their opposing views, Itten prized the act of contemplation as being more important than the resultant work, while Gropius believed that artists should be grounded in reality and respond to the exigencies of their craft rather than be infatuated with their own thinking. The Council of Masters was expected to respond to the split.
AT THE MEETINGS HELD to address this crucial issue, Paul Klee said the least of anyone. Marcks took Gropius’s side: Muche took Itten’s. Lyonel Feininger hoped that giving everyone his say would somehow lead to peace, and Lothar Schreyer attempted to persuade the different forces to reconcile. Klee, by not engaging, had more impact than any of them.
Klee’s effectiveness resulted from his demonstrating that the making of art mattered more than any of the other issues. Not just with his class of thirty, but in the stained-glass workshop, where he had four students—”three girls and a boy”—he lectured on form and color and avoided other subjects. He wrote Lily that he hoped “to inject a little élan.”56 This was much needed, he told his wife, because everything at the Bauhaus was too earnest and serious. Klee felt that despite
all the claims of a new spirit at the school, it was not sufficiently evident. He intended to see that spirit emerge through art.
It was thanks in part to Klee’s example—through his continuous production of amazing paintings, his resistance to distraction, and the soaring beauty of his thinking and its results—that the attraction to Mazdaism and Zoroaster’s rituals began, gradually, to subside.
7
In his teaching at the Bauhaus, Klee drew parallels between elemental aspects of everyday human existence and the fundamentals of artistic creation. The result was to endow both with that élan and magnificent spirit that it was his gift to perceive. He likened the development of painting technique to chemical analysis: if a commercial preparation of a given product (he did not specify the type, but was implicitly referring to substances like toothpaste or laundry detergent) sold well, he said, other manufacturers would be driven to have it analyzed so they could discover its components; the drive to master pictorial composition should inspire artists to do similar research. Here, too, he did not provide examples, but the implication was that an artist should try to understand what the underlying factors were that made Giotto’s altarpieces and Cézanne’s landscapes, however different on the surface, eternally beautiful.
The next comparison in this lecture on pictorial form came from the realm of food. If something eaten brought on illness, Klee pointed out, it would be necessary to discover its harmful components. The same applied to flawed pictures.
Then Klee allowed that those comparisons were only teasers. Having brought art down to earth, he elevated it. “In our kind of business our reasons or motives are naturally different. We do not analyze works of art because we want to imitate them or because we distrust them,” he asserted. Rather, even if art was just another métier, it depended on creativity; artists looked at the work of other artists “so as to begin to walk ourselves.”57
The Bauhaus Group Page 17