The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Independence and inventiveness were the goals he encouraged his students to strive toward; nonetheless, there were some vital general precepts that could be learned. Klee guided them to explore the art of others with the realization that it was not “something rigid, immutably fixed.” Rather like the world itself, art had developed from complex origins. He spoke about the book of Genesis and its account of the start of earthly life, using this to define art as the result of an essential human drive. “Before the birth of form … before the first mark is made, there is an entire pre-history which consists not just of man’s desire, his passion to express himself, … but also of …an attitude to the world. Driven by an inner necessity, this attitude demands expression in this or that direction.”58

  Art is not peripheral to life, Klee believed. Its making is instinctive, and as grounded in irrefutable truth as is the growth of plants or animals. In turn, its creation should mimic development from a seed or an egg.

  Form, Klee explained, comes after genesis. Form—meaning music or language or pictures—is essential to all expression. “The most profound feelings, the most beautiful soul, will be of no use to us if we do not have the forms at hand which correspond to them.”59

  Klee then described to his students, most of whom were in their twenties, the way a child takes a pointed pencil and puts it into motion “in whichever direction causes pleasure.” Like a child psychologist discussing the beginnings of intelligence, he amplified on the pure instincts of babyhood that are subsequently tempered by the imposition of reason in toddler-hood. “The chaos of the initial game yields to the beginnings of order.”60

  As he spoke, Klee resembled both a sage and a child. The students were made privy to his unabashed enthusiasm for life’s facts and possibilities, and to the intense pleasure he took in making his own work. Klee and his art exemplified his points about both the spark of creativity and the visual sophistication and technical knowledge imperative to good painting. “One remains primitive,” Klee told them. “But one cannot persevere with the primitive for long. One has to discover a means of enriching the impoverished result without destroying or erasing the clarity of the simple sketch.”61 His own pictures were, the students recognized, the perfect mix of freshness and spontaneity with know-how and aesthetic judgment.

  Klee emphasized to these artists and designers who were just starting out that while they needed to take care never to lose their instinctiveness, they also were responsible for organizing their vision. A line could be “a walk for its own sake. Without destination.” But there were also other types of lines, more developed, designed to describe planar figures like triangles, squares, or circles, endowed with “a calming character” and “neither a beginning nor an end.”62 These concepts were, in their way, obvious, yet the students had never before heard them explained so clearly. Nor had the complementary relationship of chaos with calm previously been applied to what they could draw. Their teacher lived and breathed for artistic creation—it was his entire raison d’être, as they knew from observing how he lived—and he presented its essence just as it was his essence.

  ONE STUDENT, HANS FISCHLI, described the effect of Klee’s teaching:

  Klee taught us neither how to draw nor how to use colour, but what lines and points were. …

  There was an infinite variety of marks—lacking in character, weak or strong in character, stuck-up fellows and bluffers, lines which one would have preferred to take to hospital because one feared that their end was imminent, and others which had had too much to eat. If a line stood up straight, then it was healthy, if it was at an angle, it was sick; if it was lying down, one thought that that was what it liked the most.63

  The mutability of human and visual qualities was total; so was the link between the physical and the spiritual. Because he was ambidextrous, Klee used both hands to draw diagrams in chalk on the blackboard to demonstrate what he was saying; his two hands working at the same time gave the sense that the heart and the mind were functioning in tandem, that spiritual inspiration and its subsequent physical manifestation were of a piece.

  KLEE HAD A BEARD in those days, and he often wore a fur cap, even on days when it wasn’t cold enough for the fur coat. “With his high forehead, dark brown eyes, hair combed forward like a Roman, and skin yellowish like an Arab’s, Klee made a strange impression.”64 Even people who were not aware of his mother’s partially Algerian background found that there was something in his bearing and his delivery that called to mind a North African potentate.

  But whether he was bearded or clean-shaven, whether his head was doubled in size by the fur cap or confined by his closely cropped hair, the first thing that struck people when encountering Klee was his eyes. When he was a teenager, he had exceptionally long and thick dark eyebrows that hovered like the valances of a theater curtain, accentuating the porcelain-like clarity of the large whites of his eyes. Even when those eyebrows calmed down following puberty, separating from each other and growing thinner, Klee’s oval eyes seemed disproportionately big and clear, like those of a cat, with very dark pupils. They usually were looking upward, as if connecting with the heavenly sphere.

  Everything about him was prophetlike. He walked with a slow gait and delivered pronouncements precisely and in notably economical language. “He frequently spoke a single word instead of a whole sentence, and, in true Eastern style, he might use an entire sentence as a parable.”65

  When friends visited, they would look at his latest work—he was so prolific that there were always new pieces—and he was eager to hear their responses. He was often disappointed because the commentary was insufficient. He was perpetually curious about what other people thought of his work—not just whether they liked it, but if they had concrete ideas about the subject matter and the artistry. He discussed his own paintings as if he were observing someone else’s creation, and could be highly critical, encouraging whoever was with him to discover the flaws or strong points. On those occasions when he was unabashedly pleased with something he had done, he didn’t seem conceited, because he was crediting a force outside himself.

  The naming of his work involved those viewers. Klee would have an idea, then he would listen to the interpretations others suggested, write down what they said, and finally, using his own words, decide what he wanted his work to be titled. Thus, Calypso’s Isle evolved into Insula Dulcamara. Desert Father ended up as Penitent. The naming, like the creating, was an evolution.

  8

  In his dealings with the art world, as in his relationships with the other faculty members at the Bauhaus, Klee was generally disposed to like people. That May, when the Berlin-based art dealer Alfred Flechtheim called on him, Klee put aside the many negative things he had heard and found his visitor “a purebred, and very amusing.” What counted was that when he showed Flechtheim a variety of works, the dealer found them “mouthwatering.”66 For Klee, the assurance that his pictures brought pleasure to others was more important than almost anything else.

  Klee depended on the calm of his home life, even if he and Lily were geographically separated. They both enjoyed keeping everything placid, although they delighted in the shenanigans of others. Klee wrote his wife that once they had both definitively left Munich, they would need someone who was still there to keep them posted on the latest scandals, but the two of them never were grist for the sort of gossip they both relished about others. Klee was so domestic that he wrote, “Laundry is the household task I haven’t tried yet. If I could take it on, I’d be more universal than Goethe.”67 In the pictures, there was eccentricity and madness, as well as unabashed sexual fantasizing; in Klee’s life, all was order and calm. Fritz, the cat to whom he always sent greetings in his many letters home, was the only capricious member of the family.

  That even keel, the simplicity and openness, enabled Klee to pour complexity and drama into his work. Gropius, juggling three women and needing to keep secrets, made architecture that had a look of utmost frankness, coolness, and clari
ty; Klee, for whom the greatest drama was Felix having a cold, or the unexpectedly wintry weather that June of 1921, made art full of mystery. He could afford to celebrate irresolution.

  TO KLEE, life in the park was more important than the Bauhaus. In mid-June, once winter seemed over at last, he wrote Lily: “The weather is fine. The morning scene in the valley of the Saal: a delight; the blossoming, velvet fields. There are no more flowers other than the wild roses.”68 These seasonal transformations, the spring blossoms and the new textures that came to life as the earth warmed up, were the subject of his paintings. The tensions and joys of trees and flowers fighting their way into existence animate Klee’s work of the period.

  On June 21, he wrote Lily, “I’m well, which is to say that I’m working.”69 But he was getting more and more restless to have Lily and Felix and Fritz there. Klee met the seventeen-year-old Manon Gropius when she was visiting, which increased his longing to have his own child around. He felt that Mutzi physically resembled Alma more than Walter, and thought she was nice and intelligent. He empathized with this child who did not get along well with others her own age. The evening he met Mutzi, the strawberries were delicious; he wrote Lily a glowing report, penning it on such good-quality stationery that the surface and weight of the paper brought on further encomia about the pleasures of writing on such a wonderful substance. His only complaint was that she and Felix and Fritz were not there.

  IN THE FALL OF 1921, Felix, who was soon to turn fifteen, became the youngest student at the Bauhaus. Itten may have seemed bizarre to Klee in his red suit, but the boy did well in Itten’s class. The Bauhaus offered a freedom unimaginable in normal school settings.

  Felix soon began to perform puppet shows, which were so entertaining that large audiences flocked to them. Bauhaus students and faculty delighted in these spoofs of school life, richly enhanced by the colorful costumes on the puppets Klee had made for his talented son. There were some fifty different characters in all, their faces vivid caricatures of people at the Bauhaus, most of them easily recognized.

  Lily had to remain in Munich to fulfill her obligations as a piano teacher, and Klee was in charge of the new household in Weimar. At last the apartment at Am Horn 53 was ready. When father and son moved in, the furnishings were still sparse, but it had an enchanting view over the park, and once Fritz arrived and the grand piano was put in place, Klee felt it had the essential ingredients of home. He was perfectly content to attend to the various domestic details. He cooked competently, and tried to make home life agreeable for his teenage son. He ordered a living room sofa; when it arrived, he thought the upholstery was hideous, but the form amused him, so he settled for it. On November 29, he wrote Lily, “I began with the principles of perspective to end up with the sensation of equilibrium in human beings.”70 Nothing in life was static; everything went through stages—whether it was responding to a new piece of furniture, making a painting, or dealing with life in general.

  Having initially gone to the Bauhaus to organize an exhibition of Klee’s drawings shortly after Klee arrived in Weimar, Will Grohmann became an exceptionally astute, impartial observer of the elusive Swiss. It is from Grohmann that we have some of the sharpest images of Klee. Every morning, as Klee walked to the Bauhaus from the large apartment he loved, he would pass Goethe’s garden house. He admired its rustic style. Visiting Weimar today, one can still observe its rough plaster surface covered with a lattice for climbing plants, under a steep roof of wooden shingles; this picturesque dwelling must have enchanted Klee after he left his own wonderful house, a more standard nineteenth-century residence, also still standing, with its splendid large dormer window overlooking the park. But more important, Grohmann observed, Klee “lingered to marvel at every bird he saw or to ponder the parallel between the ages of man and the changes of season. He might talk to a snake that happened to cross his path, as if it were a human being, because after all snakes, too, form part of the cosmos.”71 Those one-sided conversations with the snakes became part of his legacy.

  Paul Klee with his son, Felix, cat Fritz, and sister Mathilde in Weimar in the autumn of 1922. Klee was Felix’s more involved parent; Mathilde helped make the artist’s life run smoothly.

  Klee had a choice of dirt paths in this vast park, which for the most part felt like pure countryside even if it sat alongside a city. Some of the possible routes meandered through tall grass more than a meter high in springtime—a perfect shield for snakes. The impressive trees, many more than a hundred years old, gave Klee a chance to observe the complex structure in the network of roots bulging to various heights out of the earth surrounding their massive trunks. It was not easy walking over the hilly terrain; the journey to and from the Bauhaus necessitated some fairly steep climbing and was more of an athletic feat than a promenade. But Klee delighted in listening to the chorus of birds, taking in the smells of the dense foliage, and, when he reached the river in whose clean water Goethe was known to swim, observing the strong flow over the weed beds that were visible in the shallow stretches. In the patterns of the running water, Klee gleaned a logic that he would apply to his teaching on the shared principles of natural events and the making of art.

  Felix Klee would later recall:

  In the fall of 1921 we moved into our new four-room apartment: Am Horn 53, second floor. At various times and in all seasons, the two of us, Klee the master and Klee the apprentice, would make our way each day through the romantic park from home to our places of work and back again. How fascinating my father made these walks with his observations about nature. The world of birds and flowers had especially bewitched him. Every day we marched along the meanderings of the gently flowing Ilm, passing by the Dessau stone and the Serpent monument or the log cabin, by Goethe’s garden house and Euphrosyne’s stone. After the beloved metropolis of Munich, we led an almost cloistered and rather irksome existence in the little town of Weimar; but even though we were shunned and ridiculed by the townspeople, we enjoyed a great deal of intellectual stimulation in the many castles, museums, and the national theater.72

  If father and son did not start out together but rather walked separately, Klee would always make a mark at a precise spot in front of the bridge over the River Ilm, drawing his insignia with his cane, to let Felix know he had preceded him. Once the first snows fell, whenever there was sufficient accumulation, Klee made drawings in it for his happy son.

  Felix also had vivid memories of family vacations: “From 1920 to 1922, there were also the holidays at Possenhofen by the lake of Starnberg; Klee liked fishing, and one day, as the cabin’s handrail broke, he fell in the water with his line. Lily and I were at home, in the skipper’s apartment, when we heard pflotch, pflotch in the stairway. My father was soaked. We undressed him and his clothes were hanged by the stove.”73

  IN TIME, Klee was given a larger studio on the third floor of the main Bauhaus building, behind the cabinetmaker’s workshop and above the ceramics studio. Smoking a pipe while he worked, he developed numerous pictures simultaneously. Klee had a dozen easels, and each had a painting on it, in stages ranging from preliminary outlines to the verge of completion. His art supplies were well organized, as was his collection of butterflies, sea shells, tree roots, and pressed leaves. He also had a large supply of toys he had made for Felix and now used as props in his art.

  Klee worked calmly, painting on holidays, scarcely noting the day of the week, always seeming relaxed. Making art was as natural for him as breathing, and easier than speaking. But the subject matter troubled others, even if it didn’t bother him. Many viewers were put off by the serpents he seemed to deify in his work. They were related to the snakes in the Goethe park, but larger. Klee readily grasped why these creatures that terrified some people had been the object of worship in ancient Egypt. They moved in such a fascinating and unusual way, and protected their mysteriousness. Like cats, his favorite of all animals, they left their human viewers with unanswered questions, evoking the ambiguity that Klee considered one of life�
��s great thrills.

  The same year that Klee married Lily, his mother had become paralyzed. Klee had often cared for her up until her death during his first year at the Bauhaus. The next evening he had a dream in which a female ghost walked through his studio. The bereaved son then began making paintings with pronounced black borders in which he depicted the afterlife or the passage into it. His Women’s Pavilion (1921), which shows a lush forest inhabited by translucent, all-white women, should be seen as an imagined heaven. His Dying Plants (1922) is a morose watercolor in which the figure at the bottom appears to be a recently buried female corpse.

  KLEE DOTED ON FELIX and heaped praise on the boy’s work. In 1985, the seventy-seven-year-old Felix recalled, “Klee followed with attention my efforts at drawing and painting. He kept all my productions, then mounted my works with the same care he used for his, and wrote on them the titles I told him. ‘The paintings of my little Felix are better than mine, too often filtered through my brain,’ said Klee to Lothar Schreyer.”74

  Nonetheless, Klee cautioned his son against following in his footsteps. Felix would recall, “In 1925, when I received the title of journeyman, my father asked me: ‘And now what do you want to do? You know if I can give you advice, don’t become a painter, your life would be too difficult. Paint as much as you want, but don’t make it your main job.’—‘Then I’d like to go on the stage.’ And Klee: ‘Well, you will go on the stage.’ ”75 Klee may never have said it, but he must have recognized that his son would always be seen as the child of a better artist. His advice was clear-headed and in everyone’s best interest.