KLEE’S ART BROUGHT the spirit of surrealism to the Bauhaus, though Klee abhorred the personal flamboyance of its well-known practitioners. His lack of “image” made the candor and psychological complexity of the work palatable to people like Gropius, Kandinsky, and the Alberses, all of whom deplored the self-conscious flaunting of personal quirks. The correctness of Klee’s demeanor made it much easier for them to accept the fact that his subject matter included cross-dressing and hermaphroditism.
Klee simply accepted the human imagination. In his diaries, he wrote that in his childhood he “imagined face and genitals to be the corresponding poles of the female sex. When girls wept I thought of pudenda weeping in unison.”88 His 1923 Lomolarm depicts a crying man whose eyes and nose have a distinct resemblance to “pudenda weeping.” He could not have been more matter-of-fact about the associative workings of his mind.
Klee did not conceal his own sexual uncertainty. In addition, there are times when hostility to women is plainly visible in his art. In his diary, he wrote, “Sexual helplessness bears monsters of perversion. Symposia of Amazons, and other horrible themes … Disgust: a lady, the upper part of her body lying on a table, spills a vessel filled with disgusting things.”89
At the Bauhaus, Klee often painted dominatrixes and androgynous characters who resemble evil conquerors. He usually made women grotesque. His 1923 Ventriloquist Caller in the Moor depicts a creature who is about 70 percent breast. These full, sagging mammaries have a lower contour that also appears to outline buttocks; the crack between them is explicit. Inside these organs that are both breasts and buttocks are many monstrous little characters—part human, part amoeba, one a cross between a donkey and a mermaid. The creature stands on tapered legs, and has tiny malformed arms and, on an abstracted human head, a mouth like that of a fish.
Yet the effect of the painting is by no means unpleasant. The fantastic orchestration of the background is a vibrating, irregular grid that gives the impression of exotic silk. It is a sheer marvel of watercolor painting, a superhuman use of that unforgiving medium. And the creature herself, for all the ways that she is horrific, seems to be singing with joy. Balanced precariously on a sort of unmoored dock, with a mermaidlike form suspended on a thin line from her right breast/buttock, she has magical power. Even if everything appears about to topple, it remains upright; what should be impossible is possible.
In 1956, Erwin Panofsky, the great scholar of northern Renaissance iconography, taking a rare look at modernism, wrote that Klee showed Pandora’s box as a vase with flowers in it “but emitting evil vapors from an opening clearly suggestive of the female genitals.”90 Gropius may have founded the Bauhaus as a design school, but it became a refuge that permitted unprecedented freedom of artistic expression, a safe environment where people like Klee could allow themselves to present, without fear of judgment, their most extreme fears and fantasies.
KLEE SAW HIMSELF as simultaneously a “pedantic” father, an “indulgent uncle,” an “aunt [who] babbles gossip,” a “maid [who] giggles lasciviously,” “a brutal hero,” “an alcoholic bon vivant,” “a learned professor,” and “a lyric muse, chronically love struck.”91 His art not only allowed for this multiplicity but also celebrated it. He wrote in his diary, “So much of the divine is heaped in me that I cannot die. My head burns to the point of bursting. One of the worlds hidden in it wants to be born. But now I must suffer to bring it forth.”92 The program of the Bauhaus was to mold universal designs, but it was also a haven for people unembarrassed by their passions.
Grohmann wrote, “Klee was not incapable of loving or responding to love, but as ‘nothing lasts in this world,’ love to him was an ever incomplete thing, a mere part of the eternal flux of things.”93 Klee can also be seen as having loved his grandmother so intensely that her death early in his life was so painful that he had to expand his horizon beyond actual life. He did so on paper and canvas, not in his existence outside the confines of his studio. He wrote, “Art plays an unknowing game with things. Just as a child at play imitates us, so we at play imitate the forces which created and are creating the world.” For artistic creation was as real as the making of life itself. Klee said he felt “as if I were pregnant with things needing forms, and dead sure of miscarriage.”94 Creating art was like giving birth, accompanied by the same overwhelming thrill and also the periodic bouts of fear.
When the people at the Weimar Bauhaus saw Klee’s Where the Eggs and the Good Roast Come From, they observed a rooster as the creature laying the egg. A male animal, thus, could give birth—and could also get cooked. When, the year the Bauhaus closed, Klee made a painting of a pregnant male poet, the underlying notion was the same: to nurture art was like nurturing a new human life, and could be done by men or women. In Adam and Little Eve, Adam, clearly a self-portrait, wears small drop earrings, and Eve, rather than being a seductress, looks like a small girl who is being abducted. Man as woman, sexual vixen as child, innocent as demon: Klee reveled in the reversals. The Bauhaus was a place to expand his originality, unfettered and encouraged.
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Kandinsky’s arrival at the Bauhaus early in 1922 was a great event for Klee. His close friend from his prewar years in Munich had returned from Moscow only the year before; he had been absent from Klee’s life for a long time. Klee was delighted with the prospect of having his intrepid spiritual kin, as obsessed with music as with painting, on the scene.
Klee believed their friendship was strong in part because it was rooted in their youth, the most creative period of life. “Everything one acquires in later life is of less importance,” he would write Lily when he was preparing to leave the Bauhaus a decade later and was analyzing why he and Kandinsky would always remain close, even though they were going in different directions.
Kandinsky, thirteen years older, was emphatically Russian, intellectual, and affected by the Far East, whereas Klee was attuned more to the dictates of nature and the Arab and Islamic worlds, but from the first time they had met in Munich as young men, they had forged a lasting connection. Because of inflation, in Weimar they were in the odd position of having less money for meals than they had had in their student days, with Kandinsky even more broke than Klee, but they often got together for skimpy dinners, enjoying great camaraderie even if they never dropped the formal “Sie” when addressing each other. Kandinsky was the person who more than anyone else could get Klee to talk; Klee allowed to Lily that the Russian would ply him with questions, and he would actually answer.
When the fall semester at the Bauhaus started on October 1, 1922, Klee and Felix returned to Weimar, while Lily spent a few days visiting her father. By then Kandinsky had settled in. Klee wrote his wife about their pleasant postsummer reunions, saying that even though he got along easily with all the other masters, however disputatious they were with one another, Kandinsky was the only one of them who was truly a confrere.
GALKA SCHEYER VISITED at that time. What interested Klee, more than anything this devoted patron might do on his behalf, was Scheyer’s small son, who accompanied her. Klee told Lily he had never seen a more monstrous child. After pushing his mother until she fell down, the boy stretched out on the road, hoping to make everyone afraid that he would get run over by a car. The little horror made fun of adults and children alike, giving them all new nicknames. Naturally Felix was fascinated, but so was Klee himself. Little in his surroundings could have intrigued him more than this boy with aberrant behavior.
By contrast, Felix was his father’s angel: wonderful-looking, although seen only fleetingly because he was so active. Klee took immense joy watching his teenage son flourish with the start of the term.
Klee loved all the new beginnings. His studio floor was freshly waxed. Since he was pleased enough with the paintings that he had left behind before the summer break, he was eager to resume work on them. First, though, he dealt with the new school term in his characteristically orderly way. After gradually catching up with his colleagues, one after the other, s
eeing a few students, unpacking his bags, and putting everything away, he got to work on his lithographs—as if warming up before starting to paint again. Within a couple of days of his return to Weimar, he also made plans to take Felix to Verdi’s Otello on the coming Sunday. The music would be good for them, he told Lily. The one thing that made him impatient were the endless Bauhaus meetings, unnecessarily numerous and lengthy: “We assemble, we assemble, and we assemble.” Naughty children, his aquarium full of fish, theater performances—the stuff of everyday life and the subject matter of his painting—were a joy; administrative issues, bureaucratic rambling, and other such human foibles he found a total waste of precious time.
NONETHELESS, HE WAS BENEFITING from the crosscurrents of influence around him. The dancing figures and marionettes that began to proliferate in his work resembled characters in the Triadic Ballet and theater class. His Twittering Machine of 1922 shows a device where you could wind a handle to make nightingales sing. This unusual music box that activates the four creatures corresponded to Kandinsky’s linking of sight and sound, although the representation of birdsongs as lively shapes coming out of the birds’ open beaks corresponded to Klee’s own lessons on lines. The shapes suggest melodies ranging from joyous and celebrative to slow and somber, their dimensions going from a reedy flute to a full orchestra. His 1921 Ceramic-Erotic-Religious has qualities of the inventive constructions of the Bauhaus foundation course. But the work was not painted to prove a point so much as to convey delight: it shows the pleasurable course afforded by pure intuition, that human element that he also emphasized in his teaching.
Klee and Kandinsky posing as Goethe and Schiller. Klee and Kandinsky took no little pleasure in the great legacy of “the German Athens.”
IN DECEMBER 1922, Willi Rosenberg, a medical student in Jena who had been a student at the Bauhaus, handed in a thesis titled “Modern Art and Schizophrenia: Under Special Consideration of Paul Klee.” Labeling Klee “a great egocentric,” Rosenberg pointed out the marked contrast between Klee’s lifestyle, with its apparent calm and normal domesticity, and his artwork, about which Rosenberg repeatedly used the adjective “bizarre.” To the future psychiatrist, that discrepancy was the mark of “schizophrenia.” Rosenberg termed Klee’s recent paintings “a whole series of bizarre, fantastical works that he cannot even interpret himself.” He saw Klee as struggling “to fulfill a longing” through his art, in a “fight that caused him to go crazy. Klee also found the egocentrism of the schizophrenic and his psychological alienation from the world, increased to ghastly solipsism.”95
Rosenberg’s adviser in Jena disagreed with his student’s interpretations, asserting that the term “schizophrenic” in fact did not apply to Klee. Yet the teacher awarded Rosenberg a doctorate, and Rosenberg’s dissertation became the talk of the Bauhaus.
Statue of Goethe and Schiller by Ernst Rietschel in front of the German National Theatre in Weimar, Germany
Klee presumably knew about the thesis. He might not have disputed Rosenberg’s premise. Lothar Schreyer recalled Klee relishing the idea that new “worlds have opened up which not everyone can see into, although they too are part of nature.” Klee told Schreyer that this “in-between world” was “the realm of the unborn and the dead.” Claiming that this territory was visible only to “children, mad men and savages,” Klee informed Schreyer, “I absorb it inwardly to the extent that I can project it outwardly in symbolic correspondences.”96
Even if Klee thought he was privy to realms open only to the insane or to people who were completely untutored—and said so with the knowledge that, since he was highly cultivated and well-educated, the only category to which he could therefore belong was that of the mentally unstable—he had complete control of the way he related to his visions. Just as when, in early childhood, he had imagined female genitalia resembling an udder comprising four tiny penises and pictured devils peering at him, he handled his way of seeing with self-acceptance and grace, which is what made him appear healthy, even if slightly remote, as a human being, and saved him from the apparent sufferings of a psychotic. His art, fueled by his sensitivity to sights that might have made other people crazy, kept him stable.
THE ART CRITIC WILHELM UHDE, who called on Klee in Weimar in 1922 and wrote about the visit shortly thereafter, provides a firsthand account of a cheerful, highly civilized man with a unique perspective on the world. The encounter was especially sweet because it followed two less successful attempts at their getting to know each other.
My first meetings with Klee were not quite happy. He told me he had visited my apartment and carried off a very strong impression of Picasso’s pictures he saw there. I have no reminiscences of this meeting because my other visitors had swamped me with questions during two hours.
The second time I took initiative. I was at this time mobilized in Frankfurt, occupied to decipher a daily mail of hundreds of letters and fell ill. I asked for some days of leave but endured a row from my major for wanting to go and see these horrors of modern pictures that he called cubic sluts.
Disillusioned beforehand, depressed as I was then, I couldn’t remember meeting our painter.
What occurred at the Bauhaus was very different, reports Uhde:
The third time I was his guest in his workshop in the Bauhaus building of Weimar. It was in 1922. Nonchalantly I had followed Goethe’s and Jean-Paul Richter’s favorite promenade that I love even more. Stimulated by the memories of this earth, I wondered if there could be a painting as German as the literature and music of Jean-Paul, Holderlin, and Bach. Could the German painting interpret the Gothic ecstasy as had done Picasso in Latin earth? Could there be a German painting not only rendering the banal physiognomy of objects (despite the Expressionism and new objectivity), too easily served by a hazardous alliance of a pre-conceived theory, a routine eye and job? Will not there be a painting able of creating a pathetic reality, suited to the most complete men of the race?
When I was at his workshop facing this discreet man, friend of the muses and music, I was at once certain to see in his eyes the love of the world that makes work. I recognized the reality of phenomenons that are not at all expressed by their faces. These present only a few hazardous and too ephemeral realizations of eternal ideas. This love of the essential carried away the artist to the bottom of these thoughts. He organized them thanks to his intuitive and visionary strength. For the first time in a long time, I was filled up with happiness to have found in Germany such a pure demonstration of Gothic spirit.97
Uhde was on target with his insight that what others saw as symptoms of schizophrenia was a “love of the essential,” as it could be found in the highly complex territory that most people shun.
IN MAY 1923, Klee took a walk in the forest with Felix. He wrote Lily that they could not believe their eyes because of the rich blossoming of the cherry trees. He felt that only with time had he come to discover the beauty of Weimar—in spite of his initial enthusiasm, he had given it short shrift—but now he was totally enchanted. That world outdoors was what counted most; for all the incredible leaps he was making in his art, Klee wrote his wife that, beyond his bucolic outings with Felix, nothing was new.
Even during the Bauhaus exhibition that August, when fifteen thousand people were looking at his work and he met both Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky, he wrote Lily primarily about his walks in the park. What affected him more than anything else were his encounters with the plant and animal kingdom and his life at home.
When problems arose, Klee was philosophical. In December 1923, he spent his forty-fourth birthday completely alone. Lily and Felix were with Lily’s father, who was on his deathbed, while Klee’s obligations at the Bauhaus kept him in Weimar. Human existence seemed especially perilous, and a troubled economy with runaway inflation added to the sense of catastrophe, but Klee was matter-of-fact about it all. It might not be possible to organize Felix’s Christmas as they would like, but he would do his best.
Klee and Kandinsky went to
a café to have a cup of coffee and talk. When they saw the price of the coffee—they had not even considered having anything more—they counted their marks. Between them, they didn’t have enough. They went straight home.
But Klee took solace in knowing that a watercolor had been sold in America for which he would receive two hundred Swiss francs on December 20. He wrote Felix that, no matter what, one could always laugh, and that “one is always in good company when one doesn’t have money.”98
When Lily’s father finally died, Klee wrote his mother-in-law pointing out that her main loss was that now she wouldn’t be able to keep taking care of him. He emphasized what a beautiful end of life she had given him, how essential this was. Klee allowed that his own greatest fear of age was to be alone. He had managed the solitude on his recent birthday without difficulty, but his family was still vital to his feeling in balance.
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Being at the Bauhaus obliged Klee to formulate in words his beliefs on what an artist’s priorities should be. He wrote lecture notes so that he could explain his philosophy to the students. Nature was always the starting point, and he beheld it reverently. In 1923, Klee summed up his viewpoint when he wrote:
The artist cannot do without his dialogue
With nature,
for he is a man, himself of nature,
a piece of nature and within the space of nature.99
In his lectures, Klee discussed the growth of plants and the structure of leaves, as well as the process of human digestion. On Monday, November 5, 1923, in a typical talk, he considered “form creation” in nature as in art. “Despite its primitive smallness, a seed is an energy center charged to the highest degree,” he told the students. Klee was fascinated by seed packets. “One seed will grow into a violet, another into a sunflower—not in the least fortuitously, but by its very nature—the one always a violet, the other always a sunflower. (So reliable is this that seeds may be sorted, packed, labeled and marketed.)” This leaping from the esoteric and natural to the practical and quotidian was characteristic of Klee. So was the way he viewed science as having magical properties; laboratory research and mythological mysteries went hand in hand. “Each seed is the spin-off of a certain species and a talisman for the regeneration of that species,” he explained.100
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