Even though Klee wrote and edited in advance the text he then read to his students to trace the course of the seed’s emergence into a plant, his language was not easy to follow. In a characteristic paragraph, for which the original German was no easier for others to latch on to than is the translation, he declared: “A certain impetus from without, the relation to earth and atmosphere, begets the capacity to grow. The clumbering tendency towards form and articulation awakens in predetermined precision, determined with reference to the underlying idea, to the logos, or, as the translation runs: the word, which was in the beginning. The word as a premise, as the idea required for the genesis of a work. In abstract terms, what we have here is the irritated point as latent energy.”101
Yet for all their inpenetrability and density, summary statements of this sort manage to suggest what Klee’s drawings make more accessible: the thrill of growth, and the power of a kernel of energy that bursts open and from which lines begin to soar in various directions. Klee pulsed to the excitement of that process: “The seed strikes root, initially the line is directed earthwards, though not to dwell there, only to draw energy thence for reaching up into the air.” From there he analyzed the development that followed the taking of nourishment from the soil, paying close attention to the possibility of a split in which, during germination, plants have more than one seed leaf. He also translated natural growth into its visual representation with the statement “The spirit of this form-creation is linear.”102 For Paul Klee, all lines embodied the idea of creation, of the emergence from near nothingness to something more substantial. Artistic creation was the representation of natural creation.
Speaking to the students, Klee then explored the progression from a sole unit of growth to multiple units—from a single line to branches, and from a stream into its divisions. Characteristically, he added the emotional element to the natural occurrence, ascribing desire to these events: “The dynamic force is space hunger—space hunger as juice hunger underneath the ground, space hunger as air and light hunger in the atmosphere.”103
The most receptive students felt new worlds opening before their eyes. In the glass and weaving workshops, where Klee gave talks on form, recent arrivals to the Bauhaus considered how plants take water and essential nutrients from the soil and grow toward the sun, and applied those processes to their crafts. They delighted in the way Klee’s teaching had the energy he prized in natural growth. The gouaches Klee tacked to the walls of the corridors they walked to get to class had the same animation. Rather than being static objects, trees emerge as creatures with needs and desires. They throw their branches outward in their joyous discovery of oxygen and space; they are proud of their strong trunks; they appear nourished by their root systems. The horizon lines of mountaintops rise and dip as if their memory of having emerged from melted glaciers is still fresh.
Klee’s drawings do not look like art that is already made; rather, they appear to be in the process of formation before our eyes. One tree stands like a soldier on guard; another does a dance, pirouetting upward while also wending its way in multiple directions below the soil, like a child digging for worms.
Klee made diagrams to explain his points. He jauntily wrote the letters W, E, and L for Wasser, Erde, and Luft—Water, Earth, and Air—and drew arrows that nearly a century later seem to have just been shot from bows. He sketched a few lines to give the water a density different from the air, and even more lines to designate earth, while he also dashed in some raindrops; he was alert to the essential elements in the same way as all so-called primitive people everywhere who depend on the right balance of sun and rain for the farming essential to their survival, and who worship deities that embody the reigning forces of nature. The continuous curve with which Klee plunged beneath the earth’s horizon to indicate the wellspring of life, and then burst that horizon to suggest action on a stage, is visibly exuberant. And what it illustrates is timeless. Klee’s way of dealing with death, and with the anxiety he had felt ever since viewing his grandmother’s corpse when he was five years old, was to live in the before and the after as well as in the present.
Klee celebrated what Herbert Spencer called the “survival of the fittest.” “Competition with other creatures, or the struggle for existence, to use a more dramatic term, provides the impulse for the enhancement of energy production.”104 He applied the same principle to the feuding factions at the Bauhaus.
But it was not the competition, the idea of winners and losers, that counted the most. “The trunk is the medium for the rising of the sap from the soil to the lofty crown.”105 That simple sentence conveys the spirit and profound appreciation that underlie Paul Klee’s thinking and art. He relished the perpetual movement, and the weightlessness, inherent in natural growth. He also enjoyed the contrast of pitting dirt against a crown as if linking the fundament of life with the symbol of royalty. Klee deflated worldly pretense while extolling universal reality.
His values and his sheer enthusiasm were apparent even in the small announcement card he made for the great Bauhaus exhibition that August (see color plate 3). Of all the cards, Klee’s was especially joyous and playful. A jaunty building balanced on top of a foundation of triangles and squares looks like a top hat crowning a tap dancer. Although very abstracted, at the same time it can be read as the Bauhaus itself: a place where anything is possible, and that now had the élan he told Lily he had wanted to give it.
KLEE REVERED AIR AND LIGHT. He reminded his students that leaves became “flat lobes” resembling “a lung or gills,” in order to breathe in the atmosphere. That purpose, essential to the life of a tree, could be applied to all design at the Bauhaus: “Let this entire organism now become an example to us—a structure functioning from within to without or vice versa.”106 Necessity was the determinant; the liaison between form and function was vital.
On Saturday, November 10, 1923, Klee went further in pointing out how the manipulation of only a few elements can lead to complex results. He showed that by drawing, as simply as possible, a mesh of horizontal and vertical lines, one establishes a place; and by alternating lighter and darker stripes, first vertically and then horizontally, one achieves myriad tones ranging from light to dark. He used the word “alternation” as if he were invoking a deity. In his own work, he was making mosaics that leap off the page, that have the energy and richness of the walls and paving stones at Ravenna; this vibrancy was achieved very simply by the judicious deployment of like units.
Klee went from diagramming weaving to sketching braids, pigtails, and honeycombs. He also made patterns that looked like fish scales. In his own painting, he was utilizing these formations to evoke bustling metropolises and underwater scenes—densely packed communities where the individual elements exist both on their own and as an integral part of the larger whole. He made what was ordinary extraordinary.
KLEE GAVE HIS TALKS about every two weeks. On November 27, 1923, he chided his students for their recent work on theoretical exercises to demonstrate structure. What they had done was “chillingly symmetrical ornamentation” that was unnecessarily rigid. The problem with the students’ work was an absence of life: the studies were too static; they failed to convey “the act of forming” and “the process of growth.”107
For Klee, art had to be a form of birth: not an inert conclusion. Making this point, he played with language as with line. He imbued his advice to the students with nuance, treading lightly yet with conviction. He spoke with that same combination of delicacy and assuredness that marked his painting. “I think that it is a slippery area, and for the time being, should like to discourage you from entering it.”108
Klee amplified on “the vibratory impulse.” This was, he explained, “the will or need for living action.”109 He cited as an example the imprint of the sea’s movement in the sand. He encouraged the close observation of these compositions created, and shortly thereafter erased, by natural processes. Josef Albers, one of the young people most directly affected by Klee’
s observations, would six years later take remarkable photographs of the patterns visible as the tide begins to recede, on a summer holiday he and Klee and other Bauhaus friends took in Biarritz.
Klee had his students experiment with what occurs when one puts a fine layer of sand on a thin metal plate and then draws a violin bow along one edge to make the plate vibrate, causing the sand to arrange itself in response to that movement. He wanted them to see that the process of creation consists of an innate craving for action, followed by its “transformation into a material event” and then resulting in its “visible expression in the form of newly rearranged material.”110
“We are the bow,” he declared, describing the artistic process as an act in which matter is fertilized and becomes invested with a life of its own.111
WITH HIS UNDERSTATED GUSTO, Klee returned continuously to ordinary events that escaped ordinary eyes. Standing in that classroom in Weimar, Klee never talked about the Bauhaus or modernism; rather, he conjured the universal, the behavior of oceans everywhere on the planet, phenomena both ancient and yet to come.
This man who was so famously silent outside the classroom diagrammed and talked away to make clear to his students his idea that a musical tone had the motion of a wave and that singing or the use of a string instrument “quakes or vibrates or turns on a tremolo.”112 He told them about a fascinating, and utterly original, experiment he had conducted in his garden. First, Klee planted what was nothing but a stem with two branches. Then he bent the longer of the branches and secured it to the ground. He next cut the longer branch close to its juncture with the shorter one. Now there were two plants, for the longer branch put down roots and took off of its own accord. Both grew at the same rate. Klee made sweet, childlike diagrams of plant growth, while explaining that plants adapt themselves to the need to grow in different directions and that sap flows both up and down.”113
In his studio, meanwhile, Klee was making drawings of beetles that look as if they bear the imprint of the little creatures’ own footsteps. He painted gardens where the two-way motion of the sap animates the brushstrokes so that the images are as fresh and alive today as they were when he made them. He also made numerous images of fish and lobster traps in which the current flows in an opposite direction from the creatures swimming, a technique that creates the tension of a potential collision, and then he adds to the drama by having the fish shift directions.
Klee jumped from his discussion of plant roots and water currents to a conclusion of breathtaking simplicity and wisdom. “Creative power is ineffable. It remains ultimately mysterious. And every mystery affects us deeply. We are ourselves charged with this power, down to our subtlest parts. We may not be able to utter its essence, but we can move toward its source. …It is up to us to manifest this power.”114
Encouraging his students to go into their own depths to find the force inside themselves and to make it “function in union with matter,” he changed their lives.115
HIS LARGE EYES, which gave him the look of an amused child, and his taciturn speaking manner in no way concealed the ardor with which Klee continuously returned to the idea that art and architecture must manifest higher laws. The imperative was to create paintings or buildings that echo and encapsulate universal truths.
Klee was particularly preoccupied by the cells that constitute matter, the charged nuggets of life that are everywhere within us and our surroundings.
With his Swiss accent, his quiet, even-pitched voice, and his bemused smile, he remained soft-spoken, but was consumed by passion as he dispatched information of vital importance. “There is resonance inside the particles, immanent within them. Their oscillations range from the very simplest to the composite modes. Inexorable law must express itself throughout.”116 The making of art must have that same force, as must the resultant images.
While teaching visual art, Klee referred to the mechanics by which sound turns into music. “The bow can have no pity. Every expression of function must be cogently justified. Only then will that which is in the beginning, that which mediates and that which is at the end, belong together intimately.” He preached with Calvinist conviction, fired by a belief both in the forces invisible to us and in inviolable standards of behavior. “One must get in at the ground floor,” Klee continued. “That alone will avoid rigidity, and the entire growth process will then function without interruption.”117 It was a conscious mix of nuts-and-bolts information with spiritual faith—like the directions on a seed packet, invoking dirt and a shovel to give birth to life’s wonders. This was what the Bauhaus was about: the magnificence of existence made manifest in the physical objects that surround us.
KLEE VOCIFEROUSLY DECRIED ANYTHING disconnected from natural growth. If artistic representation did not reflect the rooting and movement and vibration of plant development and musical creation, it lacked authenticity. “Nonsense always emerges as such, in various guises. Dead forms, creaking noise, moans, breaks, monstrosities,” he said.118
This loathing for art that was less than reverential toward life was another point that all of the great Bauhauslers had in common. They detested artistic fraudulence as passionately as they enthused about excellence. Shams had to be pointed out; no equivocating was allowed. Klee’s warning to the students was delivered with the fire and brimstone of a preacher excoriating sinners. He had no tolerance for artistic endeavors possessed of “infertility, barrenness, pseudo existence, casual false-fronts, belonging to nothing. Things without growth. Eyes without function. Unnaturalness, surpassingly fair. Aestheticism. Formalism.”119
Klee immediately followed his list of vices with an encouraging reminder that there was an alternative: “Whatever rests on the foundations of life, on the other hand, is good, when new formation and preservation each find themselves in the other.”120
When the students who had come to the Bauhaus looking for sources of certainty, who braved the winter cold to come hear “St. Christopher with the weight of the world on his shoulders” speak further about the essential link between the laws of nature and the creation of art, they got what they wanted. Klee’s talks provided rich answers in a time of worldwide anxiety. The students could count on their sage to be assured without being arrogant, to explain his ideas not as a self-important master but in the capacity of one who had received the truth and now considered it his obligation and joy to transmit it.
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In 1923, seventeen-year-old Marianne Heymann arrived at the Bauhaus and attended the classes Klee gave for the weaving students. In 1957, in Haifa—where she ended up as a Jewish refugee from Nazism—she remembered those classes as having changed the course of her life.
Heymann describes the effect of Klee’s teaching on her and the other young women in the textile workshop: “While his words fell haltingly, we students experienced an inner transformation.” The teaching was “intimidating, intoxicating. … The absoluteness … that Klee opened our eyes to had the initial effect of overwhelming and inhibiting us. Thus, suddenly transported into a world of perception for which we were not yet mentally equipped, we naturally felt shaky, or as in a trance.”121
In the state of being induced by Klee’s teaching, the students experienced annihilation and resurrection:
Klee could “destroy” us with a single word, i.e., make our inadequacies starkly evident. We would be “dead” for several days. Then, when he felt it was enough, he would say a few friendly magical words and we would “return to life.” Klee did not look at us while he was lecturing and did not even face us. His eyes were usually fixed on his inner world. If he did look at [our efforts at textile design], it was as if he were looking through them, as though they were some inessential material, and it was necessary to discern the essence hidden by their outward appearance. … His external appearance has often been described. He reminded one of a Moorish wizard. Particularly his eyes, beard, and the oriental placidity of his movements. He had a pronounced Bernese accent and its slightly singsong tone would give all his utte
rances an amiable air. There was something almost plantlike about his poise and calmness.122
Heymann also vividly recalled Klee at the violin:
When he was making music, Klee’s eyes shone with an extraordinary brilliance. It was as though they were illuminated from within and radiated light. He always gave off this strange luminance while and after playing or listening to music. If I met him after a performance of a Mozart opera, I had the impression that he consisted only of his eyes, which radiated the music he had just heard. This radiance affected us with such immediacy that we had the feeling that we had been standing in the dark and had suddenly been flooded with light.123
Heymann was among the students whom Klee invited home for impromptu meals. He was gracious and would joke with his guests, but the man who was always conjuring unexpected things in the studio and kitchen alike remained distant. “We always felt as if Klee were a wizard traveling incognito from a different world.”124
Klee gave Heymann an etching of a donkey, which he inscribed to her. She was astonished to receive this gift from someone so phlegmatic in his comportment, but the element of surprise was essential to who he was. “We expected that any moment something extraordinary would happen, and it always did: a word or an allusion would transport us into his magical realm.”125
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