ONE OF THE PLACES where unexpected things happened was in the kitchen. Klee had always been obsessed with the details of what he ate. Starting shortly after his marriage to Lily in 1906, whenever they were apart, he would write her precise descriptions of the exact type of ham someone had served at lunch; in recounting a meeting with a friend, he would delight in such specifics as really “good coffee. The skin on the milk was, thank God, so tough that it stuck to the pot. But there were also macaroons—extra for me.”126
In one letter, he did a drawing of an extraordinary creation he called “caviar bread,” explaining that it had inspired him to take a brief holiday at a village near Bern because it was served at every meal there. “Hunger and thirst are a sensation for me!” he wrote Lily in 1916 from his military encampment in Landshut, adding, “I drink a liter of beer every day without any worries.”127 When he was a teenager, he and his cranky father often got along best when they deliberately drank a lot of beer together; Klee had developed a remarkable capacity for the yeast-fermented drink. He particularly prized “wheat beer, which tastes utterly delicious, with a piece of lemon swimming in it.”128
His taste in food was as eclectic as the subject matter of his painting, and he approached it with the same lust. During wartime, he savored “a bowl of sauerkraut with blood sausage—the best dinner very appreciated” and “a lovely dinner consisting of tea, liverwurst, herring, chocolate, bread, apple-cake, apples, no hunger.”129 Near his air force base in Cologne, early in December 1916, he “had the good luck to find a little pub where I got veal ragout with potatoes, and bread with a thick layer of liverwurst on top. I was starving like a wolf.”130 His preferred dishes and ingredients were at times like the beasts and other images in his art: suckling pig, roast mutton, on numerous occasions a horrible-sounding “sour liver,” which he describes as “very good, and useful on a winter night,”131 as well as cabbage, beets, lots of bread, and the inevitable potatoes, in various forms.
In early 1917, Klee started putting his own creative cooking ideas into letters to Lily. He advised her on how to make what sounds like a coarse hash out of leftover roast meat and “steinpilzen” (porcini mushrooms): “Cut some fat into small pieces when raw and put them through the sausage machine. Add some onions and potatoes. Fry on low heat, and use any other leftover in the sausage maker. Put the bones into the soup.”132 As in his art, what was vital was to use everything and waste nothing, and to assemble a range of small parts into something whole.
Klee was as enchanted by cooking ingredients as he was by tubes of paint, and he sometimes invested fruits or vegetables with human feelings, just as he did lines or colors. In one letter to Lily, describing the new potatoes and tomatoes (“all fine except one moldy one”) and other vegetables he will cook with two roosters, he reports, “The cucumber was lying there happily too.” Often he had to make do without the desired ingredients, preparing “fried potatoes (not in oil unfortunately)” or malt coffee instead of the real thing.133 The right food could have a direct impact on what he painted after eating it. “Ein schön gebratenes Gochelchen” someone sent to his house “made for a nice, inspiring meal and provided me with the energy for a very colorful watercolor.”134
ONCE KLEE ARRIVED in Weimar, the subject of what he had eaten preoccupied him all the more. He wrote Lily that his solution to living alone in that period before she and Felix moved to the Bauhaus was, every day, to make himself boiled eggs and eat them with poppy seed bread, ham, and tea, and in that period before inflation worsened to dine at a restaurant in the evening: this strategy intruded least on his painting time. Once Felix was in Weimar and they had a maid helping out, Klee delighted in the maid’s potato pancakes and instructed her on how to fry chops and exactly how to use a pullet to make a soup. He sometimes invited Oskar Schlemmer for lunch, and wanted everything to be good.
Klee regularly told Lily how famished he was, and emphasized that he needed the right foods to keep his moods in balance. On one occasion when he ate mainly wilted winter cabbage, at least there was enough leftover schnitzel so he still could paint with force. Whenever he dined on something out of the ordinary, he described it to Lily with gusto. A museum director served crab followed by what he assumed was pheasant but might have been another game bird. But the most vivid descriptions were of his own concoctions. These consisted mainly of throwing together ingredients and cooking in a completely relaxed and intuitive way. He was proud of having prepared a true “sugo”—a sauce of tomatoes and ground meat—for spaghetti, of having assembled “Háhnchen in Topf à la caccia” with onions and apples, and of giving canned peas some extra oomph with a homemade sauce of which the main ingredients were butter and flour. The repasts were frugal; he would often eat the ingredients he used for a soup the previous day, warmed up at lunchtime and then cold at night. Soup meat and beans were staples, and if the food was humble, so much the better: “It was a meal like on laundry day, and I don’t even do the laundry.”135
As in his art, Klee was obsessed with innards. He made risotto with a steamed calf’s heart—he was so happy with the cooking wine that he drank a glass as he stirred—and was pleased with tart kidneys and rice “which behaved extremely well in a piquant wine sauce.” The next night, he used the leftover sauce from the kidneys to make a minestrone “mit Blumenkohlgrûnreis und Zweibely und zum Schluss Parmesan.”136 Klee delighted in reconfiguring the same ingredients, the way he did arrows and staircases and other recurring elements in his art; he put butter and cheese into or on top of almost everything, but always in different forms or proportions.
Technique interested him in the kitchen as in the studio. He was proud to concoct a chicken soup using only a leg, to mix calf’s tongue with vegetables, and to make a mutton roast that he tied up with a string, advising his wife, “It isn’t a lot of work once one has the hang of it.”137 Returning to a favorite ingredient, the form of which was also a leitmotif in his work, he prepared calf’s heart, steamed, with vegetables. Timing was a central issue; he made a meat soup about which he instructed Lily that it was vital to add the barley only toward the end of the cooking process. He loved to experiment, and then to describe the process to his wife. On one occasion, he wrote Lily,
Yesterday I cooked and dined on a very blond but very tasty dish. I had bought sweetbreads, which at home you always eat as a lightly fried brunette dish. I remembered fairy-tale days of long ago at Marienstrasse 8 in Kirchfeld, where they looked different, and attempted a reconstruction. This was successful. I skinned them carefully and placed them in hot butter, over a low flame, and closed the lid, leaving enough time, while they steadily gave off sufficient water. Then I added a little cold water with flour and some drops of lemon juice. During this process I set the sweetbreads aside and only returned them when the sauce, which needed constant stirring, had come to the boil. That was all. Served with flat noodles—very good and very light.138
There were family politics at play here. It was an insult to his wife that a preparation he remembered from his childhood was superior to her quicker method, which had heavier results. But Klee was proud of his expertise in the kitchen. On one occasion when he was a lunch guest back in Bern and he thought he was eating “asparagus with tartar sauce”—not as unlikely as it sounds, given Bernese cooking—he wanted to confirm the ingredients, but was unwilling to have anyone think he might not have recognized them accurately. “I didn’t dare ask so I wouldn’t diminish my reputation as a chef.”139
THERE WAS A PERIOD during which Klee wrote his menus for lunch and dinner in his diary on a daily basis. He listed the meals in the same meticulous way that he catalogued his paintings, with every entry numbered to show the date.
Some of what he described were recipes to the extent that he followed a prescribed method, but he never measured ingredients, and instinct ruled. A typical entry was the one for “Gerstotto (risotto with barley instead of rice), cauliflower, mixed salad. Time ¾ hrs. Butter, onion, a bit of garlic, celery—steam 10 minut
es. Brown the barley, boiling water, cheese at the end.”140 The essential ingredients were, time and again, every conceivable part of a calf, chicken in multiple preparations, more cauliflower than anyone else in history may have eaten, lots of spaghetti, often with sugo, and, otherwise, potatoes.
When he cooked offal, he saw it with his painter’s eye. Not only did the forms of hearts, kidneys, livers, and lungs figure in his art, but the functions of these organs depended on the sorts of processes he emulated on paper and canvas. The particular language, spare and direct, in which he wrote his cooking methods was consistent with the relaxed approach, and pervading ease and enjoyment, with which he painted. On one January day, following Gerstotto, he prepared “Pork kidneys. Recipe: melt butter, add finely chopped onions and garlic, celery, beets, leeks, apple, mildly steamed with a bit of water, ca. ½ hr, at the end add finely cut kidneys, increase heat, a few minutes. 3) Salad.” The combinations were his own invention. “Veal knuckles with yellow beets, celery, and leeks” called for taking out the vegetables and buttering them and then serving everything with “potatoes in their peel” and a “salad ‘Sonnenwirbel.’ ”141 The mix of textures in this rib-sticking comfort food also had parallels in his art.
The most remarkable of all Klee’s culinary inventions was lung ragout, which he first made for a midday meal on a winter Tuesday in January. Here he was more specific than usual about the timing, if as imprecise as always about the measurements:
Tuesday, a) a ragout of lungs spiced with blond spices. Recipe—Start at ½ past II—boil a little water with some salt, add the whole lungs, 12 o’clock remove the lungs and slice finely on a board, 5 past 12 return the lungs to the pot. Ingredients added immediately: a chopped onion, some garlic, a strip of lemon peel, some horseradish, two carrots, butter and pepper. Ingredients at ¼ to I: Flour dissolved in cold water, some vinegar, a lot of chopped parsley, a little nutmeg. Serve at I o’clock. b) macaroni c) salad.142
Highly unusual, structured but playful, belonging to the obscure reaches of the cosmos, two of the essentials of his life—food and art—were of a piece.
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The man who was so surprising in the kitchen was even more unusual in-the classroom. On December 4, 1923, Klee spoke with his usual slow, singsong locutions in language that alternated between obtuse and whimsical. On that blustery winter day, the wide-eyed Swiss instructed the students, almost all of them young women who were studying weaving, that structure—”the initial organization of matter”—was an essential. These weavers already knew that warp and woof had to be interwoven and knotted if thread was to be made into material, but Klee made that inevitability of structure poetic. “Structure is not a bridge that is no longer needed, once one has gained the farther shore,” he explained.143
Structure as Klee depicted it was not just inevitable; it was also flexible and accommodating, and, in his splendid account, beautiful in and of itself. “It is a kind of rhythm of the small parts, existing as such beside the larger articulations and adapting its character anew in the various parts, accented more or less, interrupted when the context demands it, only to be resumed once again.”144 Klee then spoke about the wonderful way that a river adjusts to the landscape through which it flows, and sketched moving water to make the point. He gave the water human qualities: it is “aggressive” when eating the riverbed, “angry” when swirling into a lather, “calm” when proceeding down a long and even stretch, and then exceptionally “mute and sweet” when settling into a lake “where it more and more evades perception.”145
For the rest of his life, Klee would periodically depict water in his own art. The titles included Floating, Sinking Flood, Water Route, Rushing Water, and Moving Rapids. His subject appears in a variety of guises—delving deep, flowing gently, being terrifying and forbidding or sweetly mirrorlike. The qualities he emphasized to his students are realized to perfection in his own paintings, which are pure magic. Small in scale, they evoke the motion of the universe in their lively sequences of roughly parallel lines twisted and turned with apparent abandon, yet they have the underlying sense of order that governs a Mozart symphony. Their colors play against one another like the instruments of an orchestra, every juxtaposition giving the whole a burst of life; the overall impression is of a multitude of experiences occurring simultaneously.
“The parts and intermediate parts interlock mutually and with the whole,” Klee told the students. No single person, no element of nature, no musical note, no form of movement (visual or audible) acted autonomously; everything was a response. Klee emphasized countermovement, comparative lightness or density, openness or closeness, “proportional action.” None of this was simple, he explained; nothing was predictable or “precisely commensurable. …We are not face-to-face with mathematics here.” Impressions mattered more than what could be measured or weighed with exactitude. “You will find, for example, that parallels are no longer parallels, when some third element intervenes and interferes (optical illusion as reality).”146 As always, what emerged from all the logic and careful observation was abiding respect for life’s mysteries and for the inexplicable.
KLEE CONTINUALLY ALTERNATED between everyday details and the greater cosmos. He made complex diagrams of zigzags, charted detailed progressions of hypotenuses, and intersected loops with ruler-straight lines. As he drew in front of the students, he noted the angles and dimensions with logarithms and complex equations and calculations, and then explained his representations with statements of Zen-like wisdom. In another of his weekly lectures, he pointed out, “In nature, after all, the water does not necessarily end in a lake. Neither in a lake nor in the sea, and the springs in the mountains too must be fed from somewhere. Our epic, in other words, has neither beginning nor end.”147 As usual, the philosophical conclusion emphasized all that cannot be known. Wisdom was the acceptance of incertitude.
When Klee spoke to his students about the human circulatory system, he elucidated the way that the myocardium functions as the central motor that dictates the flow of blood “by means of a rhythmically repeated movement of contraction and relaxation, of tension and relief.”148 He sketched the way blood is propelled through the entire human body and drew “the very finest branchings” where “movement proceeds of its own accord, as always in capillary tubes.”149 He then expanded on the way that “blood deteriorates by surrendering its useful components”—again, with the word “surrendering” conferring a human attitude—before returning to the heart. He next described, and illustrated with animated chalk sketches on the blackboard, the process by which “the bad blood” travels to the lungs, “where it is purified.”150 He perpetually emphasized the circularity of everything, the miraculousness of natural processes, and the relevance of all this both to the way art is created and to the vitality essential to that art. In Klee’s account, blood experienced both “exploitation” and “subjugation.” He concluded, “Thus does nature act and shape, on the basis of her need of movement, both in terms of locale and content.”151 It was simple enough, as far as he was concerned. Klee was not trying to impress his students with his erudition; he was merely teaching what he had gleaned of the truth in order to help them move forward with their own work.
Once they had learned something, the students were meant to go deeper in their own explorations. “I have kept my discourse quite elementary, limiting myself to the merest hints. This afternoon, when you will be asked to represent such a circulatory system, you will have to go rather beyond the schema shown here on the blackboard.”152 He told the students to suggest the transition of blood from stage to stage both graphically and with a shift from red to blue. He further advised them that, within each color, variations in tonality and density could be used to represent weight shifts, and that a change from light to heavy or vice versa could symbolize the changes of blood traveling through veins and arteries and losing its nutrients or regaining its force.
IN SEVERAL LECTURES, Klee talked about, and illustrated, the intake and outgo of foo
d. The year he arrived at the Bauhaus, he had sketched a “man-fish-man-eater.”153 This amazing image is evidence that, in his art as in his cooking, there was little that Klee considered off limits. But he evoked his unusual visions in such a naturally competent way that they are not terribly startling. To consider his “man-fish-man-eater” grotesque imposes a judgment on it that is alien to Klee’s way of thinking. The creature’s greed and barbarity are depicted so as to appear as natural as the rivers and blood flow he examined in his lectures. To Klee, the creature’s actions were simply part of the cosmos.
The truncated “man-fish-man-eater” has a large boxlike head and is entirely bald. His wide open mouth is marked by upper and lower teeth that are as jagged and brutal as saw teeth; these lethal chompers anticipate by nearly two decades the brutal imagery in Picasso’s Guérnica. He also has on top of his flat pate a form that could be read either as a large eye or as a pair of lips with a black dot at their center.
A bold arrow penetrates the gulletlike opening at the top of the free-form vessel that rises through the man-fish-man-eater’s throat and opens in the middle of his mouth. The route of his comestibles could not be clearer. Toward the base of that vessel, a few horizontal lines suggest water, beneath the surface of which are abstracted fish—jagged fins and all—as well as a tiny, embryonic humanoid. They are still waiting to be digested, and a second bold arrow suggests what will happen after they have been: they will be small enough to go through a little hole and then down into a discharge pipe. At the exit from that pipe is written the name “Klee.”
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