10. WASSILY KANDINSKY, study for the mural painting of the Juryfreie Kunstschau, 1922. During his first year at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky designed murals that the students executed and that realized his lively abstract compositions on a new scale.
11. WASSILY KANDINSKY, Too Green, 1928. Kandinsky made this painting to give to Paul Klee on Klee’s fiftieth birthday. The circle had great spiritual significance and suggested eternity.
12. HERBERT BAYER, Poster for Kandinsky’s 60th Birthday Exhibition in Dessau, 1926. Bayer’s design announced one of Kandinsky’s most important exhibitions ever, a great event for everyone at the Dessau Bauhaus.
13. WASSILY KANDINSKY, Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition. Like Klee, Kandinsky helped promote the Bauhaus Exhibition in a way that conveyed the remarkable adventurousness of the new school.
14. WASSILY KANDINSKY, Little Black Bars, 1928. Kandinsky’s paintings from the Dessau Bauhaus invite literal interpretations at the same time as they belong purely to the imagination.
15. PAUL KLEE, Dance of the Red Skirts, 1924. Having imagined demons ever since he was a small child, Klee inhabited and created a universe unlike anyone else’s.
WASSILY KANDINSKY, Composition VIII, 1923. Kandinsky used vibrant colors and bold, imaginative forms to evoke sound as well as emotion.
ON MARCH 31, 1925, Paul and Lily Klee gave a farewell concert in Weimar. It was the third occasion in recent months that they had played duets in public. For this event, they performed sonatas by Bach and Mozart together and Lily played, solo, two fugues and preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
As long as they could, the Klees continued to relish the cultural pleasures of Weimar. They attended a recitation of The Grand Inquisitor, by Midia Pines, a well-known Dostoevsky reciter, and enjoyed two evenings of Kurt Schwitters reciting his own fairy tales. Schlemmer staged Don Juan and Faust by Grabbes, and there were concerts and theater performances. Béla Bartók performed Bluebeard’s Castle and his ballet The Wooden Prince. Even as the Bauhaus was being forced out, Germany’s new capital offered endless treats. Hindemith spent two hours in Klee’s studio one afternoon before performing that evening.
Klee’s work was given a major exhibition in Weimar that spring, as was Kandinsky’s. It was hard to believe that the period of glory was coming to an end.
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However reluctant he may have been, Klee moved to Dessau. Shortly after he got there, his Pedagogical Sketchbook was published as a Bauhaus book and began to find a broad audience. His international reputation was growing; his work was included in the surrealist exhibition in Paris, and he had his first solo Paris exhibition at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail.
In the midst of this complex time period—when he had success on some levels but serious financial worries and skepticism about the move—Klee painted Fish Magic (see color plate 6). While the turmoil surrounding him, and the stressful process of uprooting his family and moving to a new city where little about their life was certain, was not specifically referred to in Klee’s art, it was indirectly reflected in this particular painting. Klee told his students, “One can, once in a while, take a picture as a dream.”189 Like all rich dreams, this one begs to be read. In what initially seems to be a vision in an aquarium or through a diver’s mask, this underwater scene has, at its center, a stretched vertical canvas that fades into the horizontal canvas on which Fish Magic is actually painted. This device of a painting within a painting becomes a commentary on the illusion of art; the vertical canvas has the same proportions as the real one, a reminder that everything changes when you turn your painting ninety degrees, and the painting illustrated dissolves into the actual painting in such a way that the question of what is real and what is a reproduction of reality becomes tantalizing.
In the part of Fish Magic that appears to be on the painted vertical canvas, a clock is suspended in a fishnet that has the form of a belfry. A moon is next to the clock. These were certainly the dominant issues of Klee’s life at the time: his desire to control the passing of time so that he could, above all else, make paintings, and his wish to evoke the cosmic and eternal, as represented by the moon. Meanwhile, the fish moving this way and that, an orange one swimming eastward from behind the illusory canvas, a lavender one gliding westward in front of it, suggest transition. This was just the time that Klee, like the fish, was moving back and forth, in one direction and then another—in his case, between Weimar and Dessau. Paul had gone to Dessau, but since the only housing there was temporary, Felix and Lily had stayed behind, and he commuted. Although Klee had decided that he would be part of the new Bauhaus after all, it was as if he had put one leg into a cold ocean while keeping the other one on shore. Lily and Felix stayed in the apartment they all loved overlooking the English park in Weimar, so Klee spent a week in Dessau at the Hotel Kaiserhof, then a week back in Weimar.
What of the other elements of this pictorial enchanted land? There is a two-faced girl, one of whose mouths is like a tiny heart under a large geometric nose, with large glovelike hands that resemble sea creatures. The only other human figure is a clown, peering in from our left like an actor sticking his head out from backstage. There are large and small flowers, a pink sun, and some inexplicable objects that appear to have dropped down into the scene. And there are more fish: exotic inventions in mauve, turquoise, and red-gold, with lavish decoration and faces that give them personalities. All of this is painted with Klee’s Mozartian lightness of touch, his delicacy of line and brushwork, his tissuelike filmy layers of paint, so that the end result has none of the stridency of the surrealist art to which it might otherwise be compared, but rather is deliciously insouciant. We are left with the feeling that anything can happen, and that art, like music, takes us into new and unknown territory rather than recapitulate the familiar or the literal.
Most of all, as Klee’s knowing friend Will Grohmann pointed out, “Fish and flowers predominate by their very precision; the human beings are entirely schematic and play the part of visitors.”190 Such was Klee’s perspective: Whatever the exigencies of the Bauhaus, whatever the issues of the day, the vast and wonderful cosmos was there before us and will be there afterward. With art, one can capture the miracles.
AT FIRST, KLEE FELT that Dessau had little to offer. It was dominated by its industrial quarter and had none of the allure of the city where Goethe had lived. But the Bauhaus had been given temporary space and was moving forward. To cut down on travel time, Klee switched to spending two weeks in Weimar, two in Dessau, rather than moving every week. And he now moved from his hotel to a furnished room in the house where the Kandinskys were renting an apartment.
Klee taught in the provisional school building, and began to explore the city on the Elbe. By June 1925, after he had been there for a couple of months, he wrote his father and sister that the area where he and Lily and Felix would live was really very beautiful, the junction of the Mulde and Elbe rivers magnificent, and the parks enticing.
One mid-September day, Klee wrote Lily from Dessau that when he was walking to school in the morning he ran into Gropius. The Bauhaus director, Klee told his wife, was “very nice.”191 Ise Gropius, who had just returned after one of her sanatorium treatments, was less to his taste; she visited his studio with her sister, and it had not been pleasurable. But Klee was pleased because “Gropi” was going to take him the next day to a concert that would include a Hindemith violin concerto, and life at the new location held more promise than he had anticipated.
Klee was pleased that the Bauhaus theater was doing its own version of The Enchanted Flute. Moreover, “Gropi” had assured him that progress was being made on the new house, and that the construction site warranted a visit. Klee also told Lily that every student had shown up for his class and been very attentive, and that he had gone to a restaurant that served decent food for little money—”an unpretentious place, frequented by the good petit-bourgeois”—although the next day he would cook for himself.192 He was seeing lots of the Kandinskys, an
d also enjoyed being with Franz von Hoesslin, a music conductor, and his wife, and with the Muches.
Klee, however, disliked a lot of what was “in” at the Bauhaus. On Saturday, October 24, he went to an evening of dance performed by the Bauhauslers; the next morning, he wrote Lily, “The ambiance there was vulgar and the people wild. A dreadful noise, extremely disagreeable.” Nonetheless, with his usual quest for balance, he concluded, “One can say that the settling in Dessau is, little by little, taking place.”193
THE GOAL OF THE SETTLING WAS, of course, a maximum amount of time at the easel. When the Kandinskys came in late from parties, Klee, who generally went to bed early, would hear them from his adjacent room; rather than feeling that he was missing out, since his schedule revolved entirely around his studio time, he was glad to live more calmly. If he socialized, it was likely to be at midday on weekends. He reported to Lily on a Saturday lunch with the Kandinskys—venison and noodles—and lunch at the Gropiuses the next day, although in that case the food was not good enough to mention.
On December 18, when Klee returned from a day of travel, he found on his worktable an apple, an orange, and a hand-colored lithograph, all from Kandinsky in honor of his birthday. The gesture touched him. In spite of the antipathy from the outside, as long as the heat was working and his paycheck was coming in, Klee was content. He grudgingly accepted his obligation to give lectures—while he enjoyed teaching, once he was doing it, he dreaded any incursion into his painting time—and found his fellow senior faculty members amiable. They would get together in cafés, and everyone always sent warm greetings to Lily.
Then Lily appeared in Dessau, and the two of them spent New Year’s Eve with the recently wed Alberses, and the Grotes and the Muches. When others danced, Klee smoked his pipe on the sidelines—though Anni Albers, who was lame, did not dance either, it would never have occurred to her to disrupt his reverie—but, in his own way, he was part of the reborn Bauhaus.
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At the start of 1926, Lily returned to Weimar to the apartment she preferred, but Klee was increasingly content with the new arrangements. The owner of the local movie theater would put on special films for the Bauhauslers. The Kandinskys, Muches, Moholys, and Klee went fairly often. When the theater owner showed his favorite new audience a film that took place in an artist’s studio with a lusty nude model, Klee wrote Lily, “It was movvvvvving and edifffffffying.”194
During the days, Klee often took long walks along the Mulde. A connoisseur of weather conditions, he was delighted when the first signs of spring began to appear in late February, but he was equally content when winter reappeared in all its majesty at the start of March, providing a heavy snow that enabled him to make a superb snowman.
Klee particularly enjoyed going to the English Grounds of Wörlitz, created in the late eighteenth century on a tributary of the Elbe on the outskirts of Dessau. The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had inspired the design of this pastoral paradise, which embodied certain Enlightenment principles that were vital to Klee. Rousseau considered botanical growth to be the model for all of life and fundamental to education, much as Klee himself did.
For Klee, this enchanting park was one of the great attractions of the Dessau Bauhaus. He regularly walked around its lake and along the canals, visited the landscaped “Rousseau Island,” which was a near facsimile of the island of Ermenonville where Rousseau was buried, and studied the neoclassical and Gothic architectural follies. Klee’s usual stopping points included the Temple of Flora, an artificial version of Vesuvius, and a climbing rock. The whimsy and imagination of it all delighted him; he had no agenda on those walks, but they provided material that later showed up in his work.
Though he enjoyed his solitude, when important art gallery owners from major cities appeared to work with Kandinsky on plans for exhibitions honoring Kandinsky’s sixtieth birthday in December 1926, Klee was content that they dropped in on him as well. Klee recognized that those connections with the outside world made it easier to push on with his own work, just as he now acknowledged the need to teach. On April 23, 1926, the Vorkurs was offered for the first time in Dessau, and Klee taught twenty men and one woman. Once he accepted the inevitability of losing time in the studio, he enjoyed giving the lectures, because they demanded concentration, and he felt that each time he taught, he did a better job.
In close consultation with Lily, Klee was working on making their future residence everything they wanted it to be. They would be moving to 6/7 Burgkuhnauer Allee on August 1. When he went to see how the construction was going, he was especially thrilled with the closets: one for linen, two for clothing. And his studio was the “summa.” After one of those visits, he reported to Lily with childlike joy about walking with Julia Feininger along the Elbe, and buying “beautiful herrings” for dinner.
He and Lily were very precise about the colors they wanted for the interior of the house; Klee specified that more saturated paints be used for the window trim than for the walls. While Lily was still in Weimar, having decided to spend spring there, they both anticipated unprecedented comfort once their new life was in order. It was a miracle to be able to live so well when the economic situation was so terrible. Klee in this period was having large exhibitions at his usual galleries, and the reviews were excellent, but, as Lily wrote Galka Scheyer, “The financial success was almost nil. The scarcity of money in Europe is catastrophic. It affects everything and not a single person has money.”195
“Paulie,” she said, was now receiving eight hundred marks a month in salary, but it did not go as far as the two hundred fifty he had been getting before. Even with his painting sales, he could not afford the new clothing he would have liked. To have a new house being built according to their specifications was part of the Bauhaus miracle.
KLEE ATTENDED A PERFORMANCE of Parsifal that lasted five hours, with a fifty-minute intermission. Again, his account to Lily reads like a review by a savvy music critic. “The orchestra made a pure and harmonious sound from the first to the last note. … The baritone was superb from every point of view. … The dramatic soprano … sang well but lacked personality. …
Not the least lack of taste in the scenery.”196 He elaborated on the lighting, sets, and costumes, complaining that the only real weakness was with the voices of the men’s choir.
Mainly, he focused on the household. Felix was entering the Bauhaus theater workshop, and Klee helped him get settled into it. The painting of the house was proceeding—the studio was “magnificent” and their bedroom “superb”—and he was especially happy with the armoires.197 Life was coming into shape again.
OF THE LECTURES on form that Klee gave to the students that spring at the weaving workshop, one observer reported, “Those who were able to follow the differentiated theoretical lectures with which Paul Klee supplemented the instruction in the weaving workshop found essential enrichment in them.”198 They were, as many students noted, hard to grasp. Klee was often speaking in his own language. Another listener would recall that the talks were “like the formula of a mathematician or physicist, but, considered carefully, it was pure poetry.”199 But his method had an impact. Klee would draw on a small slate to show how to develop a form, and then would erase it to let the student proceed on his or her own rather than copy. He would, for example, focus on the cube. The students were encouraged not just to learn how to create one, but how to give it a passive or active personality so that it was not merely an inert reproduction of a form.200
Klee’s appointment calendar reports concerts, opera performances, class days, exhibition plans, evenings at the Kandinskys’, hikes, even an occasion of being naked in the garden of the mausoleum.201 Then came the great moment in July 1926 when Paul, Lily, and Felix Klee moved into No. 7 Burgkuhnauer Allee, with only a wall separating them from the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half. On the ground floor there was, in addition to the pantry, kitchen, and maid’s room, one large space that served as both the music and dining room. Above there w
ere two bedrooms, a room just for Lily, and Klee’s studio, while the top floor had Felix’s workroom and a guest room. Klee’s large square studio contained a black wall that made a dramatic backdrop for looking at art.
The little row of four residences—all except for Gropius’s accommodated two families—was in a pine forest. In that bucolic setting, the houses were in the latest, streamlined modern style, but they imposed no orthodoxy. The Klees kept the furniture they had always had, so that even with its very modern architecture, it was home as always. Klee also had his ever-expanding collection of the sea shells and snails he brought back from travels to the Baltic and Mediterranean seas. Mollusks were an obsession: he had a second collection of photographs, X-rays, and cross-sections of them.
Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the masters’ houses in Dessau. The masters’ houses had wonderful roof gardens and lawns.
In 1929, a journalist from Das Kunstblatt would visit the house the Klees and the Kandinskys shared. Writing about it, she never referred to the men’s wives, or to Felix; it was as if the houses reflected only the “two powerful artistic personalities” of the Bauhaus masters, and nothing of their families.202
In Kandinsky’s house, the writer noted a pale pink room with a gilded wall, followed by a pure black one “made brighter—as though by two suns—by paintings whose colors give off a powerful glow, and by a large round table shining white.” Kandinsky’s love for “pure cold colours” was evident everywhere.203 But Klee’s house, separated from Kandinsky’s by only a thin wall, made an opposite impression. “The air which meets us already at the entrance … seems so different, much more intimate, closer to the earth, more humid even. So different, too—soft but impressive—is the language spoken here.”204
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