The Bauhaus Group

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by Nicholas Fox Weber


  For Klee, the greatest luxury of all was the location, which meant that he could enjoy long walks to the Elbe valley without having to go on city streets. He took whatever route caught his fancy, paying no attention to trespassing laws. It was as if the grounds of private castles existed only to fuel his imagination and provide material for his art.

  IN LATE SUMMER OF 1926, the Klees took another trip to Italy. They started in Bern—to make the necessary banking arrangements and to change currency—and then thrilled to the many tunnels in the Alps on the train to Milan, where they changed for Genoa. Leading his wife and son on a tour of the harbor, Klee bargained toughly with the boatman. Will Grohmann, who knew his subject so well that he sounded as if he were there, observed, “Displaying a surprising amount of southern temperament …he seemed transformed …at home. The reserve he always presented to the outside world gave way to a natural openheartedness.”205

  From Genoa they took a sailboat across the bay and stayed in a pensione in a vast overgrown garden. Klee’s quest for snakes was insatiable: they were different from those he encountered in German parks, who hid in the brush in a plant he described as spitting its seed.

  Then the Klees worked their way down the Italian Riviera to Livorno, eating well at every stop. On a boat to Elba, Klee marveled at dolphins that appeared to race the ship. He ate “spaghetti al sugo with the captain,” declaring it “Gotterasse”—food for the gods.206

  In Pisa, he stood for hours in front of the frescos of Campo Santo, and for ten splendid days in Florence he went to the Uffizi every day. Then came three days in Ravenna, where the mosaics overwhelmed him. When he returned to Dessau to start the first full academic year there, his energy was renewed.

  Once he was back at the Bauhaus, Klee’s parsimoniousness and his abhorrence of politics were both tested severely. The school was off to a shaky start in its new location. Money was tight for the local government, which was the school’s exclusive source of funding beyond the modest income it earned from the sale of Bauhaus products. This was when Gropius, scrimping to save money for the workshops, proposed that the masters temporarily give up 10 percent of their salary.

  All except for Klee and Kandinsky accepted the inevitability of that personal sacrifice. Having stayed at the Bauhaus mainly for the financial security of teaching, and knowing that they were the most acclaimed of its artists, they would not take a mark less than what they had been promised.

  Klee could not stop feeling insecure about money. When Lily had written Galka Scheyer that art sales were almost nonexistent, it was an exaggeration; times were tough, but Klee’s work was now selling at decent prices in a number of places. Klee himself recognized his and Lily’s inability to accept their well-being. Shortly after they had arrived in Dessau, he told Schlemmer that the next generation would do better with fame and success, that they would adjust more easily than his and Kandinsky’s age group. He recognized that he and Kandinsky were both too scarred by the war and the hardships that followed to know how to enjoy their new prosperity.

  Klee was in Bern on the way to Italy for his holiday when Gropius wrote him, on September 1, 1926, about the salary reduction. He immediately answered by saying, “I look gloomily ahead to further negotiations and am afraid of something that was avoided even during the worst phase at Weimar: an inner disruption. I am traveling south with the burden of such thoughts.” Then, after the Bauhaus director beseeched him a second time, Klee replied to “Herr Gropius”:

  The impression gained at the last meeting remains extremely disgruntling, despite the vacation spirit, sunny days, etc. It seems not to be given to us to breathe nonpolitical air, and time and again we are being forced (unfortunately) into politics. …

  The fact that the Mayor declares himself powerless in regard to the additional financing necessary for our Bauhaus, and the fact that every one of us is supposed to bleed for it, must be taken into consideration. But as far as I am concerned, I have to reject any attempt to push part the moral responsibility for this onto me.207

  THE BAUHAUS WAS GETTING READY for the inauguration of its new building. Klee told Lily he was keeping his distance from all the festivities; he wrote his father and sister that he was doing his best to ignore such distractions and simply to work on his art and teach his course. In addition, Klee was on his own with Felix that November, and even though his son was now eighteen, for Klee it was a priority to have the household functioning well while Felix was rehearsing opera every day. Klee often attended his son’s rehearsals, frequently talking with the director, and enjoyed getting to know Felix’s friends, but other Bauhaus events held little interest for him. Order at home mattered more; he was pleased with a new housekeeper who was as helpful with the meals as with keeping his evening clothes pressed. This last service was important to Klee, since formal attire was expected for concerts, where he regularly sat in the first row of the loge.

  KLEE HAD BROUGHT a lot of unfinished work from Weimar and wanted to get immediately to the task of completing it. His “plan of attack,” however, was taking time. He needed the right inspiration, and even fewer interruptions. And it was at precisely this moment that he was beginning to find himself in conflict with Ise Gropius concerning the concert program organized by the Friends of the Bauhaus.

  Even Klee could not manage to stay completely apart from the personality conflicts that riddled the school. The concert on November 8 with Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin epitomized what he most valued in life. “There are always so many things to learn from Bach! These sonatas have such richness that one is never done with them. These two men are outstanding musicians, profoundly honest.” It was after the concert, when the best-known of the Bauhaus masters repaired to Gropius’s house and were joined by the musicians, that the problems began. Klee had reluctantly consented to perform on November 27 at a concert for a large audience, because it was raising money for the Bauhaus canteen. At the reception after the Serkin-Busch concert, Ise was desperate to know if Lily would be there to play piano, with Mme. Schelper singing. Writing Lily about this, Klee characterized “Frau Gropius” as having “put herself in charge of trying to divert her husband as much as possible.”208 Pressured by his teaching obligations and Mrs. Gropius’s badgering, Klee now felt the glorious two months in Italy, from which he had only returned on October 28, disappearing in a radiant light.

  At least he loved the new classroom, which was light and spacious. And he was delighted by a cleverly designed piece of furniture there. It was a dark green board on wheels. If you turned a crank, the place for writing rolled away, leaving a new space for more drawing. Moreover, his students seemed interested in what he was saying.

  On November 27, 1926, Klee, Lily, and Frau Schelper gave the all-Mozart concert that Ise Gropius had inveigled them to perform. Even if Klee would not consent to the salary reduction, he was willing to give in to pressure in other ways. After all, he had a new studio and a new place to live.

  21

  Once he, Lily, and Felix had moved into their new house, Klee gave his classes in the studio there. Normally there were six or seven students, although sometimes as many as ten, who one afternoon a week trooped the half mile to Burgkuhnauer Allee.

  Howard Dearstyne, a young painter who had come to the Bauhaus from America, was mesmerized from the moment he walked in for the first time. “The house was very quiet,” and full of “old furniture, highly polished and seemingly inherited.”209 The black wall, covered with paintings in process, was a dramatic backdrop for the semicircle of chairs where the students sat facing three easels, each of which had a painting by one of the students on it. Klee sat in a rocker between the students and the easels, facing the art so that his back was to the class. He would sway back and forth slowly, while the students, especially the three whose work was about to be critiqued, waited for him to deliberate.

  For a considerable period of time, Klee would remain totally silent while examining the paintings. When he finally spoke, he assiduously avoided eit
her praising or criticizing the work. Rather, he offered comments on painting in general. One student, Gerhard Kadow, recalled, “Criticism of a work was latently present in these remarks but it was rarely stated, and as a result, was sensed that much more intensely.”210 Klee’s discourse enabled the students to go beyond their notion of what they had intended to do in the work, but also to grasp what they had created unconsciously. They gained a perspective on their own imaginations; many of the students felt as if they were understanding their own work for the first time.

  Dearstyne noted that Klee was unusual as a teacher for being “neither hated nor attacked. He lived like a strange being in the rationalistic and political world of the Haus. His withdrawal was respected. … His reserve and remoteness tended to accentuate the impact of his speaking.”211 His speech, Kadow noted, was distinctive: “Klee used a rather special vocabulary in expressing his thoughts, yet his sentences were organized simply and with a great deal of clarity. He never spoke a sentence for the sake of beautiful words, and he never tolerated a vague thought, though often touching on regions beyond logic.”212 Dearstyne was transfixed by the “dry and unemotional manner” of his deliberations and the sight of him drawing equally well with both hands on a blackboard in the studio.213

  Following the analysis of student work, Klee had everyone form a circle around a large gray glazed pot for a period of general discussion. They would talk away animatedly, most of the students smoking one cigarette after another while Klee puffed away on his pipe. Klee was amazed by how much he learned from these sessions. He told Kadow that the students should not be the ones “paying tuition, but that he, the teacher, should be paying us for he felt that the stimulation he received from us was far in excess of that which he gave.”214

  Another student described Klee as being “like a magician … with glance, word, and gesture—utilizing all three expressive possibilities with equal intensity—he transformed, for us, the unreal into the real, the irrational into the rational.”215 The revelations tumbled, one on top of the other. The students came to see that the formation of a plane was “not a matter of the simplest deliberation but, rather, of the deepest experience.” Klee simultaneously touched “‘on the nearest’ and ‘on the farthest,’” while also making “side springs” and taking “bypaths”:

  For us, in the beginning, these seemed roundabout—in order to reveal to us most clearly the diversity of the life of forms. … We gradually came to realize that this person here—Klee—was talking to us about life. We were permitted, with him, to experience the development of human existence in its entire capriciousness. We raced with him through tens of millennia. Klee made us again participants in primordial experiences. … There was nothing that he did not mention. … He saw everything. And he told us everything. The question is, did we understand everything?216

  Even though he did not discuss the examples of his own art that were surrounding them, Klee’s private universe—populated by the man-eating creatures, amoebic mermaids, extraterrestrial landscapes, and geometric plants that emerged in a brightly colored world that was half familiar, half purely abstract—added to their sense of being in new territory that connected them with the remote past as well as the distant future.

  As he spoke, Klee would often pause, and fall into periods of total silence. His listeners had no idea whether these would last for one minute or five minutes. Then he would abruptly resume talking. While full of uncertainty, the journey led their consciousness to new depths.

  ANOTHER DESSAU STUDENT, Hans Fischli, who eventually became an architect, painter, and sculptor in Zurich, gave an interview sixty years after studying with Klee. Fischli initially took the foundation course when Klee gave it in the main Bauhaus building, and then joined the elite group who went to Klee’s studio.

  Fischli recounted that Klee taught

  the Vorkurs for two hours per week. He stood at the board like a teacher; we sat at the back like students. I couldn’t write down what he said because I was listening and watching so intently. He never lectured about art and music. Instead, he gave us tips, for example: “In my opinion you have to know what you want to draw, and then you have to be able to depict it—with only one or two lines.” Then he explained that each line is a thing in itself.

  For Klee, there was no botching or smearing, not with color either. We were supposed to respect color, hold it sacred. It was better to put one color dot next to another instead of smearing them together.217

  Klee also emphasized that “if you want to paint a picture, a harmonious picture, then you must get to know the format first. You need to determine if it is high/vertical, wide/horizontal, or square. After that, you will want to put something onto this beautiful paper, with the knowledge that there are different specific points on this paper. One is the middle which you determine by drawing diagonals from the corner.”

  Fischli recalled that Klee encouraged the students to consider themselves personally connected with these points: “Nobody can take them from you. They’re not measured points, but you’ve found them yourselves.”

  Klee looked not only at pure geometry. Said Fischli, “He also showed us how to draw a fir tree forest. It wasn’t necessary, he said, to fill the whole paper with tree drawings. As a symbol for a fir tree, a simple line drawing would suffice. And a forest consisted of several such symbols—that’s how easy it was. We learned to see clearly and simply, and to think while working. But we never talked about it. Either you understood him—or you didn’t. He came, taught his class, and left.” Unlike all the other Bauhaus masters, Klee did not give grades.

  After doing the Vorkurs, Fischli decided to seek admission to

  Klee’s drawing class. So one day I put together a small portfolio and went to his house on the Kühnauer Strasse. Lily was also there. He looked through my portfolio, slowly, with no comment. Then he smiled very faintly—he didn’t laugh—and said I should come join the group.

  Each one of us would bring his or her newest work to those classes in Klee’s private studio. Klee would look at the pieces one by one and then would explain what we had done. We listened with excitement. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything, he’d just leaf through the pages and nod. Sometimes he’d say things like “you watched me well.” It was always very matter-of-factly, very poised. But you always felt whether he understood you or not. For example, when I showed him my Alpaufzug (Alp elevator/hoist)—oil on Japanese paper—he said: “Yes, the Swiss Hans Fischli is homesick, but he’s done a good job of overcoming it.”

  Beyond the teaching, there was the fascination of seeing how Klee worked. For example, we saw how he would paint India ink into wet water colors so that the ink would permeate the color, with the tip of a paintbrush, would add blue to gray, still wet areas of ink. The color would run into it by itself, without him having to blend it in. He didn’t teach us this explicitly; we had to detect that ourselves and try it on our own.

  Controlled haphazardness became the essence of art. For Fischli, Klee was a distinct “type: the musician, the thinker, the dreamer. … In his studio his violin case was always open, the violin still had rosin dust on it, meaning he had just played on it. He was someone who created tones—on the violin and in his pictures. … He was a transmitter, not a school master.” Fischli remarked that Klee “was a man of flesh and blood, but with an immense charisma. Yet he was never a god or a priest for me. Rather, I always had respect for him, and esteem: for his work and for him as a person.” Paul Klee disconcerted many people in the outside world, but he captivated most who were at the Bauhaus.

  22

  In Weimar, the Klees had always played music after supper. In Dessau, Klee changed the routine. While he practiced violin early every morning and played in a chamber music group once a week, he gave up the evening recitals.

  The ritual of Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and late Beethoven at the start of his day invigorated him. “When playing his violin, Klee surrendered himself to music. His eyes became transfixed, and he appear
ed to lose all awareness of his surroundings.”218 He had memorized the entire score of Don Giovanni and believed that his task was to play as Mozart would have played.

  Klee was convinced that music was far more evolved than art. The goal of his own painting was to attain the freedom and excellence Mozart had achieved two centuries earlier. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony was in Klee’s eyes “the highest attainment in art,” and its fast movement “the summit of all daring. This movement is decisive for all subsequent musical history.”219

  When Klee worked, he always listened to classical music, which infused his art with its movement and sense of structure. But on the rare occasions when guests came over, he entertained them with recordings of contemporary music. He often played Stravinsky’s l’Histoire du Soldat, a marvelously playful and upbeat piece that had had its second public performance during Bauhaus Week at Weimar in 1923. When concerts in Dessau included modern music, however, he regarded it as an intrusion. He considered Ravel coarse and Hindemith “stark” on the issue of anything spiritual.

  Nonetheless, Hindemith visited his studio in May 1930, after which Klee wrote Lily saying that he admired Hindemith’s vigor and splendid rhythm, as well as his economy of means and the control evident in the chamber music. But he still disliked Cardillac, Hindemith’s first opera, proclaiming that this melodramatic fantasy had a weak text, and in its neoclassical form was full of tonal and rhythmic compromise. In music as in painting, Klee’s concept of what succeeded or failed was sacrosanct.

  WHEN THE KLEES MOVED to Dessau, Lily implored her husband to get a telephone. She had long wanted one, but Paul was always against the idea. “I won’t have that devil’s box in the house,” he announced “in his thickest Bernese dialect.”220

 

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