The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  He might avoid arguments with everyone else, but he could not escape them with his wife. Lily protested his refusal, complaining that she always had to run to town for everything rather than picking up a phone and ordering a delivery the way her neighbors did. Klee finally acquiesced, allowing that she could “stick it in the cellar.” Lily had the phone installed in the pantry. Klee refused to answer it.

  SCHLEMMER WROTE that when Hannes Meyer became director of the Bauhaus in 1927, he thought Klee was “in a perpetual trance” but that Meyer respected Klee’s need for “a relatively contemplative painter’s existence.”221 Schlemmer, who ate at the Klees’ every Sunday, considered himself to have a privileged insider’s view, since the Klees generally had so little connection with the Bauhaus community.

  Klee’s hypnotic state allowed his mind and heart to function without the constant little annoyances that dominate most people’s lives. The void that existed around him meant that intuition, which came from within, was unimpeded by outside disturbances. In his teaching and his way of painting, Klee held to the precept that without intuition there is no totality. The physical remove of the house on Burgkuhnauer Allee provided the distance from others that allowed his reverie to have its full impact.

  Lily and Paul Klee in the English garden at Wörlitz, near Dessau, 1927. Klee generally went to the park alone, but here he has taken his wife to the invented landscape where he spent some of his happiest hours.

  A creature of routine, Klee always woke at seven, and almost always took a daily walk in the English garden at Wörlitz. He would often go canoeing. Felix had a canoe, which he kept on the Elbe; they would sometimes paddle together.

  When Felix went to Paris in June 1927, Klee wrote him a letter saying he had gone out in the canoe alone. That morning, he had woken at 7 a.m. as usual, painted all morning, and had an outdoor lunch at Wörlitz before the canoe run. He was picturing how beautiful Paris must seem to his son, especially since it was Felix’s first visit there. He also offered some fatherly admonitions. He was sure the trip would not be restful, so he was concerned about how long Felix would be there. Where was he going next?

  Five days later, he wrote Felix again:

  The French are, after all, a very ironic society, but you must not let that bother you, it is not aimed at German things, but at everything. They even take themselves ironically. It is good that you are still going to operas. When Paris is over you must settle down a bit, it is much better for you if you spend some quiet days after your stay in Paris—and also for me, as nature is much cheaper than culture.222

  Klee imagined Felix behaving as he had at the same age. But how he had changed since those days of drinking and chasing women in Munich. At a party for Muche, he drank only vermouth, and not too much of it. Marriage had put an end to his womanizing. Nonetheless, when the women had to pick their dancing companions, and Julia Feininger “put her grapnel around [him]”—Klee deliberately used this image of a small anchor with five barbed claws—he allowed himself to be led to the dance floor.223

  His performance there, however, was unlike that of his friend Kandinsky, who danced like a young man. Klee reported all this dutifully to Lily, saying that the difference between his dancing and Kandinsky’s was the same as between vermouth and champagne.224 He assured his wife that he no longer drank too much because he didn’t have time; he always had more than one painting he was trying to complete, and would not be alert enough with a hangover.

  Lily was often away in one sanatorium or another, being treated for what was vaguely called “a nervous disorder.” At the start of July 1927, while she was in the mountains at Oberstdorf, Klee sent her a postcard to say that he had received twenty-five marks, and that if Lily needed anything he would gladly add this amount to whatever else he sent her. The previous evening, Schlemmer had joined him for his chicken in the pot; he was walking, for an hour or two a day; and he reported regularly to the “brigadier of No. 6,” as he called Kandinsky. Two days earlier, at dusk, he had strolled along the river, and it was magnificent. “The Sunday petits-bourgeois had already gone home. The fish were jumping out to capture mosquitoes, and some steamships were still wandering in the region.”225 He did not get home until ten o’clock, when the Kandinskys came to check up on him. Of course he was fine, he assured his wife: he ate a delicious meal that he had prepared expertly, and then put some tangos on the gramophone. The Kandinskys should stop feeling as if they had to babysit for him.

  KLEE RARELY CHASTISED LILY or anyone else, but, in that same period, her insistence that he write her every other day annoyed him. “You cannot demand such regularity from me, it’s not in my nature. The constraints of the Bauhaus already weigh on me sufficiently.”226 Her questions were just one more time waster that kept him from painting.

  Cooking and contemplating nature, in solitude, were what recharged his batteries. Except for his long walks with Kandinsky, along the great expanses of water that he considered the best aspect of life in Dessau, he mostly needed to be alone. In the rooftop garden, he planted roses, petunias, sunflowers, geraniums, and dahlias, which he tended with care. He loved to contemplate the progress of trees: from being bare to having buds, then bursting into full leaf, and eventually assuming their splendid autumn variations before completing the cycle for winter.

  Similarly, Klee was a connoisseur of the different shapes and hues of the landscapes he encountered on the holiday journeys that were his one break from daily routine. In 1927, he went to Porquerolles, an island off the southern coast of France. For Klee, that Mediterranean journey was a mission to gain knowledge and inspiration: “Once again I went in search of something to stimulate harmonies lying dormant within myself, small or big adventures in color.”227 The sequence of events that began with the initial stimulus of what he took in with his eyes continued with its processing within his brain, whereby the vision would come to activate the hands with which he made art. Whatever excited him in the sights he so eagerly surveyed would, eventually, find its way, re-formed, into the paintings that were his predominant goal.

  Lily was again taking a cure when Paul and Felix made this trip to Porquerolles. Klee wrote her that the climate and the colors were so splendid that they did not mind staying in the barest of digs, with food that was just adequate at best. The petit bourgeois around him were irritating, their children badly brought up, the waiter and the maid the only desirable people, yet he was rejuvenated by the heat, and was thrilled to observe the cicadas and lizards. He and Felix hiked, swam, and picked ripe figs warmed by the sun. Then Klee would sit on his handkerchief on a cliff top—there were many to choose from—and draw.

  In his letters to Lily, Klee described the shrimp, jellyfish, sea urchins, “the ravishing snails and periwinkles, and the simply fabulous flora under the water and on its surface.” He also offered trenchant commentary on human behavior: “Here, the men are polite and correct, but the women very pretentious, giving themselves stupid allures. What noble creatures Italians are by comparison! On the other hand, the men are nicer here. In France, what is dominating is chattering—in a superb language. If I could master it perfectly, I would no longer deprive myself of the pleasure of talking a lot.”228 Convinced, however, that there was no language in which mistakes were so offensive as French, he did not try.

  For all of his reserve and apparent emotional distance, Klee was intensely self-aware. Underneath the taciturn façade, he knew who he was, and was more than willing to reveal himself to the person who understood. From Porquerolles, he wrote Lily:

  —I know where I’m going, but in the nature of things not where I shall be staying until I see it with my own eyes. In reality Corsica is enormous—on the map it seems small. On the map Porquerolles is almost invisible, but in reality you walk for hours and get sore feet. I think I hit the right psychological moment to leave. You get used to things and fall into a rhythm, getting up, going for a walk, lunch, a nap, painting, tea, a bath, dinner, a walk to the harbor, sitting down for a final co
ffee, bed. It becomes an everyday routine, and if there is an easy way to make a change one should do so. When I am on my own and perhaps more introspective, not available for others and reflect and cogitate, I always find a considerable reservoir of energy within myself and can purchase a variety of things with it. This time I am purchasing Corsica.”229

  From Corsica, he wrote his wife that “the way [Calvi] is built into the heroic landscape is so fantastic that one is confronted by a puzzle. Granite in every sense.”230 He used the word “granite” the way others might say “diamonds” or “emeralds.” This was the Bauhaus mentality at its best. Education at the school emphasized the act of looking and the analysis of construction, whether natural or man-made. It was essential to see beneath the surface, beyond issues of style. Nothing was to be taken for granted. Above all, Klee’s immense appreciation of life and his willingness to be enchanted were the ideal.

  THE TRIP KLEE TOOK to Egypt had a great impact on what he offered at the Bauhaus afterward. The journey got off to a great start when, on December 19, 1928, he returned to Genoa, and ate a perfect “sugo.” He was primed for pleasure; even before he arrived in Egypt, Klee revered its culture. Grohmann observed that while the artist believed that classical Greece was now “irrevocably in the past,” Egypt was “more exciting, at once eternal and alive. He felt that every monument and every mound of sand proclaimed its origins, reflected the present, and foretold the end.”231 Klee’s idea of the confluence of ancient time and the current era, and his belief that each grain of sand was miraculous, were both central to his teaching and painting.

  In his 1925 Bird Pep, for example, Klee had anticipated the revelations of the Egyptian desert. In this marvelous painting, the cactus on the horizon seems to have just burst into life, as if it were born in a nanosecond. The plant is like a dancer who was not there a moment ago and now has leapt onto the stage as a mature and developed being. We feel its growth and development as if we can see its stems lengthening, its leaves gaining their span, and its red flowers assuming their color. In this as in so much of Klee’s work, the history of the universe seems to have occurred simultaneously in a fraction of a minute and over countless millennia. The sun that Klee painted with a core like a fertile egg yolk, and with a red aura around it, is the sun of all times. Conveying its past, present, and future, it has irrefutable power.

  Paul Klee, Bird Pep, 1925. The desert and the creatures of the cosmos thrilled Klee for their miraculous vitality and sense of eternity.

  The bird that is the central figure of this oil and watercolor on paper has legs like those Klee drew for his students when he was depicting human development. They are signs for the limbs of a competent walker, not a realistic rendering. The bird is comic, its head and beak practically equal in size to the rest of its body. Its entire outline—of head, chest, tail, legs—is covered with fine follicles, copious and long, with many of them jutting out straight. A lot of the plants also have these follicles that look like antennae. Projecting into the atmosphere, reaching toward the future, all these little hairs evoke the miraculousness of living organisms. Three years later, Klee would be conscious that the birds he saw in Egyptian statuary were comparable: timeless and universal creatures endowed with spiritual power.

  The colors of this 1925 painting are an amazing, almost lurid mix of desert rose, bilious yellow, and lime green. We are in a warm and exotic place here—certainly not Weimar or Dessau. This could be a vision of the ancient primordial past; it could be a view out the window today. Or maybe it is the future, when strange and fantastic creatures will have taken over the earth. In Egypt, he would discover its companions.

  KLEE SAILED FOR ALEXANDRIA from Genoa on December 20. He wrote to Felix from the boat: “The food is extraordinarily sumptuous and perfectly prepared. In the morning you get your choice of drink and eggs or ham, as much butter, bread and jam as you like. At 10 o’clock you are offered soup and a sandwich (I dispense with this second breakfast). At 12 o’clock there is lunch, a supremely lavish midday meal. 4 o’clock is tea time and at 8 o’clock there is a gigantic dinner.” To Lily, he described Naples—”from the outside, beauty in person; on the inside, character in person.”232 The boat made two stops in Sicily, in Messina and Syracuse, where Klee immensely enjoyed the return visits, however brief. The weather was cold, as well as cloudy and rainy, and Crete now had snowcapped peaks, all of which Klee adored as he anticipated the heat of Egypt.

  Cruising away from Crete, he wrote Lily, “There are people from every nationality, unfortunately also Americans, the only ones lacking knowledge of how to live.” Klee felt that Americans were without a belief in anything spiritual, and missed the great beauty of where they were. “What is the value of all civilization, whether good or bad, compared to this water, this sky, and this light?” he asked,233 suggesting that such appreciation was alien for most Americans.

  On the afternoon of his arrival in Egypt, he walked through the native quarter of Cairo. The following days offered one thrill after another. He studied antiquities in the museums, explored tombs and pyramids, and visited Luxor, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, Thebes, and Elephantine Island at Aswan. It felt like a trip backward in time, as each site was more ancient than the previous one. The gardens and sunsets were even more exciting than the archaeology, the light conditions over the temples and pyramids more moving than the stones; of a storm near Crete on the way back, Klee wrote Lily a single word: “Superb!”234

  THE TRIP LASTED LESS than two weeks, and Klee wished it had gone on longer, but its effect stayed with him. The intense Egyptian sunlight as well as the quality of simplification inherent in Egyptian art began to permeate his own work even more than it had previously. After Tunis, he had been obsessed with the moon; now it was the blistering sun. Following the trip to Egypt, Klee’s work got lighter and brighter, with a noticeable change in palette.

  Color, Klee told Grohmann euphorically, was “the most irrational element in painting.” It wasn’t only the choice of hue but the way it was applied that counted; he would use a glaze to give a color remoteness and intensify it to bring it near. Grohmann writes, “For Klee colors are actors; he is the stage director; but he does not too severely restrict the independence of his cast.”235

  Klee’s work in Dessau now took off in a new direction. He began to use sequences of parallel lines, applying principles of counterpoint and the structure of a fugue to them. The lines could appear fearful, romantic, frightening, or joyous; there was never just one aspect to Klee’s art, and the ups and downs of his psyche would always get in there. Forms could be deliberately still or deliberately active, and colors ranged from dark and mysterious to magisterial to flippant.

  Klee’s 1930 Individualized Measurement of Strata demonstrates with a flourish his inventive use of vibrating hues to make movement occur in parallel, nearly identical forms (see color plate 5). The painting is both the result of a series of careful decisions and a by-product of intuition. Orchestrated so that one sees the individual units as well as the totality, it has a perpetual flow, and provides a range of pleasures.

  The dry and inert title Individualized Measurement of Strata suggests how methodical and scientific exploration can yield lively and lyrical results. The painting derives from the complex diagrams of tonal scales and the precise progressions from black to white and back again that were central to Klee’s teaching. What exuberance comes from this! To the Bauhaus students, Klee constantly compared aspects of art to music, and would make visual equivalents of staccato, legato, and allegro; in this and related water-colors, he achieved those varying effects. He also demonstrated the achievement of both high-speed movement and equilibrium through visual tonality: a rare feat.

  In Individualized Measurement, no color or form is superior or inferior to another. Klee inveighed against judgment. Fat or thin, tall or short, red or white: these distinctions did not denote better or worse. What matters, rather, is the composite, and the recognition that one set of traits never rules o
ut another. This is why Klee preferred the word “absolute” to “abstract.”

  For “absolute” bestowed an intrinsic quality on every hue in the spectrum, and every shape imaginable. Grohmann often heard Klee make the distinction that “the absolute was something ‘in itself,’ like the absolute of a piece of music, psychical not theoretical, as he told his pupils,” while the abstract ran the risk of being “unspiritual,” a quality Klee deplored.236 Individualized Measurement is a perfect example of the quality of the absolute as it was confirmed for Klee by the trip to Egypt.

  23

  In the summer of 1929, Paul and Lily Klee went to Guéthary, near Biarritz.

  After Josef Albers died, when I was going through the contents of a storage room that the artist himself had been the only person to enter for more than twenty years, I found photos Albers had taken on that holiday. The Kandinskys were also at the beautiful beach resort on the southwestern coast of France, just north of the Spanish border, and they all clearly had a blast.

  Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee on vacation in Guéthary, 1929. The Bauhaus artists loved to travel, especially to exotic places. This seaside resort in the Basque Country, along with various Mediterranean resorts, inspired them artistically.

  Paul and Lily Klee in Guéthary, near Biarritz, 1929; photo collage by Josef Albers. For decades, no one knew about Albers’s visual portrait of stylish Bauhauslers relishing the delights of charming seaside resorts during their summer holiday.

  Albers’s photos of Klee in a white sweater with an unusual weave of cotton and linen and a contrasting V-neck collar, coupled with a beret worn at a jaunty angle, show him in a summer holiday mood. In one image Lily is also dressed in resort finery, and Klee holds a parasol. In that elegant town on the Atlantic, Klee, in the summer preceding his fiftieth birthday, has a mischievous smile that makes it easy to picture him as the playboy he had been thirty years earlier. This was not the Klee most people knew.