THAT SEPTEMBER, WASSILY KANDINSKY received a Golden State Medal in Cologne. It acknowledged the Russian’s accomplishments overall. Klee was ecstatic, voicing greater excitement than was usual for him, because Nina Kandinsky, who had suffered many reversals in life and who lacked her husband’s creative resources, was heartened by her husband’s award. But Klee was generally troubled. On September 11, 1929, he wrote Felix, who had recently joined the Municipal Theater in Breslau, “The Bauhaus will never calm down; otherwise it wouldn’t be the Bauhaus.”237 Two days later, he wrote Lily, who was in Bern, “I am now trying to paint again, but unfortunately still can’t avoid noticing a certain hastiness about it, because my time is not my own. I am not particularly irritated by the Bauhaus, but they require things of me that are only very partially fruitful. That is and remains unpleasant. It is nobody’s fault except my own, as I can’t find the courage to leave. Thus precious years of production are partially wasted. There is nothing more uneconomical or more stupid.”238
Yet Klee was less involved with Bauhaus affairs than most people. On one occasion, when it was announced at a large assembly that there would be a departmental meeting on a Friday afternoon and one of Klee’s students protested because Klee’s painting class was scheduled at the same time, everyone else burst out laughing. Unlike the worried student, they all knew that Klee never attended such events anyway.
KLEE’S IMPENDING FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY was such a vivid reminder of the passage of time, and the progress toward the end of life, that he could not take it lightly. The only way was with an escape to the immortal realm of Mozart and Bach, so he and Lily planned a concert at home to mark the occasion.
Other people, though, could not let the milestone go without fanfare. The Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin organized a major show of Klee’s work in honor of the event. Closer to home, the students and some of the other Bauhaus faculty members also decided that Klee’s being half a century old warranted special attention. This inspired the event whose recounting opens this book.
The flowers and other presents that were dropped from a plane onto the Klees’ roof garden were a diversion but not an unequivocal success. Klee wrote Felix that after his gifts fell from above, the flat roof collapsed and everything plummeted into his studio. “It certainly was a fine surprise.” A week later, he told his son, “The fact is, I would find it hard to sum up my highly contradictory feelings about this fiftieth birthday.”239
ON AUGUST 23, 1930, Oskar Schlemmer wrote in his diary, “Paul Klee, yesterday still a little shrimp, is today already considered an ‘island.’ “240
In spite of the international economic depression, Klee was enjoying increased critical and commercial success. Hot on the heels of the shows that had honored his fiftieth birthday, there were major museum exhibitions in Dresden, in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, and in Berlin. Another large show was planned for Dusseldorf in 1931. Museums were acquiring works, and Flechtheim got the great Paris-based art dealer Kahnweiler more involved in marketing Klee’s art in Europe. The New York dealer J. B. Neumann, as well as Galka Scheyer, were buying more work for the United States. Cahiers d’Art devoted a special edition to Klee. However, it was not false modesty when he told Will Grohmann his reaction to this publication: “The sight of my name in such large letters seemed quite frightening.”241
Klee was feeling unsettled in general, especially by changes at the Bauhaus. When in April 1930 he talked with Hannes Meyer about the problems of the school, he found the director both very nice and refreshingly frank, but Klee decided the time had come to raise the issue of who his own successor would be. He knew it would not be easy to identify a candidate.
Adding to Klee’s difficulties, he was suffering from migraines that he described as “hellish.” These were not new to him, but they were becoming more intense and frequent. This man who was often so content with the offerings of everyday life now wrote Lily that his days were awful.
Klee complained about the German climate and the Dessau weather in particular; he was dreaming of North Africa, or Sicily. But he was so overworked from too much teaching, and, above all, from too many meetings, inevitable in spite of his concerted efforts to avoid such duties, that he had to turn down appealing invitations for travel. He could not even make it to Bern for his father’s birthday or to Breslau to be with Felix. He was perpetually in the process of finishing three or more major pictures at the same time, and could not bear to be away from the studio except for essential reasons.
Nonetheless, he remained an engaged parent. He took pains to advise Felix on a range of issues now that the future theater director was on his own. Klee was obsessed with Felix’s budget and allowances. When getting a new suit, Felix was to be sure that it was in an authentic English material; Klee instructed him that nothing else was of value for a man’s suit.
On April 3, Klee wrote Lily a detailed analysis of a performance of the Jupiter Symphony. He was very specific about the double basses and, again, the kettledrum, concluding, “Impossible to speak about the symphony itself. It is the highest peak of art and the finale is the riskiest enterprise possible: a movement ‘fatidique’ for the history of music afterwards.”242
Klee was reevaluating a lot in life. Lily was now away on health cures even more than before, and in his solitude Klee developed a new awareness of his reputation for coldness. He wrote, “People say I have no heart. Felix spent his money more quickly than he was supposed to; otherwise, our conversation on the phone was very pleasant. We imitated the cries of animals, chickens, dogs, night cats; we couldn’t stop ourselves.” Given his initial opposition to the telephone, the report was a concession that she had been right after all; it also was his way of showing that he was not as rigid as he often seemed. The same day, Klee wrote Felix a letter that began, “Yes, I have a heart; that’s why I am writing you now …,” and concluded, “I didn’t want you to think that I didn’t have a heart; that would be untrue. I am simply possessed by demons.”243
In the spring of 1930, Klee decided he would resign from the Bauhaus on April 1, 1931. He dreamed more and more of being somewhere else to lead the ideal life. The location should be simple and pleasant, in an optimal climate. But Italy or Crete was too much to hope for. He knew he would have to find another teaching post, to be prepared for eventualities like illness. He also was resigned to the idea that he had to teach in a place where German was the primary language.
AS KLEE PREPARED to move on from the institution of which he had been a part for more than a decade, flowers, music, and, above all, work remained the staples of his life. But at times something new excited him as well. In May 1930, he felt a new world open because of a film showing organized by Hans Richter of a movie by Viking Eggeling. The Swedish Eggeling, who was born less than a year after Klee but who had died in 1925, at age forty-five, was an experimental filmmaker who had been close to Arp and Modigliani in Paris before moving to Zurich, where Richter introduced him to Tristan Tzara. The film Klee saw was the extraordinary Diagonal Symphony, which Eggeling had made in the year prior to his death. In it, white-on-black abstractions, built from parallel lines, resemble Bauhaus foundation course constructions and what Klee drew on the blackboard when he taught. These shapes soar with imagination and spirit. Klee believed that if Eggeling had not died when he did, cinema would have been more of an art. He thought it still might become one, but that at the moment he was disappointed that no one gave it sufficient attention.
That same month, Klee made an exception to his usual refusal to interrupt his studio routine for nonessential reasons: he decided to go to Stuttgart for meetings in a museum. In the years since Stuttgart’s Academy had turned him down, all the new Weissenhof housing structures had been built. But the inventive architecture by Le Corbusier, Mies, Gropius, and others did not interest Klee as much as the trees. Mainly chestnuts, they were, while enormous, sadly ordinary. Similarly, the vegetation in the parks was “luxuriant but cruelly lacking in soul.” There was something art
ificial about this landscape in Klee’s eyes; while everything had been cultivated to make an impression of majesty, the result “evoke[d] more of a pretentious research than a natural phenomenon.”244 Klee began to obsess over what was missing in Stuttgart’s famous central park, and wrote to Lily about nothing else.
ALTHOUGH KLEE’S PAINTINGS were beginning to sell at higherprices—he received 1,150 reichsmarks for two watercolors, and 5,000 from sales in New York—his view was that he and Lily had to be careful not to get too comfortable. “It’s the best way to avoid simultaneously avarice and wastefulness,” he instructed his wife.245
He handled his business dealings thoughtfully. Typically, Klee wrote Galka Scheyer, “Between his Majesty and Your Excellence there was still an unresolved matter. His Majesty needs honor more than money (but money too).” He gave Scheyer a 25 percent reduction on his usual prices whether she kept the work for her own collection or resold it. When she asked for an even greater discount, he said that his need for income made it impossible, but that “what Your Majesty can do is offer a present.”246 Continuing with the vocabulary of royal negotiations, he called this letter a “Charter” and used it to deed her the splendid painting Plant Seeds as a gift of thanks for all she had done.
Some collectors were so avid for Klee’s work that they sought him out. Edward M. M. Warburg, a twenty-three-year-old American heir to banking and railroad fortunes who had been one of three students to organize exhibitions of recent art in the pioneering Harvard Society for Contemporary Art and now taught modern art at Bryn Mawr College—he made an anonymous contribution to pay his own salary—secured a letter of introduction to Klee from Curt Valentin, who worked at Flechtheim’s. Warburg arrived eagerly at Klee’s front door on Burgkuhnauer Allee, but stopped at the sound of the artist playing Bach on the violin. The young collector sat on the doorstep and waited until the sonata was over.
Once inside, Warburg was overwhelmed. First there was the sight of the intense dark-eyed artist in the sort of white coat worn by surgeons. Although Warburg had arrived unannounced, his letter of introduction and sympathetic manner as well as his fluent German gained him a warm reception and an invitation to take a close look at all the paintings on the walls and easels. Warburg already knew the work of Calder and Miró and other modernists he had shown at Harvard, but this art was as fresh and spontaneous and free as anything he had ever seen. And the atmosphere in which it was made struck him as magical.
The recent university graduate began to go through some works on paper. When he attempted to prevent Klee’s pet cat—Fritz’s successor—from walking across a watercolor he was holding, the artist urged him to let the cat do as he wanted. But the watercolor was still wet. Warburg panicked, telling Klee he was terrified that the cat would leave a paw print. Klee simply laughed. He said that the paw print would later on be a great insoluble mystery. “Many years from now, one of you art connoisseurs will wonder how in the world I ever got that effect.”247
Warburg was captivated by an oil Klee had completed the previous year. Called Departure of the Ships, it celebrated the ability of canvas sails to harness the flow of air in order to ferry people across the miraculous substance of water. Warburg’s conception of ships had previously been linked to his father’s enormous yacht and the ocean liners on which he sailed first class; Klee’s painting was a vision of all seaworthy vessels large or small, grand or functional, in the most general sense. The rich young man saw the canvas as an homage to the act of sailing, the inventiveness of the mechanisms, and the concord with natural forces, with no reference to what Warburg considered the mundanity of upper-class life. For Klee, there was no separation between the ships one might encounter on the sea and in one’s dreams, just as there was little difference between the growth of trees and the making of artworks.
Klee’s painting reveals motion itself. It illustrates wind. Its sails could be any type, anywhere, in the moonlight. Just as Departure of the Ships presents its subject as universal rather than specific, so does Klee’s Romantic Park, an oil and watercolor that also captivated Warburg. This dreamlike compendium of jagged staircases, upside-down heads, and half-real, half-ornamental forms had also been painted the year before. In its complexity and the reading it invited, it reminded the young collector of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Klee’s imaginative, poetic way of seeing things was irresistible. Warburg acquired the pair for about $800 each.
For a recent college graduate, it was a daring act. People in his financial position might easily buy sports cars, or even paintings by the old masters, but canvases by Paul Klee were a gamble. The artist was delighted by his young client, but when Edward Warburg brought the paintings back to New York and showed them to his parents, he was informed that the only place they belonged in their neo-Renaissance mansion on upper Fifth Avenue was on the squash court. That is precisely where he hung them, converting the plain white space into an art gallery.
24
In August 1930, Lily was at another sanatorium, this time in Sonnmatt, near Lucerne. On his own, Klee went to Viareggio, a beach resort, where he was ecstatic. When he returned to the Bauhaus in September, however, the school’s problems were more troublesome than ever. Mies van der Rohe had replaced Hannes Meyer as director; Klee wondered how Mies would do, if he could avoid burning his wings in the tempestuous atmosphere of the school at a time when there were intense negotiations going on with the mayor.
With the directorship having changed hands, Klee wrote Lily that he was glad to be back at the school to give advice if Mies wanted it, even though she told him she thought he had returned for nothing. This time, rather than bemoan his obligations, Klee told his wife he did not consider it an inconvenience to help out, and that he believed he could still find time to paint.
In that same period, Klee wrote Felix that while the Jews were becoming more worried about the rise of antisemitism, no one should come to hasty conclusions. He assured his son that there were professional politicians who had too much sense to let persecution occur, and that if anything dire happened in Germany, France and England would intervene.
But he was not always blind to injustice when he knew the victims personally. The Bauhaus had expelled a number of students that fall because Mies did not approve of their political attitudes; Klee was appalled. When these students asked to show him their work outside of the school, he said he would review it with them privately, even while he remained a Bauhaus master. However naïve Klee was in clinging to his belief that Jews were safe from persecution, when he recognized unfairness, he took action.
FOR THE SAKE of his own stability, and because he did not believe that Mies could contend with the political pressures in Dessau, Klee resigned from the Bauhaus as planned in April 1931.
By then, he had been offered a part-time professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf. The new position allowed him to teach and get paid for it, with few of the demands and pressures he felt at the Bauhaus. Now that he had a sure market for his work, he calculated that if he had more time to paint, he might no longer need a teaching salary, but he had discovered at the Bauhaus how vital it was to have an exchange of ideas with students. He wanted to maintain that connection even if he no longer needed to teach for financial reasons.
The other surprise was that, although they had not wanted to move to Dessau originally, the Klees now preferred their house there to any other possible residence. Even after the Bauhaus moved to Berlin in 1932, they stayed on at Burgkuhnauer Allee. Klee could not find as good a living situation in Dusseldorf, and was willing to take the long train trip there and back so that he and Lily could continue to make their home in the house Gropius built for them.
In 1932, Felix, still at the Breslau Municipal Theater, met the Bulgarian singer Efrossina Gréschowa—called Phroska professionally—and married her. Lily was ecstatic, and Paul very pleased. For a brief time, all was going well. Klee recommended Jean Arp to succeed him at the Bauhaus, and although nothing came of it, the idea made
a lot of people happy. Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, meanwhile, began to resemble Klee’s to such a degree that Schlemmer thought Klee had painted them. Whether or not Klee was aware of the extent of the imitation on the part of a senior colleague he greatly admired, it was an indication of how much his own art was now revered.
25
In January and February 1933, Lily Klee was with Galka Scheyer in a sanatorium in the town of Braunlage, in the Harz Mountains. On March 17, shortly after she returned to Dessau, she and Klee were at home when Nazi Party storm troopers arrived. The police supervised the storm troopers as they rifled through Klee’s art and papers and the family’s possessions, searching everything, although what they hoped to find was unclear.
On April 1, the Klees moved to Dusseldorf. Three weeks later, Klee was suspended from the Dusseldorf Art Academy as part of a general putsch against modernism that also took the form of Gestapo investigations at the Berlin Bauhaus. The Nazis believed that most new art and architecture was counter to the interests of the German state. Klee spent two weeks packing up his studio, and the Klees moved back to Bern.
In Bern, the Klees first lived in two furnished rooms. Then, in June 1934, they found an apartment on the second floor of a three-family house in the suburbs. It was small and simple, but sufficient, with a music room, a room that could serve as a studio for Klee, a bedroom, a kitchen in an alcove—not nearly as nice as what they had had at the Bauhaus, but adequate for Klee to prepare his favorite recipes—and a bathroom. He and Lily were content that they had hot water and central heating.
This apartment had a view of the Alps. Lily Klee wrote Galka Scheyer that they were “like 2 happy children. … Somehow living with limitations makes one feel more fortunate.”248 However, having become a German citizen when he moved to Munich as a young man, Klee was unable to gain Swiss citizenship.
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