TO HIS PARENTS’ DISMAY, Felix Klee remained in Germany. He and Phroska were beginning to enjoy successful careers onstage, and Felix did not want to give them up, even if in order to succeed in the German theater he had to denounce his father.
The Third Reich considered Klee’s work a travesty. “The Nazis sequestered 102 Klees in German museums” in 1937, and included 17 Klees in the famous “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in Munich.249 In the catalogue, the exhibition organizers compared Klee’s paintings “to work produced by schizophrenic inpatients” and declared it to be evidence of “confusion of a psychological instable character.”250 Felix still did not leave Germany or protest the official verdict.
IN 1934, KLEE HAD CONTRACTED MEASLES. As a result, he developed scleroderma, a disease of the mucous membrane, which slowly began to kill him. It did not, however, prevent him from producing an extraordinary body of late work, with the themes of war and death now replacing birth and the splendors of nature as the dominant subject matter.
On hearing the news that Klee had died in July 1940, less than a year after his sixtieth birthday, his old Bauhaus colleague Oskar Schlemmer wrote in his diary, “What a visual and spiritual combination he made to the world of the artist. And what wisdom!”251 Schlemmer then pondered the question of what this would mean for the fate of abstract art in general—especially given how inhospitable much of Europe was becoming to modernism. Schlemmer wondered if, with Klee gone, the movement would have leaders and find refuge.
FOUR MONTHS AFTER KLEE’S DEATH, the American magazine Time, which represented mainstream thought in the United States, published an article, “Fish of the Heart,” in which the artist’s work was characterized as “little childlike scrawls” and “artistic babbling and cooing.” The unsigned critique opined: “In this world of screwball art the most consistently screwy was Paul Klee’s. An absolute individualist, whose work resembled nobody else’s, Klee painted ‘animals of the soul, birds of the intellect, fish of the heart, plants of the dream.’ ”252
The article informed its readers that “Walter Gropius invited Klee to teach drawing at his famous Bauhaus technical art school in Weimar.” Collectors began acquiring “his infantile drawings” and “U.S. modern art connoisseurs bought his ectoplasmic scratchings at $750 a canvas.”253 This was a direct reference to the canvases Edward Warburg had bought, although it erroneously reduced their prices by $50 apiece.
The article in Time was in effect a report on the paintings in two shows in private New York galleries—Willard and Buchholz—that had been organized following Klee’s death. The magazine described the work and its maker. “All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before. It was also posthumous in another sense. To the red-cheeked, goose-stepping Nazis who after 1933 scrubbed individualism from Germany’s art galleries, Paul Klee has been the most degenerate of degenerate artists. Some day history will have to decide whether Hitler was right—about Artist Klee.”254
Wassily Kandinsky
1
Shortly after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Wassily Kandinsky wrote a letter to Lily Klee. This was in the period when Lily preferred to remain in the pleasant apartment in Weimar rather than move to temporary digs near the school’s new location.
Lily had given Kandinsky some polenta. Addressing her with a Russianized version of her name, he wrote,
Dear Elisaveta Ludwigovna,
For years I have wanted to eat polenta—so you will easily understand what pleasure you have given me. My heartfelt thanks. For me polenta is a synaesthetic delight, for in some strange way, it stimulates three senses perfectly harmoniously: first the eye perceives that wonderful yellow, then the nose savors an aroma that definitely includes the yellow within itself, at last the palate relishes a flavor which unites the color and the aroma. Then there are further “associations”—for the fingers (mental fingers) polenta has a deep softness (there are also things which have a shallow softness!) and finally for the ear—the middle range of the flute. A gentle sound, subdued but energetic …
And the polenta which you served me had pink tones in its yellow color … definitely flute!
Kind regards to you, dear Pavel Ivanovitch, and dear Felix Pavlovitch, with best wishes for you all,
Yours,
Kandinsky1
Kandinsky’s paintings of the period have elements of the marvelous Italian cornmeal. The word “synaesthetic” was key; the Russian invented it to describe the commingling of the various senses that was one of his artistic goals. The soft explosions of polenta cooking, the repetitive popping noise, conjured a realm that increasingly obsessed him: the sonic effects of visual experience. Beyond that, the abstract forms that appear to be in continuous motion—growing, bursting, and condensing—are like polenta when it is being cooked, with the delicate grains absorbing water and air and transmogrifying. Inevitably, too, Kandinsky’s oils and watercolors have a sphere of the same vibrant yellow that the painter admired in the cornmeal, which evokes a spiritual force.
Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, 1906. The year before Münter painted this, Kandinsky had started to live with her in Munich, where he had gone from Russia after practicing law in Moscow. He went to Germany to devote himself to art full-time.
The smells and tastes of food were less directly connected to Kandinsky’s art, but his alertness to their subtle unfolding in the polenta reflects his priorities. Sharp observation of everyday experience was fundamental. A keen appreciation for the processes perpetually occurring in the kitchen, the human body, and the wooded parks where he and Klee and Albers took their daily walks, governed his life. What was essential was to stop and look. In his pervading appreciation of existence and his overwhelming desire both to celebrate and to add to the world’s store of beauty, he was possessed by a determination to make the most of every source of wonder; he would rest only in order to gain strength for action.
THOSE SAME DESIRES ruled the lives of several of his colleagues, but Kandinsky was distinguished among them in bringing to the mix “the Russian soul.” He had the particular intensity that fired Pushkin and Tolstoy, that permeates the chants of the steppes and the icons of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that has characterized an entire people through all the transformations of their nation. Will Grohmann, who observed Kandinsky firsthand at the Bauhaus, writes, “His uncompromising attitude to life and art, his faith in the unconquerability of the human spirit, came with him from Russia.”2 Although Kandinsky spent most of his life in Germany and Paris, he not only retained his fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity, remained immersed in Slavic literature and music, and continued to speak his native language with his wife; he also guarded his secrets, and relished a sense of inexplicable mysteries.
Of the Russian types, he was a nobleman out of Turgenev. He looked every bit the aristocrat, and struck people “as more like a diplomat or a widely traveled scholar than as an artist.3 While Johannes Itten wore his outlandish costumes and the Bauhaus students flaunted their bohemianism, Kandinsky dressed with meticulous elegance. This was true not just in society but also when he painted. Unleashing his furies as he brazenly applied vivid pigments to canvas, he wore, at his most casual, a bow tie and jacket. “I could paint in a dinner jacket,” he once quipped.4 But Kandinsky was marked by correctness and reserve rather than dandyism. In his appearance and demeanor, he had no wish to attract attention; he “spoke quietly and attentively, and was never wounding. He behaved impeccably even in painful situations.”5 He had genuine style; he was not a showman.
His propriety teetered at the edge of aloofness. For his students and colleagues, there was always the sense that Kandinsky, however amiable and cheerful he might appear, had some very private issues he was deliberately keeping from view. He was older than everyone else by at least a decade, but it wasn’t just age that kept him apart. What was that veneer meant to guard? Grohmann thinks it was masking an ove
rriding instability. “The more Kandinsky became aware of his psychic constitution, the more he developed a capacity to control himself …to save face.” Kandinsky was so eager to conceal the vagaries of his mind that he preferred “chance acquaintances to half friendships.”6 The person at the Bauhaus to whom he was closest was Klee; this suited him in part because Klee, too, eschewed intimacy. It was like befriending a flock of birds or an image of St. Christopher—highly rewarding, but without threat to the privacy Kandinsky guarded so carefully.
KANDINSKY’S FACE rarely came into focus behind the cloud of smoke from the cigarettes he puffed all day long. The screening served him well. By the time he was at the Bauhaus, he had effectively excised from his story the woman who had been his truest partner, the brilliant painter Gabriele Münter; all that one could glean about Münter from the elusive Kandinsky was that, in her bitterness over his having left her and, shortly thereafter, taken up with the young playgirl who was now his wife, she had refused to return a lot of the art he had left in her care a decade earlier.
But even if Kandinsky would not discuss the details of his past, students and teachers of every level and a range of styles admired him immensely. He was the voice of reason in Bauhaus disputes, where his ability to keep his personal reactions hidden set him apart, and he was respected for his balanced perspective on complex issues. While establishing careful perimeters around his private self, he was open to infinite approaches in most matters. Anni Albers recalled, with a broad smile, “Kandinsky often said, ‘There is always an and.’ “Grohmann refers to Kandinsky’s wish “to express mystery in terms of mystery.”7 There were layers beyond and beneath the layers; that complexity inspired extraordinary thinking and completely original art.
2
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, on December 4, 1866—in the same decade that Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment were published, and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov was first performed. His earliest memories consisted of shapes and colors of the sort that would eventually become the substance of his art. When he was three years old, the family’s coachman would strip spirals of bark from thin branches, “cutting away both layers of bark from the first spiral, and from the second only the top layer.” Little Wassily saw the forms as abstracted horses, with the outer bark a “brownish yellow … which I disliked, and would gladly have seen replaced,” and the second layer a “juicy green … which I loved most particularly and which, even in a withered state, still had something magical about it.” The wood of the now-naked branch was “ivory-white … which smelled damp, tempting one to lick it, but soon withered miserably and dried, so that my pleasure in this white was spoiled from the outset.”8 Colors would induce intense emotions in him for the rest of his life.
Bright hues made him rapturous; black induced fear. At age three, he also went to Italy with his parents and his Russian governess, and retained an impression of a frightening black carriage in which he and his mother crossed a bridge over “dirty yellow” water in Florence when he was on his way to kindergarten. Even more terrifying were “steps leading down into black water, on which floats a frightening, long, black boat with a black box in the middle. … I … bawled my head off.”9
When Wassily was five, his family moved to Odessa, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He had not been there long when he painted a water-color of a horse. His aunt—his mother’s older sister, Elizaveta Ivanovna Tikheeva, who lived in the house and helped him with his art—had asked him to hold off doing the hooves until she was there to advise him. Initially, the boy was content to comply. Then, suddenly, he couldn’t wait a moment longer.
He loaded his brush with black paint and globbed it onto the bottoms of the horse’s legs. “I thought, if I make the hooves really black, they are bound to be completely true to life. I put as much black on my brush as it would hold. An instant—and I was looking at four black, disgusting, ugly spots, quite foreign to the paper, on the feet of the horse. I was in despair and felt cruelly punished.” The repulsion fascinated him. “Later, the prospect of putting black on the canvas would still put the fear of God into me,” he said.10 That fear carried an excitement. In the night scenes and landscapes he would start making when he was in his twenties, and in the abstractions he crafted at the Bauhaus, he would often slather black on—perhaps deliberately to conjure what was disturbing, or else because he relished a certain victory in having overcome his fear of it. In the house in Dessau where the Klees occupied the other half, he and his young Russian wife painted a wall of their dining room pure, unadulterated black.
IN A PORTRAIT PAINTED in Rome, Kandinsky’s mother, Lidia Ivanovna Tikheeva, has a majestic stare. Her face is perfectly proportioned, with aquiline nose and rosebud lips framed by a complex chignon, and her gown and jewelry are splendid. “Characterized by inexhaustible energy and marked nervousness,” Lidia was a force to reckon with.11 Wassily, however, did not have to deal with her most of the time, because when he was a small boy she divorced his father, who was left to bring him up. In a memoir he wrote in 1913, Wassily Vasilevic Kandinsky portrays his father as “a deeply human and loving soul.”12 Wassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant, fostered his son’s interest in making art. He hired a private drawing tutor for young Wassily and let him, at age ten, choose between a school that emphasized the humanities and one that focused on science. When Wassily picked the former, his father was delighted.
Wassily’s maternal grandmother, a Balt who spoke German, and Elizaveta Ivanovna indulged him in Lidia Ivanovna’s absence. The boy had a penchant for a horseracing game and loved being read fairy tales—mostly in German, his first language. It was a magical childhood, except when he suffered from “inward trembling” and terrifying dreams. To escape, and go “beyond space and time”—his words—he latched on to drawing as the sole solution.13 Like the young Paul Klee, he made pictures as instinctively as he breathed and ate.
At age thirteen, Wassily bought a paint box with money he had saved up from his allowance. He later described the sensation of the pigments being extruded from their tubes: “One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings … which one calls colors—exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness and devotion, with obstinate self-control, with sensitive, precarious balance.”14 He “longed to be a painter” and “loved art above all else.” Yet when Kandinsky left Odessa at age nineteen for the University of Moscow, he decided that “art was an unallowable extravagance for a Russian.”15 He studied economics and law, even though he painted in his free time. The “intricate, conscious, refined ‘construction’” of Roman law “enchanted” him, but left him unsatisfied “as a Slav because of its far too cold, far too rational, inflexible logic.”16 He turned to the old peasant code in Russian law, which was unusual for its flexibility and the way it treated the same crimes differently according to a measurement of the good or evil at their root. This less rigid approach fascinated him, and when Kandinsky was twenty-three, it inspired him to go on a trip to Vologda, a northern province full of monasteries and medieval towns, so he could write a report on peasant laws and paganism in the Syryenian tribes.
The journey was funded by the Society for Natural Science, Ethnography, and Anthropology. Kandinsky traveled from village to village studying folk art and sketching peasant architecture and people dressed in traditional costumes. Visiting the colorfully carved houses with profusely ornamented furniture and icons, and traveling through the woods, marshes, and sandy desert, he felt as if he were “living inside of pictures.”17
Kandinsky’s report was published, and he had the rare distinction of being elected a member of the society. In 1892, now twenty-six, he passed his law exam and married a cousin, Anja Shemyakina, one of the few female students at the University of Moscow. The following year, a paper he wrote on the laws concerning
workers’ wages won him an appointment as instructor at the university.
What Wassily Vasilevic Kandinsky desperately desired, however, was to paint “the most beautiful hour of the Moscow day. …To paint this hour, I thought, must be for an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy.” He was fixed on the moment when the sun is “getting low and has attained its full intensity which it has been seeking all day, for which it has striven all day.” That craving to make paintings of comparable force would eventually provide the basis of his teaching at the Bauhaus. “The sunlight grows red with effort, redder and redder, cold at first, and then increasing in warmth. The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s soul vibrating.”18
In Kandinsky’s mind, there was not just “always an and;” there was often a however.
No, this red fusion is not the most beautiful hour! It is only the final chord of the symphony, which brings every color vividly to life, which allows and forces the whole of Moscow to resound like the fff of a giant orchestra. Pink, lilac, yellow, white, blue, pistachio green, flame red houses, churches, each an independent song—the garish green of the grass, the deeper tremolo of the trees, the singing snow with its thousand voices, or the allegretto of the bare branches, the red, still, silent ring of the Kremlin walls, and above, towering over everything, like a shout of triumph, like a self-oblivious hallelujah, the long, white, graceful, serious line of the bell Tower of Ivan the Great.19
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