The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  In the limited time Kandinsky could devote to painting given his obligations as a law professor, he did his best to evoke those sights. But it would be a while before Kandinsky’s art could begin to live up to what he saw in his mind. “These impressions … were a delight that shook me to the depths of my soul, that raised me to ecstasy. And at the same time, they were a torment, since I was conscious of the weakness of art in general, and of my own abilities in particular, in the face of nature.”20 It would require him to have a totally different approach if his art was to match the forces inherent in the universe.

  Two decades later, Kandinsky would develop a form of painting that completely eliminated the idea of representing known sights. Abstraction “put an end to the useless torment of the useless tasks that I then, despite their unattainability, inwardly set myself. It cancelled out this torment, and thus my joy in nature and art rose to unclouded heights. … To my enjoyment is added a profound sense of gratitude.21 As the senior figure in Weimar and Dessau, he would invoke that redolent sense of gratitude and the specter of those “unclouded heights.”

  Such intense feelings had a hefty price. In his reminiscences about his craving to express his feelings through art, Kandinsky alludes to the inner turmoil that Will Grohmann considered the clue to his comportment at the Bauhaus. “My soul was kept in a state of constant vibration by other, purely human disturbances, to the extent that I never had an hour’s peace,” Kandinsky acknowledged. The slightest visual event triggered either overwhelming joy or intense anguish in him: “Everything ‘dead’ trembled. Everything showed me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, inclined more often to silence than to speech—not only the stars, moon, woods, flowers of which poets sing, but even a cigar butt lying in the ashtray, a patient white trouser-button looking up at you from a puddle on the street, a submissive piece of bark carried through the long grass in the ant’s strong jaws to some uncertain and vital end, the page of a calendar, torn forcibly by one’s consciously outstretched hand from the warm companionship of the block of remaining pages.”22

  IN THAT PERIOD in Moscow, even if Kandinsky did not feel entitled to devote his life to art and release that extraordinary responsiveness, to enjoy rather than repress his fiery nature, he was developing the sensibility that would determine his life’s course and become the substance of his Bauhaus teaching. “Every still and every moving part (= line) became for me just as alive and revealed to me its soul. This was enough for me to ‘comprehend,’ with my entire being and all my sense, the possibility and existence of that art which today is called ‘abstract,’ as opposed to ‘objective.’ “23

  In the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the young lawyer came to believe that “the great divisions of light and dark” in Rembrandt’s paintings resonated like “a mighty chord.”24 They evoked for him the trumpets in Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, a performance of which he attended at the Court Theatre. Listening to Wagner, Kandinsky envisioned the Moscow twilight as he wanted to paint it: “The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments … embodied for me all the power of that prenocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind, they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”25

  He still was not ready to let those forces determine his life’s course, but he recognized that his internal storm needed an outlet. “Even as a child, I had been tortured by joyous hours of inward tension that promised embodiment. Such hours filled me with inward tremors, indistinct longings that demanded something incomprehensible of me, stifling my heart by day and filling my soil with turmoil by night.”26

  Then Kandinsky experienced a powerful moment of relief from his suffering. He was in front of a Monet in a show of French impressionist painting in Moscow. Standing close to the canvas, he could not recognize its subject as a haystack, although the catalogue listed it as such. Initially, he “found this nonrecognition painful.” But then “I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture … gripped me.” He succumbed to “the unexpected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor.”27

  The law professor abruptly decided to start anew and to head to Munich to throw himself full-time into painting. “At the age of thirty, the thought overcame me: now or never. My gradual inner development, of which until now I had been unconscious, had progressed so far that I could sense my artistic powers with complete clarity, while inwardly I was sufficiently mature to realize with equal clarity that I had every right to be a painter.”28

  3

  Anja accompanied her husband to Munich in 1896, but she disliked the artistic life. She left Kandinsky in 1903, although they did not divorce until 1911 and always remained on perfectly civil terms. Kandinsky, meanwhile, began his new life. He studied art in a traditional academy, with the same Franz von Stuck who had taught Klee and would teach Josef Albers, and about whose teaching of figure drawing the three would commiserate at the Bauhaus. Kandinsky also studied art at the Munich Academy, but often cut class and worked at home or outdoors, painting with such intense colors that, over a quarter of a century later, when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and he needed to describe his credentials to the Municipal Council, he told the officials that he had been in deep trouble at the Munich Academy for being so “intoxicated by nature” that he tried to express “everything through color,” and that he failed a drawing test there.29 He believed that this conflict with the establishment in Munich a quarter century earlier was one of his main qualifications for teaching at the Bauhaus.

  Between those confrontations with the hidebound art establishment and his joining the Weimar Bauhaus in 1922, Kandinsky altered the course of world art. In 1901, he founded “the Phalanx,” an organization to advance new artistic methods that was named after a word invented by Homer for the battle line in ancient Greece, where heavily armed soldiers, working in unison, vanquish their enemy with heavy swords and twelve-foot-long pikes. The Phalanx showed work by Monet as well as other impressionists, while Kandinsky pushed his own work into a new realm by using tempera to create vibrant colors.

  Teaching a breakthrough approach to painting and drawing, the Russian led his students to Bavaria by bicycle and summoned them for critiques with a police whistle. In 1902, one of the students who cycled in agreeably when the whistle was blown was Gabriele Münter, a quiet and thoughtful twenty-five-year-old woman, of slight build and almost Japanese looks with her smooth dark hair and porcelain skin. The mutual attraction was immediate, and once Anja moved out, Kandinsky and Münter began to live together; they traveled to Venice in 1903, and, in the winter of 1904–5, to Tunis. Kandinsky returned to Odessa and Moscow on his own, but afterward he and Münter moved to Sèvres, near Paris, for a year, then for nearly another year to Berlin, before returning to Munich.

  In this period, during which Kandinsky became one of the principal painters in the the Blue Rider movement, his work went from animated woodcuts based on Russian folk art and fairy tales to landscape paintings in unprecedented combinations of saturated colors. Münter worked similarly: there are paintings from 1908 and 1909 where it is difficult to tell who painted which one. She had extraordinary natural gifts, and was one of those rare people who could spontaneously make dazzling art, almost primitive in its untutored freshness yet revealing complete competence, that evoked natural sights with unequivocal joy. Kandinsky learned an immense amount from her approach—more than he would ever acknowledge. At the Bauhaus, he would be with a woman who had no such artistic skill, who worshipped him giddily; it would be as if there was something intolerably threatening about having once been with a fellow artist who had direct access to her own brilliant instincts.

  MÜNTER AND KANDINSKY’S APARTMENT on Munich’s Ainmillerstrasse was two houses away from where the recently married Paul and Lily Klee were living. The moment that Klee and Kandinsky met, they enjoyed a remarkable rapport. Each was delighted to meet another person who cared
so deeply about making art, and who was so bent on exploring new means to imbue that art with vitality. The rare sense of comfort and pleasure Kandinsky experienced with Klee, in spite of Klee’s apparent remoteness, would over a decade later be a lure to the Bauhaus.

  There were halcyon evenings when Kandinsky and Münter would go over to the Klees’ to hear Paul and Lily perform violin and piano duets. Kandinsky adored little Felix, who, starting at the age of two, in 1909, would spend time in the Russian’s studio when his parents were busy. Felix Klee would never forget Kandinsky’s and Münter’s apartment, which was larger and more elegant than his parents’ and distinguished by its white doors.

  Once they were based in Munich, Kandinsky and Münter spent their summers in the Bavarian Alps, in the picturesque country town of Murnau, where Münter bought a house in 1909 (see color plate 7). There, Münter’s natural skill as a painter became all the more evident. Her exuberant renditions of idyllic life in the countryside seemed effortless, spontaneously evoking the sweet local church, apple trees bursting with fruit, and farmhouses bathed in summer sunlight. Kandinsky was more of a struggler, perpetually intellectualizing and pushing himself to the next step, although he benefited immensely from his exposure to Münter’s forthright style. Kandinsky and Münter were both affected by the hinterglasmalerei—small folk art pictures with the images painted on the reverse side of glass—that they collected together. With their simplified forms and vibrant colors, these anonymous works had a charm and an immediacy that both painters sought to retain in their more sophisticated work.

  But the Russian could not stop his inner wheels from turning. By 1910, he was determined to explode the boundaries of painting. He started to improvise compositions that convey sheer energy. Their charged, dark lines of scant representational value, and their sequences of fantastic yellow, red, indigo, and mauve biomorphic forms, pulse in deliberate dissonance. With these paintings simply named Composition or Improvisation, Kandinsky unleashed a way of painting that was unlike anything that anyone else had ever done or even considered.

  While Kandinsky’s fellow Blue Rider artists—Auguste Macke, Franz Marc, and Klee—adhered to figurativism, they admired his independence as well as the consuming zeal with which he approached the task of painting. As Grohmann observed, “Kandinsky himself was a very unusual, original type, uncommonly stimulating to every artist who came in contact with him. There was something uniquely mystical, highly imaginative about him, linked with rare pathos and dogmatism.”30 It was impossible not to respond to him and his work.

  4

  In 1910, Kandinsky painted a watercolor that went one step further than his previous work by eliminating any reference whatsoever to known subject matter. This is possibly the first entirely abstract painting—as opposed to objects with abstract decoration—by anyone, ever. That same year, he wrote On the Spiritual in Art. This book, which declared painting “a spiritual act,” embraced the supernatural and irrational as valid components of art.31 In advocating what was sensory and intuitive and opposing materialism, On the Spiritual in Art liberated many readers; following its initial publication at Christmastime of 1911, it went through two more printings within a year.

  Observing Kandinsky firsthand, Grohmann had the opinion that the artist’s beliefs derived directly from his own mental state.

  According to all who knew him, his was a complex mind, given to violent contrasts, and his deep-rooted mistrust of rationalism drove him in the direction of the irrational, that which is not logically graspable. We know that he suffered from periodic states of depression, imagining that he was a victim of persecution, and that he had to run away. He felt that part of his being was closely tied to the invisible; life here and now and in the hereafter, the outer world and the inner soul, did not seem to him opposed.32

  Although the stated goals of the Bauhaus stressed the practicality of objects and the utilization of modern technology for aesthetically worthy results, Kandinsky’s presence there would cause many people to explore mystical realms and to accept the inevitability of neuroses as an aspect of creativity. Kandinsky declared his purpose to be the creation of “purely pictorial beings” with their own souls and religious spirit. He believed that such art would have major ramifications. At the same time that he bravely accepted the reality of the mind’s tortures, Kandinsky had “an absolute faith in the onset of a new era, in which the spirit will move mountains” and in which painting would defeat materialism “by asserting the primacy of inner values, and by directly appealing to what is good in man.”33

  In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky conceives of a “spiritual triangle” divided into three tiers, with atheists in the lower segment, and, in the layers above, “positivists, naturalists, men of science, and art students.” This middle category does not have an easy time; “they are dominated by fear,” for they grapple with “the inexplicable” while remaining unable to accept it, and thus suffer great “confusion.” He writes of the plight of these people as if he were narrating the plight of the damned at the Last Judgment: “The abandoned churchyard quakes, the forgotten grave yawns open. … All the artificially contrived suns have exploded into so many specks of dust.”34

  Denizens of this middle tier suffer from their illusion that it is possible to create or live in an “impregnable fortress.” The occupants of the highest realms of Kandinsky’s triangle recognize the fallacy of that assumption. Among this select group of “seers” and “prophets,” creative geniuses who have entered the realm of “light” and “the spiritual,” Kandinsky names Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, explaining how each eschewed superficial beauty in preference for a true representation of “inner life” as well as “the divine.”35

  Kandinsky considered music the ultimate art form, which is why he included more composers than painters in his pantheon. But he attributes to color some of the same transformative effects he cherishes in music. To chart the process of the impact of color on the viewer, he draws an analogy to the workings of a piano: “Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings.”36

  THESE IDEAS that Kandinsky developed in a phenomenal burst of energy in 1910–11 would underlie his teaching and his comportment more than a decade later in Weimar and Dessau. “My personal qualities consist in the ability to make the inner element sound forth more strongly by limiting the external. Conciseness is my favorite device. … Conciseness demands the imprecise.” For Klee and Gropius, but also for the Bauhaus population at large, he was an exemplar of the idea that the most mysterious people are often the most restrained in demeanor; in his case, the veneer and carefully controlled behavior were deliberate. “I have an explicit dislike for ‘shoving things under people’s noses,’” he wrote. Kandinsky abhorred those people who, “like street vendors, proclaim their excellence in loud tones to the entire marketplace.”37

  In his art, though, he had no inhibitions. There was nothing boastful or immodest about his work; it openly soared with a feeling of liberation. Between 1911 and 1914, Kandinsky made paintings of stupendous physical and emotional charge. These extraordinary artworks are paeans to energy, to the power of line and color to evoke spiritual and physical force.

  EVERYTHING CHANGED with the onset of world war. It wasn’t until Kandinsky went to the Bauhaus eight years later that he regained the strength of his fertile prewar period.

  On August 3, 1914, Kandinsky, who as a Russian could not remain in Germany, went to Switzerland. He felt no need to go as far as Russia, because he thought the war would not last. Münter had stayed behind; on his own, he went from one friend’s house to another, waiting out the situation. In September he was in the village of Goldach, on the Bodensee.

  In that tense time period, the Klees came to visit, both to offer Kandinsky some companionship in his solitude and to enjoy the beautiful mountain lake themselves. The friend’s villa where they all were staying wa
s in a small park, where Felix, now seven years old, liked to play.

  After the Klee family had been there for a couple of days, Felix was running around in the park when he came upon a toolshed he had not seen before. He could hardly wait to explore it, and was about to open the door when he heard unexpected sounds coming from inside. Felix, whose imagination was not unlike his father’s, pictured ghosts. He quickly bolted the door to keep them from escaping the shed and attacking him. Then he ran off in terror. But he did not tell anyone about his moment outside what he considered a haunted house.

  Felix had his dinner earlier than the adults, then went to bed. Later in the evening, when everyone else was summoned to the dining room, Kandinsky failed to appear. The host and Paul and Lily Klee went to search for him, assuming he was outside painting or enjoying the evening air and was out of earshot. He was nowhere to be found.

  Just as darkness was setting in, the search party spotted a white tissue waving from an upper window of the toolshed. Felix had locked Kandinsky into his improvised studio.

  Years later, at the Bauhaus, the Klees and Kandinsky would roar with laughter at the memory of that event. Given all that had happened since, it was nice to have such an lighthearted problem to think back on. It wasn’t long after that summer in Switzerland that Kandinsky realized that the conflict sweeping through Europe wasn’t going to end quickly, and that, as a Russian, not only was he unable to return to Germany, but he could not even remain in neutral Switzerland. In mid-November, he left Zurich to go via the Balkans to Odessa, where he arrived on December 12. He then traveled on to Moscow, arriving there on December 22.

  Münter continued to stay in Munich. They got together in Stockholm, where they both had exhibitions at the start of 1916, but shortly after the opening of Münter’s show there, Kandinsky returned to Moscow. They never saw each other again.