The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The murals were never installed in Berlin. If they had been, painting would have served architecture as Gropius had intended, consistent with the Bauhaus’s mission of providing the broader public with a new way of seeing.

  7

  Wassily Kandinsky’s revolutionary abstractions were not to everybody’s taste. What was supported at the Bauhaus and admired by most of the students and his fellow faculty members was, predictably, disliked by the majority of unsophisticated viewers; beyond that, it attracted the ire of many of the so-called cognoscenti. Kandinsky was criticized vociferously in the art press. Many people did not even try to understand his work; others felt that they knew exactly what the artist was up to, and that he was coldly didactic. The critic Paul Westheim accused Kandinsky’s geometric work of “fossilization and intellectual frigidity.” The artist’s rebuttal was as close to self-revelation as he got: “Sometimes there is boiling water flowing beneath the ice.”50

  This attack spurred him to forge ahead in his campaign to prove that what seems rigid can pulse with life. Kandinsky devised a questionnaire, which the wall-painting workshop distributed to everyone at the Bauhaus. It had straightforward line drawings of a circle, a triangle, and a square. The instructions were for each participant to indicate his or her profession, sex, and nationality, but not name, and then to assign a color—red, yellow, or blue—to each shape, filling it accordingly and, “if possible,” writing an explanation for the choice.

  Most people, by a considerable margin, came up with the same response. The circle was blue, the triangle yellow, and the square red (see color plate 8). Those results satisfied Kandinsky immensely, for they concurred with his premise that “the circle is cosmic, absorbent, feminine, soft; the square is active, masculine”—and the triangle, with its acute angles, intrinsically yellow.51

  Oskar Schlemmer was among the opinionated minority that disagreed.

  For him, the circle was red: the red of a setting sun, an apple, or the surface of red wine contained in a glass or bottle. The square, being a man-made concept not found in nature, was blue, which for Schlemmer was the metaphysical color. The yellowness of the triangle, however, was beyond dispute.

  Wassily Kandinsky, questionnaire from the wall-painting workshop, filled out by Alfred Arndt, 1923. Kandinsky wrote a questionnaire asking everyone at the Bauhaus to assign colors to shapes.

  Schlemmer’s views, however, had no impact on Kandinsky; nor did any other opinion that contradicted his precept. Kandinsky was completely dogmatic about the issue. He insisted that all curved lines, as parts of circles, should be made blue, all straight lines red, and all points yellow.

  People reacted differently to the absoluteness of his stance. Most of the students accepted Kandinsky’s system as gospel; they seemed unable to question the merits of a viewpoint he extolled so emphatically. Schlemmer, who was perturbed by the intractability with which Kandinsky insisted on conclusions of dubious value, was even more upset by the students’ submissiveness than he was by his colleague’s rigidity.

  While Kandinsky could be as haughty as a tsarist nobleman commanding his troika, his arrogance was subtle, which is one of the reasons the students readily submitted to his views. He simply believed without question in his own rightness. He was all the more effective, because, as bold and exuberant as his art was, when he spoke as well as when he wrote, he demonstrated utmost reserve. He was too certain of his “truths” to have to shout.

  Kandinsky was responding to sensations that he felt came to him directly from realms far beyond the sphere of what is explicable; he succumbed to the dictates of his own soul and of color and music, all intertwined. The resultant confidence and lack of doubt convinced many people, even as it distressed Schlemmer.

  KANDINSKY’S SELF-ASSUREDNESS could reach a disastrous level. This was the case in his relationship with Arnold Schoenberg.

  Two months after he arrived at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky wrote Schoenberg that he felt as if he had “experienced centuries” since seeing the Viennese composer and his family in Bavaria in the summer of 1914. He explained that for his seven years in Russia he had been “completely cut off from the whole world” with “no idea of what was taking place here in the West,” and that in Berlin he had initially been too overwhelmed to look up old acquaintances: “I came with mouth wide open and gulped and gulped.”52 But now that he was at the Bauhaus, he was eager to renew their connection.

  To the extent that friendship was possible for someone as reserved as Kandinsky, he and Schoenberg were friends, as well as mutual admirers with many interests in common. Kandinsky had been the one to initiate the relationship when, in 1911, having attended a Schoenberg concert, he wrote the composer to say that Schoenberg’s work “realized” what he had “so greatly longed for. … The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I try to find in my paintings.”53 Kandinsky accompanied the letter with a portfolio of woodcuts as well as photographs of his recent work.

  Even before they met, Kandinsky assured Schoenberg that “today’s dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of tomorrow.”54 But he also let the composer know that he could not understand the last two sentences of the concert program—even after reading them repeatedly.

  Schoenberg, eight years Kandinsky’s junior, replied warmly. He knew that there was “no question of my work winning over the masses;” therefore he was especially pleased to have moved “those really worthwhile individuals who alone matter to me.” He thanked Kandinsky profusely for the woodcuts, writing:

  I like the portfolio very much indeed. I understand it completely, and I am sure that our work has much in common—in what you call the “unlogical” and I call the “elimination of the conscious will in art” … One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill. Not all of these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive.

  As for the sentences Kandinsky had not understood, Schoenberg explained that they had been added by the concert agency without his knowledge, and thus fell into the category of “unwanted and distasteful” advertising.55

  What had been a conversational risk on Kandinsky’s part therefore strengthened their rapport.

  An intense correspondence ensued, each man extolling the merits of the other’s work; that April, Kandinsky sent Schoenberg a photo of himself, requesting one of the composer in return. In late summer of 1911, they finally met, on a lake steamer, near Murnau, Kandinsky in short lederhosen, Schoenberg all in white. That same year, Schoenberg published his groundbreaking Theory of Harmony and Kandinsky published On the Spiritual in Art.

  Now, more than a decade later, when Kandinsky was in touch from Weimar, Schoenberg responded first by reiterating to Kandinsky why he considered On the Spiritual in Art such a seminal work. The composer also wrote a lot about his son, Georg. Georg was showing great prowess at football, and Schoenberg felt close enough to Kandinsky to want the painter to know how proud that made him.

  In the letters that Kandinsky and Schoenberg continued to exchange throughout the painter’s first year in Weimar, Kandinsky allowed that his administrative tasks made it hard to concentrate on his work. “I can never accomplish half of what I would like to,” he complained to his old friend.56

  IN THE SPRING OF 1923, Kandinsky had the idea that Schoenberg should become the director of the Weimar Musikhochschule. On April 15, he wrote that if Schoenberg had an interest in the post, he would “set to work with a will.” Schoenberg responded by return mail. A year before, he would “have plunged headlong into the adventure” and would have given up the idea of being able to compose and do nothing else. The idea of the teaching post was a great temptation, “so great is my taste for teaching, so easily is my enthusiasm still inflamed. But it cannot be.”57

  The reason Schoenberg could no longer entertain the idea was that in the past year
he had learned a lesson he would never forget. “It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew.”58 He blamed Kandinsky for this brutal new awareness of antisemitism.

  On the issue of being Jewish, Schoenberg continued: “I am content that it should be so!” He did not mind being “lumped together with all the rest,” even though, he let Kandinsky know, “I have heard that even a Kandinsky sees only evil in the action of Jews and in their evil actions only the Jewishness.” Schoenberg informed Kandinsky he had given up hoping to achieve “any understanding. It was a dream. We are two kinds of people. Definitively!”59

  The person who had apprised Schoenberg that Kandinsky had made anti-semitic remarks was probably Alma Gropius. She was especially alert to the issue since Franz Werfel and Gustav Mahler were Jewish, although the latter had converted to Christianity. Schoenberg had also converted, two years prior to this exchange of letters, but recognized that his religious choice made no difference whatsoever in the face of the prejudice that was mounting all around him.

  A citizens’ committee had recently faulted the Bauhaus for “harboring ‘elements of alien lineage.’ ”60 To determine whether or not this was so, an official state inquiry had calculated the percentage of Jews at the school. The census revealed that of the two hundred students, there were only seventeen Jews. Most people were simply relieved, but Schoenberg was appalled that anyone had either wanted or conducted this research. He believed Kandinsky was among those who had supported this distinction between Jews and non-Jews.

  KANDINSKY QUICKLY ANSWERED Schoenberg’s letter. His first reaction was irritation at the unnamed person who had poisoned their relationship. The next was a classic “Some of my best friends are Jews” remark. He assured Schoen-berg that he had had a Jewish friend for forty years, ever since grammar school, and they would be friends to death; in fact he had as true friends “more Jews than Russians or Germans.”61

  Kandinsky went on to discuss what he termed “the ‘Jewish problem.’ Since every nation has particular characteristics which can move in a particular orbit, there are sometimes, in addition to ‘possessed’ human beings, ‘possessed’ nations. … Surely you understand me?” However, Kandinsky pointed out, neither he nor Schoenberg conformed to the stereotypes. Yet while each of them was proof that the generalizations were not always valid, he advised Schoenberg that “one can at least reflect on one’s nation coldbloodedly, or with pain, but always objectively, and examine its innate qualities.”62

  Kandinsky also emphasized to Schoenberg how annoyed he was that the composer had not written him “at once” upon hearing the remarks Kandinsky had made; he should have voiced his objections right away. But Kandinsky did not deny, or apologize for, what he had purportedly said. Digging himself in deeper, Kandinsky wrote, “I reject you as a Jew, but nevertheless I write you a good letter and assure you that I would be so glad to have you here in order to work together!”63

  THIS TIME, Schoenberg did not answer by return mail. After a week had passed, he wrote Kandinsky a response of many pages. It begins, “When I walk along the street and each person looks at me to see whether I’m a Jew or a Christian, I can’t very well tell each of them that I’m the one that Kandinsky and some others make an exception of, although of course that man Hitler is not of their opinion.” He goes on to point out that even if he wrote that information on a piece of cardboard and hung it around his neck, it would do him no good. The previous summer, Schoenberg had been working in Mattsee, a resort near Salzburg, and had to leave after learning that Jews were unwelcome. He quipped to his old friend, “Must not a Kandinsky have an inkling of what really happened when I had to break off my first working summer for 5 years, leave the place I had sought out for peace to work in, and afterwards couldn’t regain the peace of mind to work at all.”64

  Schoenberg couldn’t believe that Kandinsky had so much in common with the people who railroaded him out of Mattsee. He responded to Kandinsky’s “one’s nation” commentary by asking why, when Jews are compared to “black-marketers,” Aryans are not similarly equated with “their worst elements”—and are, instead, put in the category of Goethe and Schopenhauer.

  What every Jew reveals by his hooked nose is not only his own guilt but also that of all those with hooked noses who don’t happen to be there too. But if a hundred Aryan criminals are all together, all that anyone will be able to read from their noses is their taste for alcohol, while for the rest they will be considered respectable people.

  And you join in that sort of thing and “reject me as a Jew.” …Do you think that a man who knows his own value grants anyone the right to criticize even his most trivial qualities? … How can a Kandinsky approve of my being insulted; how can he associate himself with politics that aim at bringing about the possibility of excluding me from my natural sphere of action; how can he refrain from combating a view of the world whose aim is St. Bartholomew’s nights in the darkness of which no one will be able to read the little placard saying that I’m exempt!65

  Schoenberg proposes that a bad Jew should be seen as the exception, not the norm. After all, among his pupils, the Aryans had had cushy jobs during the recent war while most of the Jews had done active duty and been wounded. Schoenberg asks Kandinsky, “Are all Jews communists?” and then reminds the painter that of course this is not the case. Schoenberg himself loathed Trotsky and Lenin—and separated himself from the Communists as from the Elders of Zion.

  The point was essential because he believed, to his horror, that because he had been born Jewish, Kandinsky instantly associated him with both groups. “You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I and many others, will have been got rid of. But one thing is certain: they will not be able to exterminate those much tougher elements thanks to whose endurance Jewry has maintained itself unaided against the whole of mankind for 20 centuries.” Horribly prophetic in his use of the word “exterminate”—this was only 1923—Schoenberg’s only error was in underestimating the future slaughter. For he believed that the Jewish people were “so constituted that they can accomplish the task their God has imposed on them: To survive in exile, uncorrupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!”66

  In spite of his rage, Schoenberg believed that there was an old, better Kandinsky. The person he had in mind was different from the one in his “new guise. Kandinsky is still there … I have not lost the respect for him I once had. … If you would take it on yourself to convey greetings from me to my former friend Kandinsky, I should very much wish to charge you with some of my very warmest.”67 But now that Kandinsky had disparaged Jews, he seriously doubted that they would ever see each other again.

  KANDINSKY WAS SO UPSET about Schoenberg’s letter that he showed it to Walter Gropius. Nina Kandinsky would later recall, “Gropius turned pale and said spontaneously: ‘That is Alma’s doing.’ “68 But Nina’s accounts of history often served her own purposes, with little regard for accuracy, and even if it had been Alma who initially told Schoenberg that Kandinsky had made antisemitic remarks, and possibly had invented or exaggerated them, Alma had not written Schoenberg the letter that gives stronger evidence of Kandinsky’s attitudes than anything Alma could have transmitted. In what he wrote the Jewish composer, Kandinsky revealed not just what he felt, but also the coldness and insensitivity with which he said it.

  Alma continued to characterize Kandinsky as an antisemite, but what is unclear is whether this was a case of her falsely maligning him or was something more valid. In 1924, the year after the rupture with Schoenberg, Kandinsky gave a lecture in Vienna, where he and Nina had been invited “to stay with a bank director.”69 Nina, writing in her autobiography about what happened subsequently, does not identify the man as Jewish—presumably because she assumed that his being “a bank director” indicated as much—but goes on to report that a friend, Fannina Halle, met them a
t the train station and said that they were staying with her instead. Halle explained that Alma Mahler had told everyone that Kandinsky was anti-semitic and therefore could not stay with his original host.

  Nina’s story, however, is full of holes. Fannina Halle was also Jewish, and the bank director’s wife still hosted a dinner for them. All of this was according to Nina herself. She gloats in adding that Alma and Franz Werfel were at that dinner and that, while Alma wanted to sit next to Kandinsky, he refused, accusing her of doing him harm, and so he ended up between Fannina Halle and the director’s wife, with Werfel in the place next to Alma where she wanted Kandinsky. Promoting the notion that Alma was the culprit, and Kandinsky himself not really antisemitic, Nina Kandinsky seems bent above all on making herself victorious over a rival for her husband’s attentions.

  Wassily and Nina Kandinsky with Arnold Schoenberg and his wife. Nina Kandinsky dated this photo 1927. If this date is accurate, the Schoenbergs only joined the Kandinskys on the grass very briefly; even so, they look unhappy to be there.

  NINA ALSO WRITES that in 1927 she and Kandinsky were on holiday in Portschach, a village on the Worthersee, and were taking a walk along the lake when Schoenberg, also with his wife, warmly called out to the painter. The two couples then had a brief conversation. Nina Kandinsky uses that reunion as evidence that all was forgiven, and that the only issue had been Alma’s rumormongering. In fact, Schoenberg and Kandinsky never really got together again. In 1928, when the Kandinskys were in Juan-les-Pins, they invited the Schoenbergs, who were nearby in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, to visit them, but there is no sign that the composer and his wife accepted. And while Kandinsky would write Schoenberg a long and warm letter in 1936, no evidence remains of a response. When Schoenberg informed Kandinsky in 1923 that he could not go to Weimar and intended never to see Kandinsky again, he meant it.