The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  8

  In 1923, during his first full year at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky painted Composition VIII (see color plate 16). His new life in Weimar was having splendid results; he considered this large canvas the pinnacle of his own work after World War I.

  Grohmann perceived Composition VIII as the exemplar of the “creative freedom” Thomas Mann identifies in Doctor Faustus. “Every note, without exception, has significance and function,” Grohmann points out, while there is, at the same time, a welcome and radical “indifference to harmony and melody.”70 In this painting, which is nearly six feet high, each of the many individual elements radiates power. Every circle, dot, squiggle, triangle, checkerboard, and dash functions independently and has inner strength. The spare, vibrant colors add to the punch. And while each form exerts its own force, the elements also work in an energetic, deliberately cacophonous relationship to one another; this, Grohmann asserts, “results in cosmic order, law, and aesthetic gratification.” He goes on to quote Mann’s Leverkuhn, declaring, “Reason and magic may meet and become one.”71

  In his friend Grohmann Kandinsky had found the perfect apostle. Kandinsky’s own published writing about his Compositions lacks Grohmann’s gaiety. In On the Spiritual in Art, the painter calls his Compositions “the expressions of feelings that have been forming within me …(over a very long period of time), which, after the first preliminary sketches, I have slowly and almost pedantically examined and worked out.”72 Groh-mann managed to elicit livelier language from Kandinsky in a personal letter. In this document, which Grohmann cites, the painter lets his guard down and allows a warmth and fire to come through. In the book he wrote about the painter, which remains the best firsthand account of Kandinsky and his work, Grohmann brings us closer to Kandinsky’s mystical engagement than did Kandinsky in his self-presentation. Elucidating the breakthrough achieved by Composition VIII, Kandinsky wrote Grohmann that the circle

  Serge Chekhonine, sketch for a magazine cover with a portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1923. This image shows Stravinsky in the same year that he visited the Weimar Bauhaus for a performance of L’Histoire du Soldat The artist clearly saw the impact Kandinsky’s art had made on the composer.

  is a link with the cosmic. … Why does the circle fascinate me? It is

  (1) the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally,

  (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable,

  (3) simultaneously stable and unstable,

  (4) simultaneously loud and soft,

  (5) a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.73

  Grohmann also quotes the responses Kandinsky gave to the psychologist P. Plaut, who sent out a questionnaire polling artists on some of their practices. Kandinsky informed Plaut, “I love the circle today as I formerly loved the horse, for instance—perhaps even more, since I find more inner potentialities in the circle, which is why it has taken the horse’s place. … In my pictures, I have said a great many ‘new’ things about the circle, but theoretically, although I have often tried, I cannot say very much.”74

  The mix of hesitancy with passionate conviction, that abiding faith in himself paired with self-doubt, defined Kandinsky. So did his ability to feel greater animation and life in an abstract form than in his favorite animal. Color and shape were more real to him than living beings.

  THE ELUSIVE RUSSIAN ARTIST maintained a persona of imperial detachment, but in his controlled, abstract art he used distilled forms to reveal his inner furies. He urged the Bauhaus students to take his same approach. In Kandinsky’s classes, the younger artists did exercises to express aggression with triangles and to suggest calm with squares. They employed the circle, the form that led to the fourth dimension, to invoke the cosmic.

  That realm of the circle, the shape he made blue, was the one in which Kandinsky lived mentally. Married to a mundane woman who perpetually fretted about everyday occurrences, he escaped into his own mental territory. Nina suffered, for example, from a severe fear of fireflies; she was convinced they would burn her on contact. Kandinsky tried, unsuccessfully, to reassure her; where he found nature magical, she became terrified. His way of coping was by mentally inhabiting the world he evoked in his paintings.

  When Kandinsky tried to capture this imagined territory verbally, as he did ad nauseam, in endless written treatises on his approach to color and form and on his theories about art as a form of investigation, the results don’t have the impact of his paintings. But the Compositions themselves present his invented universe in such a way that it is as welcoming as it is unknowable. And they soar with vigor and energy.

  IT WAS DURING this period of his life at the Bauhaus, when Kandinsky was making Composition VIII and similarly euphoric works while existing completely outside the earthly sphere, that he had the meeting with Klee, already described, in which they went to a café and, after counting their marks, had to return home without coffee. Because they had completely lost whatever wealth they had in Russia, the Kandinskys were in even worse straits than the Klees, while they were used to a higher standard of living—or at least longed for one. The artist could scarcely afford crates to ship paintings to exhibitions, while his wife craved new dresses and hats.

  In spite of a pressing need for cash, Kandinsky, like Klee, was content to be paid in canned food for the artworks sold by Galka Scheyer. On January 17, 1924, he wrote Scheyer from Weimar with his specifics: “Fruit in the larger cans because there probably aren’t any smaller—otherwise 1 lb. or 1/2 lb. would be much better. Vegetables we eat mainly as a side dish along with potatoes, so we can use smaller cans, but now and then larger ones would also do.”75 When he wanted to be diplomatic and agreeable, he evinced charm and generosity. Kandinsky tried to persuade Scheyer to take a larger commission; if, however, she insisted on forgoing it, she could just increase the amount of tinned food. He was determined that she not deplete her precious supply of cash at the moment when she was just starting his enterprise.

  His own financial situation would improve in 1925 when the Kandinsky Society was formed. That organization consisted of a group of subscribers who gave money, with each receiving a watercolor at the end of the year. Once the society was active, their support provided the painter with a dependable few thousand marks annually.

  Kandinsky’s arrangement at the Weimar Bauhaus was not unlike Klee’s. It enabled him to devote a considerable amount of time to his own painting, in exchange for which he did a limited amount of teaching and undertook some administrative duties. But for him the effort to combine writing, teaching, painting, and helping Gropius with administrative and diplomatic matters was often immensely frustrating. Kandinsky generally felt that he should be doing something other than the task at which he was currently working. Although Grohmann observed that “from the outset Kandinsky felt at ease in Weimar, for he was surrounded by men who understood him,”76 he suffered, at the Bauhaus as everywhere else, from being one of those people who rarely believes he is achieving his objectives. Kandinsky always lamented what he was not doing, and was dissatisfied with what he was doing.

  He tended to analyze his own analysis. The Russian had none of the devil-may-care decisiveness of Gropius or the sheer delight in nature and all forms of creativity enjoyed by Klee; rather, he was mostly dissatisfied. There was, indeed, always an “and,” but, as in his love life, there was never a perfect moment of unequivocal joy—except at the moment of making art.

  In 1924, the Braunschweigische Landeszeitung published an article calling Nina and Wassily “Communists and dangerous agitators.” In response, on September 1, Kandinsky wrote to Will Grohmann from a holiday in Wennigstedt, a resort on the North Sea, “I have never been active in politics. I never read newspapers. … It’s all lies. … Even in artistic politics I have never been partisan … this aspect of me should really be known.”77 He was so disgusted by the accusations linking him with the political party now ruling Russia and with forces that might undermine the stability of the world he was now enjoying tha
t he considered leaving Weimar to become a less public figure. But, as he wrote Grohmann a month later, he really believed in the purposes of the Bauhaus.

  Beyond that, in spite of his perpetual personal woes, he had a goal that was entirely his own, far loftier than Gropius’s aims of good design for industrial mass production and the joining of the various arts. “In addition to synthetic collaboration, I expect from each art a further powerful, entirely new inner development, a deep penetration, liberated from all external purposes, into the human spirit, which only begins to touch the world spirit.”78 Kandinsky always pushed everything to its extreme—into that disembodied realm where he might find a well-being absent in his everyday life.

  IN LATE 1925, Oskar Schlemmer heard Wassily Kandinsky give a Bauhaus Lecture—a special event whose audience consisted of many of the school’s leading figures as well as important outsiders. Schlemmer disliked most of what he heard. Kandinsky seemed to denigrate everything except for nonobjective painting, and Schlemmer was offended not just by what he said but by the stridency with which he said it. Yet the speaker was fluent and intelligent: “He also spoke with resignation of his own isolation, of the fate of the modern artist.”79

  For long periods, Kandinsky had tried to verbalize his ideas in a room he had in Weimar exclusively for writing. “The combination of theoretical speculation and practical work is often a necessity for me,” he wrote Grohmann. Yet as he approached the age of sixty, with his usual feeling that he was doing one thing while he should be doing another, he was impatient with the amount of time he had spent formulating and verbalizing his ideas on paper rather than engaging in painting. In the fall of 1925, he informed Grohmann, “For three months now I haven’t painted as I should, and all sorts of ideas are begging to be expressed—if I may say so, I suffer from a kind of constipation, a spiritual kind.”80 The man who could describe himself as pedantic and spiritually constipated was, however ferocious the diatribes against him from others, his own worst critic.

  9

  In that room in Weimar where he enjoyed an author’s idyllic circumstances—quiet, solitude, minimal financial and time pressure, even if he wished he were painting instead—Kandinsky wrote Point and Line to Plane. He was glad when it finally went to press, because he kept revising until the last possible minute. But for all the discontent that privately surrounded its creation, Point and Line to Plane is an upbeat, enthusiastic treatise. The book puts forward the case that “form is only a means to an end” and amplified Kandinsky’s own goal “to capture the inner secrets of form.”81

  In relation to the goals of Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky wrote Grohmann, “Once you referred to ‘Romanticism,’ and I am glad you did. It is no part of my program to paint with tears and to make people cry, and I really don’t care for sweets, but Romanticism goes far, far, very far beyond tears.” Talking about his art in its ideal form, the Russian made the exact comparison he made when talking about himself:

  The circle which I have been using of late is nothing if not Romantic. Actually, the coming Romanticism is profound, beautiful (the obsolete term “beautiful” should be restored to usage), meaningful, joy-giving—it is a block of ice with a burning flame inside. If people perceive only the ice and not the flame, that is just too bad.82

  This wonderful life force pervades Point and Line to Plane. In his text, Kandinsky starts with the simple point. He then describes the life that grows from it, the chords that develop. He also analyzes the straight line, outlining the personality shifts that occur according to its position: “As a horizontal it is cold and flat; as vertical it is warm; as diagonal it is lukewarm.” He also discusses the drama that occurs when lines meet at angles or are curved. “Straight, zigzag, and curved lines are to each other as birth, youth, and maturity.”83

  That multifacetedness of the purely visual applied to life itself. Kandinsky accepted the apparent contradictions of his own personality, and he celebrated the immense diversity of human experience. Following a summer holiday with Nina at Binz-on-Rugen, the normally hardworking, self-punishing painter wrote Galka Scheyer, “Our laziness had no limit.”84 He delighted in creating a picture of his wife and himself on vacation, comparing their existence to a zigzag line curving in a carefree way to a relative halt. He was pleased to have a side that was the opposite of being pedantic or spiritually constipated; there was, indeed, always an and.

  When Kandinsky wrote that letter, Scheyer was in Honolulu, which, Kandinsky wrote her, “for me might as well be Mars or Jupiter.”85 That idea of the unknown, the notion of living on another planet, was in keeping with what Kandinsky had discovered visually. The quip had the larkiness and escapism he considered essential to human existence if one were to have a chance of prevailing over life’s harshness—just as verticality is vital to the life of a line that is otherwise horizontal.

  SCHEYER, WHO WORKED WITH KANDINSKY much as she did with Klee, had in 1925, in her effort to find an audience for modernism, moved from the East Coast of the United States to Sacramento, California. Kandinsky wrote her:

  Let’s hope that the people in California have a better sense and can see the difference between art and currency. The so-called mentality of New Yorkers is something so deadly and repulsive that it gives one goose bumps. But this is inevitably the last stop for the purely materialistic mindset. The Germans and, as far as I know, the Russians have already begun to suffocate in this atmosphere.86

  Revealing his usual blend of enthusiasm and skepticism, hope and doubt, he continued:

  The youth are still ashamed (at least in Germany) to admit their—in part unconscious—hunger for a different purpose in life. They generally want to appear very serious, logical and matter-of-fact. They also demonstrate courage, but a false courage; since it only serves to conceal the inner division, it is easily seen through. It appears to me nonetheless that for many the burden of this little coat appears to be too much of a bother, and I see here and there a gradual inner transformation. In such cases Germans are too cautious, and even the young person has an exaggerated fear of looking foolish.87

  Kandinsky craved the spiritual aspect of life, in a territory devoid of materialism.

  Yet, with a perpetually needy wife and desiring certain luxuries himself, he was not without some of the same conflicts he observed in others. His thinking was like his painting: tortured and then celebratory, lighthearted and then overwrought. His keen alertness to appearances, the human veneer, combined with his craving for the soul and the revelation of the inner self, gave the man the spotty energy of his canvases.

  At times, however, he could not contend with the complexity of his own observations and feelings, the pull in contradictory directions. He told Scheyer, “Sometimes it drives one to despair and one wants to see nothing other than one’s studio. It’s no less despairing sometimes, when one thinks about for whom one is really working, for whom and what purpose! But luckily, the artist can no more shake off his work than the drinker his schnapps. So, pour me ‘nother one!”88

  This was classical Kandinsky: to move, in one brief but sweeping monologue, from anguish to a solution, then return to anguish, and, finally, achieve a joyful acceptance of the addiction to art.

  10

  While Wassily was trying to paint and to conquer life’s imponderables, Nina in 1925 was miserable at the prospect of giving up the charms of living in Weimar and moving to industrial, unglamorous Dessau.

  She had been among the original reconnaissance group to check out the Bauhaus’s future home and had acknowledged its potential, but for someone who loved the cosmopolitan offerings of Moscow and Berlin, and the charms of Weimar, it felt like repairing to the wilderness. For Kandinsky, however, the new location offered great opportunities. Mayor Fritz Hesse’s enthusiasm for the Bauhaus, and his determination to have the local government provide generous funding for new buildings, was a boon. Although much of the city consisted of manufacturing plants and bleak neighborhoods filled with workers’ houses, there was a G
othic church and the state theater; the Junkers aircraft factory added a dash of the modern era.

  Kandinsky was among the few people who recognized that while Gropius was still the director of the Bauhaus, his interest in the administrative hassles was flagging even as he delighted in designing its new campus. As a distinguished figure with diplomatic capability, Kandinsky now assumed a major role in assuring the success of the school in its new home.

  The first issue to resolve was the resistance of the local population in Dessau. Kandinsky organized a meeting of the most important Bauhauslers in the house where he and Nina were living temporarily. Kandinsky informed his colleagues that he had had a local government minister come for tea, and that the minister had proposed that the Bauhaus organize lectures and exhibitions to make the goals of the school clearer to an unsympathetic community. The minister told Kandinsky that many people were so enraged that luxurious houses were being built for Bauhaus faculty, at a time when some Dessau residents whose families had been there for generations could hardly afford roofs over their heads, that there was an outcry for Mayor Hesse’s impeachment.

  Kandinsky’s centrist position within the school itself, and his wife’s capacity for socializing, enabled him to get along with almost everyone, even if he remained aloof. He and Nina often had people to their home for dinner, and even more often went out. He spearheaded a program that tried to help the citizens of Dessau understand the Bauhaus mission.

  Klee—who was living with the Kandinskys and was, for the time being, without either Felix or Lily—often waited up at night for the Kandinskys to come home. Klee was happy to avoid the social life in which they constantly participated, but he liked to chat and hear the latest gossip. When Klee went out with the Kandinskys, it was more likely to go to the movies than to be with other people—there was an excellent cinema in Dessau, which showed the latest films—but he enjoyed the Kandinskys’ reports of the relatively convivial atmosphere at the Bauhaus’s new location. In his letters to Lily, Klee made clear how impressed he was with the way his great friend got on with Dessau’s upper echelons as well as with the various factions at the school, and the role he played in bridging the two communities.