The Bauhaus Group

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by Nicholas Fox Weber


  Kandinsky was living with the appearance of more ease than he was actually feeling, however. From his and Nina’s temporary digs at Moltkestrasse, he wrote Galka Scheyer a telling letter in October 1925. Congratulating Scheyer on the enthusiasm she had found for the Blue Four in the United States, even if she had not yet made sales, Kandinsky compared it to his own reception in Europe. “I’ve been working for decades, for example, and have been treated like a dumb kid on numerous occasions by ‘the public opinion.’ You can hardly imagine what orgies the current ‘art critics’ in Germany are currently celebrating more and more often.” In his withering way, he pointed out that they were declaring expressionism dead—while misusing the term to denote his form of abstraction. Miserable about the triumph of the highly realistic painters then in vogue, Kandinsky called the “national thought …a superficialization.” He lamented to Scheyer that his sort of work was deemed “an aberration” or “an intentional lie;” in spite of his previous remarks, he now suggested that maybe Americans will end up being “the smarter ones after all.”89

  ALMOST AS SOON as they got to Dessau, Kandinsky and Klee began their ritual of taking walks together in the valley of the Elbe River, which was often shrouded in a soft mist. After one such walk, in late November 1925, Kandinsky wrote Grohmann about that landscape in the fog: “Whistler could not paint this, nor could Monet.”90 In spite of threatened salary cuts and the awkwardness of living and working in temporary quarters, he did not lose his eye for magnificence.

  And then life improved as the Kandinskys watched construction begin on the two-family master’s house they would share with the Klees. They saw the well-lit studios and marvelous living spaces begin to take form. In addition, improved financing—thanks largely to Fritz Hesse—meant increased support for a flurry of work at the Bauhaus. The furniture, metalwork, and printing workshops began producing designs that were quickly taken up by industry. Marcel Breuer was making splendid chairs and tables, Marianne Brandt streamlined lighting fixtures and teapots, and Herbert Bayer stunning graphic designs. Kandinsky enjoyed this sense of progress all around him and the buoyant mood that went with it. And even if he had to give up far more time than he would have liked for his administrative and teaching responsibilities—he had only three days a week for his own work—he was painting prodigiously. Anticipating his sixtieth birthday, he wrote Grohmann:

  In a Russian novel there is this sentence: “The hair is dumb: ignorant of the youth of the heart, it turns white.” So far as I am concerned I neither respect nor fear white hair. … I’d like to live, say, another fifty years to be able to penetrate art ever more deeply. We are really forced to stop much, much too early, at the very moment when we have begun to understand something. But perhaps we can continue in the other world.91

  The completion of the new house furthered his feeling of regeneration. After the Kandinskys had moved in, during the summer of 1926, Wassily wrote Galka Scheyer, “Where we are living is wonderful, … right in the woods. We are happy to be rid of the nasty Dessau smells (sugar refinery, gas works, etc., etc.) and are enjoying the real country air.” He was contending with disorder in the house, and had to unpack the boxes in which his and Nina’s possessions had been stored since they left Weimar, so he could not properly benefit from the most beautiful sunshine,”92 but he still had a new sense of well-being. When the Klees moved in next door, he was even happier.

  Yet, as always with Kandinsky, things were never 100 percent. “I’m beginning only very slowly to work, although the burning desire has been torturing me for a long time already. The studio is very, very nice and hopefully the work that will be done there will also be respectable.”93

  The Kandinskys decorated the house very much according to their own taste. They had antiques and traditional Russian furniture in almost every room. It was an unusual combination: tables and storage chests that looked as if they came from a dacha, with armchairs and commodes that belonged in an elegant St. Petersburg apartment, thrown together in Gropius’s modern functionalist shell. Furniture that called for rough wooden planks or ornate paneling now sat in front of flat white plaster walls.

  The Kandinskys’ living room in Dessau. In most of this house, the Kandinskys had traditional Russian furniture that recalled their childhood homes.

  The dining room, however, was stridently modern—with a new table and chairs that Marcel Breuer had designed especially for the Kandinskys. There was a china cabinet with a rigidly geometric design of black and white panels, and one of the walls was painted solid black. Kandinsky delighted in hanging his brightly colored paintings on this particular wall. If black had induced anguish in his childhood, it now had bravado.

  The Kandinskys’ living room walls were a soft pink, except for the one behind the sofa, which was a creamy off-white. The ceiling was a cool neutral gray. The doors were in the same black as the dining room wall. There was also a niche in which the walls and ceiling were covered in shimmering gold leaf. Kandinsky as a person concealed the drama of his own feelings, his changing moods, in which darkness and high spirits both had their roles, but in the surfaces of his surroundings he was happy to have colors express the alternating humors of his soul.

  IN DESSAU, the Bauhaus started to publish a new periodical to report on all that was being done at the school. Its first issue, which coincided with the inauguration in December 1926, was dedicated to Kandinsky on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. His birthday was also the occasion of a large show that received considerable attention in the press (see color plate 12).

  Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in the dining room of their masters’ house at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1927. Marcel Breuer designed the furniture especially for this space, where one wall was painted black and the ceiling gold

  Most of the articles were favorable, but there was a stinging attack by an important critic, Carl Einstein, in a book on recent art. Einstein called Kandinsky “an artist who created things solely from within himself and was incapable of communication.” Kandinsky defended himself by responding that the attacks testified to “the inner strength of this art, its inner tension and the implications bound up with it in particular as concerns ‘life.’ “94 This was, once again, the blood boiling beneath the ice: his analogy to his own being.

  Although Gabriele Münter would not permit him to communicate directly with her, “after long negotiations through intermediaries,” that same year she finally returned twenty-six crates of paintings Kandinsky had made before the war.95 She held on to many significant pictures—as well as to countless watercolors, drawings, sketchbooks, and personal papers, among them an important lecture manuscript—but the work she gave him back from storage provided the backbone of his exhibition. Münter also returned his beloved racing bicycle. With the show, the Bauhaus publication in his honor, the return of his early work, and the object that enabled him to pedal off to Wörlitz and other local pleasures, Kandinsky’s new life truly began in Dessau.

  KANDINSKY’S 1926 PAINTINGS of circles are rich and imaginative. These spectral visions are rewarding to look at simply for the jolt of energy they give; they also present the basis of the artist’s latest theorizing, and therefore of his teaching following the Bauhaus’s move. Kandinsky was thriving, and it showed. He was reveling in the access to nature offered by his new house; he had written Grohmann following the move there, “We live as if we were in the country, not in the city: we can hear chickens, birds, dogs; we smell hay, linen blossoms, the woods. In a few short days we have become different people. Even the movies don’t attract us, that is saying a great deal.”96 Given his passion for Buster Keaton, to be able to forgo films was a mark of his contentment on Burgkuhnauer Allee. But there was no greater evidence of his high spirits than the work he did that summer and fall and put on view in his birthday exhibition at the end of the year.

  Klee wrote the preface for the exhibition catalogue. Admiration shines in his text: “He developed in advance of me. I could have been his pupil and was, in a sens
e, because more than one of his remarks managed to illuminate my quest beneficently and confirmingly.” Klee wasn’t commenting so much on their age difference (he was only twelve years younger than Kandinsky) as on the courage of his Russian colleague’s early strides into pure form and vibrant color. Klee had witnessed this astonishing development firsthand in Munich before World War I. His preface is awkwardly written—”Emotional connections remained, it is true, uninterrupted, but also unverifiable, until Weimar realized my hope for a fresh encounter”—but testifies nonetheless to the splendid link between the two men who now shared a house in Dessau. He also extols Kandinsky’s youthful energy, declaring of the work the artist had completed while approaching his sixtieth birthday, “This is not sunset, it is simply action … which by the richness of its achievement transcends not only the life span of artistic experience but also the epoch.” This, Klee says, will surely continue after sixty. In summation, he encapsulates, in marvelously few words, what it is that made Kandinsky great: “the achievement of a work that concentrates all tensions within it.”97

  11

  In addition to the show in Dessau, Kandinsky had exhibitions that year in-Dresden and Berlin. He also had visits from the conductor Leopold Stokowski and the copper magnate Solomon Guggenheim, both of whom bought paintings. Major museums in Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg were collecting his art as well.

  Yet his life was never simple. Oskar Schlemmer, who was designing costumes in 1926 for “The White Festival”—they were four-fifths white, one-fifth color—wrote his wife, Tut: “Quite a rivalry has sprung up among the women: I was designing the Kandinska’s costume (in the form of a little Kandinsky); the Gropia floated off with the sketches and was no more to be seen. I am curious.”98 Nina was both prettier and less intelligent than almost all of other women at the school, and the atmosphere at the Bauhaus could be as competitive and petty as in any other small town.

  Schlemmer also reported on Kandinsky’s relationship to his students, as opposed to his connection with local officialdom. Kandinsky’s teaching aroused dissent in the Bauhaus community because of its stridency and dogmatism. On the other hand, Schlemmer admired Kandinsky’s diplomatic skills and rare ability to get along with some of the most prominent people in Dessau, whom most other Bauhauslers found unapproachable. Even if some of the students recoiled at his arrogance, and even though he would have preferred to devote more of his time and energy to his own work, Kandinsky had become the backbone of the Bauhaus at one of its shakiest moments.

  AT THE END OF 1927, Kandinsky sent Galka Scheyer a miniature painting as a Christmas present. It was to be worn as a pendant. She wrote him that it was “a symbol of incomprehensible realities that is concentrated in this small surface but also streams endlessly forth, like the secret law of the forces of life in movement.”99 She wore the magical talisman often. To the few people who understood the fantastic realm of his art, the factors that were both patently visible and deliberately invisible, he was thrilled to give presents.

  In 1928, Kandinsky painted Too Green, which he would give to Paul Klee the following year for his fiftieth birthday (see color plate 11). The water-color, created by using a spray gun, is an irregular sequence of gyrating circles. At the same time that they are purely abstract, representing nothing other than themselves, the disks, which appear to rotate and to be millions of miles away—the spray painting makes their surfaces appear to be in an atmospheric fog—resemble spectral bodies in orbit.

  It was the perfect way for one friend to communicate to the other in the language they knew best. In visual rather than verbal language, Kandinsky was celebrating what he and Klee cherished: eternal beauties, the power of abstract form, and access to the larger cosmos. In addition, these intensely serious men were devoted to fun, and Too Green is as playful as it is accomplished.

  THAT SAME YEAR, Kandinsky designed costumes and sets for a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for which Felix Klee was production assistant. His engagement with the boy whom he had taken care of in Munich at age two, and who had inadvertently locked him in his temporary studio a few years later, was of great meaning to both of them.

  Kandinsky used lighting for the ballet in such a way that he realized his own goal of synthesizing science and technology and art. He wrote a description:

  At the first expressivo only three long vertical strips appear in the background. They vanish. At the next expressivo the great red perspective is introduced from the right (double color). Then, from the left, the green perspective. The middle figure emerges from the trap door. It is illuminated with intense colored light.100

  It was Felix who made this fantastic scenario occur in sequence with Mussorgsky’s music as it went from dramatic to playful to lyrical to stormy. Felix managed the lighting changes and complex switches of backdrops and props through sixteen scenes.

  Kandinsky made the backdrops and costumes, as well as props that moved around or hung from above. Rather than create the specific pictures Mussorgsky had in mind, they formed a sequence of abstractions that coincided with the changes in the music. Felix, whose puppet theater had trained him in rapid movements, controlled the action with dexterity.

  The scene called “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle”—meant to represent two Polish Jews, one rich, the other poor—featured two figures standing behind tall and thin transparent rectangles, backlit so that their silhouettes were visible. “Promenade” and “Ballet of Unhatched Chickens” were both animated by flashlights moving along wavy lines. Grohmann vividly describes the penultimate scene, “The Hut of Baba Yaga”:

  The central portion of the set was first concealed by a black cover, while hand-held spotlights positioned behind the scenery illuminated the various patterns of dots and lines cut into its left and right sides. When the central image, the hut of the witch of Russian folklore, was revealed, the clockface glowed with a yellow backlight while the single hand rotated. … The Great Gate of Kiev, the final scene … began with the side elements and twelve props representing abstract figures, to which were added successively the arch, the towered Russian city and the backdrop, each lowered slowly from above. At the end these were raised, the lighting became a strong red and then was completely extinguished and the transparent disk used at the beginning of the performance was lowered. Quickly this was illuminated at full strength from behind and the lights finally were extinguished once more.101

  Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Pictures at an Exhibition: Gnomes, 1928. Kandinsky made numerous sets for the production, of which Felix Klee was stage manager. Lighting, music, and scenery all worked together in happy collaboration.

  Music, mechanics, and artistic invention were thus combined to achieve an art form that was energetic, diverting, and unprecedented. At the same time, the collaboration of a sixty-year-old artist and his best friend’s teenage son showed what a community the Bauhaus could be.

  ON MARCH 13, 1928, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky both became German citizens. The country from which Kandinsky had been forced into exile fourteen years earlier was now his official homeland. He and Nina were overjoyed.

  Celebration at the house of Nina and Wassily Kandinsky, 1928. When the Kandinskys received their German citizenship, their friends organized a lavish costume part

  The Kandinskys’ friends quickly organized a costume party to celebrate. Marcel Breuer and some of the other faculty members became “Schillian officers” at the festive evening. That chosen role encouraged great feats of imagination: Ferdinand von Schill had been a Prussian patriot who commanded a regiment of hussars and who, in 1809, unsuccessfully led an uprising against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. He did so independently and without government approval. He died in street fighting; his officers were court-martialed, after which most were shot or imprisoned. László Moholy-Nagy decided to be an old person from Dessau. Herbert Bayer, always as swashbuckling as possible, was an Austrian officer. Ludwig Grote and Hannes Meyer were officials—giving the evening an air of leg
itimacy—while Klee was a Turk. Kandinsky himself was “a half-breed, comical.” He was overcome with joy at the many times people raised their glasses to toast him and Nina as “real Anhalt natives,”102 and seemed to have no premonition that they would yet again be forced out of their chosen country.

  In a letter Paul Klee wrote Lily in September 1928, he provided a splendid rendition of Nina’s conversational gambits. Lily was still in Bern. The Kandinskys had gotten back to their half of the house a couple of days earlier. Once they knew Klee had reinstalled himself, they started to knock on his door repeatedly, but he was invariably out on his long walks into the countryside whenever they called, and so they had no response. Finally the Kandinskys had left their visiting card, folded at the corner, in his mailbox.

  Late one evening, the Kandinskys and Klee were at last reunited. Klee and Kandinsky were eager to talk about what had happened with their painting during the summer. Nina, however, completely dominated the conversation, making it impossible for the two men to discuss what most mattered to them. There was no stopping her monologue about her and Wassily’s recent holiday. Klee quoted Nina’s comments: “In France I’m proud to be a woman, because everyone is so polite—and—and—and above all Paris, but black suitcases get terribly beaten up; that comes from the automobile, when they’re put underneath them.”103

 

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