Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in Dessau, 1929. This is a rare photograph by Paul Klee. Klee saw the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half of the same house, on a daily basis. While Wassily was a close friend, Nina was mainly an object of amusement.
A connoisseur of Nina’s silliness, Klee willingly subjected himself to her babbling. Nina was good-natured and devoted to her older husband, which counted for a lot. She was, at the same time, completely ditsy. In October 1929, Kandinsky was bedridden with a kidney infection. He was getting better, but there were high and low points, and while Klee knew it was not too serious, Nina, predictably, was alarmed. Klee mocked the way the nervous young wife went into action. Nina came to him for instructions on how to make hot compresses. Klee thought there was something quite fantastic about the idea that she could not figure out how to soak a washcloth in warm water.
THE KANDINSKYS’ GERMAN CITIZENSHIP enabled them to get new passports, which made it easier to travel. Naturally, Nina’s first choice was the French Riviera.
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in Dessau, 1929. This is a rare photograph by Paul Klee. Klee saw the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half of the same house, on a daily basis. While Wassily was a close friend, Nina was mainly an object of amusement.
In 1930, when she and Kandinsky returned to Paris, she was thrilled by the latest fashions, but he was eager to get to Italy for the art. She complied, but not because she shared the interest. Kandinsky wrote Grohmann from Ravenna: “What I saw was beyond all my expectations. They are the best, the most powerful mosaics I have ever seen—not only as mosaics but as works of art.”104 As the pioneering abstractionist stood with his pretty young wife in front of those extraordinary fifth-century masterpieces, and marveled at the tiny squares of color forming graphically vivid images of biblical scenes, he was aware that his companion was happy because he was happy, yet did not truly understand. Nina adored him, perhaps in ways Gabriele Münter had not, yet she was alien to his capacity to be thrilled by ancient religious art just as she did not even try to understand his tireless experimentation.
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In the late 1920s, a small group of young Americans with an eye for modern art became aware of the Bauhaus as a hotbed of new and exciting ideas. Kandinsky, along with Klee, loomed as an inventive genius whose presence at the school’s revolutionary headquarters in Dessau made it a center of pioneering ideas and artistic creativity.
In 1926, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who was teaching a course in modern art at Wellesley College near Boston, gave his students a quiz to evaluate their knowledge of modernism. The quiz subsequently appeared in the August 1927 issue of Vanity Fair, the fashionable monthly magazine whose editor, Frank Crowninshield, would two years later be one of the seven members of the founding committee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where Barr would be the first director.
Those who took the quiz had to answer the question “What is the significance of each of the following in relation to modern artistic expression?” Fifty names followed, among them George Gershwin, James Joyce, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Saks Fifth Avenue, Franz Werfel, the Sitwells, Arnold Schoenberg, and Das Bauhaus, which was number 48. The answers followed so that the quiz takers could see how well they had done. The answer for 48 was “Das Bauhaus: At Dessau, formerly at Weimar, Germany. A publicly supported institution for the study and creation of modern architecture, painting, ballet, cinema, decorative and industrial arts. Among the professors are Kandinsky, the Expressionist, Paul Klee claimed by the super-realists, and Moholy-Nagy, the Constructivist.”105 The labels for Kandinsky and Klee were inaccurate, but at least there was an awareness that something major was going on at this unique institution.
Barr had distinct impressions of the Bauhaus as a place with an overarching agenda. In 1928, on a trip to the Soviet Union with the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, he visited the School for Art-Culture in Moscow, where he engaged in a conversation with its director, Professor David Sterenberg, about what was happening in Dessau. Barr wrote in his diary, “They were very much interested in the Bauhaus and have evidently learned much from it. I asked Sterenberg what were the chief differences between the two. He replied that the Bauhaus aimed to develop the individual whereas the Moscow workshops worked for the development of the masses. This seemed superficial and doctrinaire since the real work at the Bauhaus seems as social, the spirit as communistic, as in the Moscow school. Kandinsky, Feininger, and Klee have actually very little influence among the Bauhaus students.”106
Barr had spent four days at the school on his way to Moscow. His quick impressions would do the Bauhaus considerable harm, because as the most influential person in America in cultivating attitudes toward the modern art movements of the era, he would convey the impression that the goals of the Bauhaus were primarily political in nature, having more to do with collaborative work and the spreading of design standards throughout society at large than with the making of great art. All the firsthand accounts from Bauhaus insiders make clear that Sterenberg was more accurate than Barr. By identifying the central issue as “the development of the individual,” the Russian pinpointed the goals of Kandinsky and Klee and Josef Albers as artists and teachers. None of these three was interested in a political agenda, even if Hannes Meyer was, and even if Gropius’s ultimate goal was societal transformation.
Another young American, the designer and future architect Philip Johnson, wrote Barr a letter about a year later in which he discussed Kandinsky specifically. He deemed the Russian “a little fool who is completely dominated by his swell Russian Grande Dame of a wife. He had millions of his sometimes painful abstractions sitting around the house and thinks he is still the leader of a new movement.”107 One man’s “little fool” was another’s tall gentleman. In his unpublished diary, the art dealer Hugo Perls describes Kandinsky, even at a slightly later point in his life, as “straight, tall, healthy, and jovial like a major or a professor!” Perls was greatly impressed, as well, by Kandinsky’s meticulous sense of order. “Once when we spoke about a certain painting of his, he fetched a diary with an exact inventory of his work. Vertical lines divided every page into 3 columns: in the first a pen-and-ink sketch of the painting, in the second a description of subject and colors, and in the third the date when it was finished and the time he had worked on it.”108
PHILIP JOHNSON WAS NOT the only person to make, from afar, a withering assessment of Kandinsky, even if most of the attacks focused on the art rather than the man and his wife. In April 1929, Ray Boynton, a highly respected American professor who taught at the University of California in Berkeley, wrote a broadside on the Blue Four that singled out Kandinsky as the worst culprit. Kandinsky’s response was more excitement than displeasure. He wrote Galka Scheyer, “So, there was a fight after all!” and asked her to send all the articles and tell him whatever she heard. He told her, “It’s very nice of you to defend me so energetically, … and to train the people to look through or behind the surface of my painting—woe to those who remain on the surface! Woe therefore to almost everyone!”109
Not only was he feeling that “almost everyone” from the outside was not getting beyond the surface, and was therefore seeing only his cold veneer without his inner fire, but the Bauhaus itself was becoming an increasingly unsympathetic environment for him. One problem was that Hannes Meyer, who had replaced Gropius as director, rejected the idea of Bauhaus theater productions. This forced Oskar Schlemmer to give up what had been his passion, and to leave the school. Kandinsky had been one of Schlemmer’s most vocal supporters: Schlemmer wrote his colleague Otto Mayer, “Kandinsky openly shows his sorrow at the end of the Theater in its present form.”110 Schlemmer asked Kandinsky if he wanted to take over the theater workshop, but the Russian declined, saying the whole notion of theater at the Bauhaus had become too controversial. But Kandinsky felt such affinity for Schlemmer’s ideas, in particular the way he used solid colors in the Triadic Ballet, that Schlemmer’s exile stung.
Kandinsky was increas
ingly pessimistic about the ability of people, anywhere and under any circumstances, to grasp truly new approaches. Shortly after moving to Dessau, he had written “And, Some Remarks on Synthetic Art.” It acknowledged his “despair at the slowness of the human spirit.” Kandinsky was impatient with the continued application of nineteenth-century values. He felt that painting itself had made progress—”with the principle of inner necessity, with the recognition that form is a bridge to inwardness”—but that even if he and other artists were finding the means to express the soul visually, and to illustrate the force of human feeling through color and line, the general population was lagging in its ability to understand. Another of his goals, the universal recognition “that science and technology both can co-operate with art,” was at least accorded proper respect at the Bauhaus.111
Kandinsky was criticized not just for painting work that people could not grasp, but for giving it names that didn’t provide the hints and instructions for which they were looking. Titles like Composition VIII were an affront to people who wanted something more lyrical and informative. In he wrote Grohmann, “My titles are supposed to make my paintings uninteresting, boring. But I have an aversion for pompous titles. No title is anything but an unavoidable evil, for it always has a limiting rather than a broadening effect—just like ‘the object.’ “112
Because “almost everyone” failed to understand his work, Kandinsky was, in spite of his guaranteed annual income from the syndicate of supporters who had formed the Kandinsky Society, short of money. Unlike Klee, he suffered from a lack of collectors. When his work did sell, the prices, in were three thousand reichmarks for a small painting, and up to ten thousand for the large ones. When Galka Scheyer arranged for the film director Josef von Sternberg to visit the Bauhaus to buy some of his work, Kandinsky cautioned her that von Sternberg must be told he would not lower those prices. He only made “exceptions for people who would like to buy out of pure interest but have no money”;113 but he never gave deals to the rich. Still, he hoped von Sternberg would pay the asking price, since Nina always needed more money.
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Nothing was ever 100 percent right. In 1929, Kandinsky had a major exhibition in Cologne, where he was pleased to receive the Golden State Medal. But the success he was enjoying on many levels brought its own problems. Just being Kandinsky was becoming a profession in itself. Managing his exhibitions and sales exhausted him. Klee had his loyal sister to perform those functions; Kandinsky had to do it all on his own. He was desperate to get back to painting, but he had too much administrative work, too many letters to answer. It was a struggle to organize his days.
He chose to keep a meticulous catalogue of his work, going to great effort to track everything that was sold, applying numbers to each piece whether or not it was still in his hands. But that craving for order deprived him of many hours that might otherwise have been spent with a brush in hand.
Anguish, nevertheless, served as a catalyst. Kandinsky believed that an “antecedent psychic state” was essential for a work of art to “come into being.”114 His mental darkness affected his creative process and led to his exuberant art.
Despite all the pressures on him, Kandinsky’s paintings from the Dessau years appear to smile at us. Noticeably warmer than his work in Weimar, they are paeans to motion and a height of energy. His 1928 Little Black Bars infuses the viewer like a shot of adrenaline (see color plate 14).115 An ovoid—for some of us it is hard to resist reading it as a hurled football or rugby ball—descends from the heavens. A small glowing moon (or possibly sun) appears above the ovoid. It suggests the distant realm from which the fast-moving form originates—and which it is clearly descending from rather than rising toward, thanks to the way Kandinsky has weighted its downward point with heavier colors.
Then, just as we start to read things literally, we realize we cannot. What was the moon or possibly the sun is just a yellow sphere. What might be the sails of a junk are just billowing shapes. Lines that are remarkably spermatozoid are possibly only eager squiggles. Yes, these are sights we know—a world of forms, of objects that move through air or float on water—but they also belong to a universe that did not exist until Kandinsky invented and painted it. The richly mottled textures, the deliciously rich brick red and warm black and satisfyingly sturdy yellow are all pleasures in themselves, not suggestions of some other reality. A bold diagonal line is just that; it has no representational purpose, any more than the sound of a violin does. And the more we look, the more we feel the sheer life of the painting.
The artist’s mind was endlessly fertile. Attraversando, of the same year, has a background that resembles crossing rays of light. It seems that Kandinsky may have gone into the glass workshop, run by his friend Albers, and used the handheld gun essential to sandblasting; clearly Kandinsky sprayed the surface with a fine coat of granular paint, and applied tape to the canvas and then lifted it to create unfolding linear bands that are like the planes of a pleated fan. On top of this background, which has some of the same feeling as the sweep of spotlights at the start of an old-fashioned Hollywood film, there is a sequence of black verticals that would if they could extend above the top of the canvas and below the bottom. Are these tree trunks in a forest? Strips of material in front of a stage? Of course they are nothing literal, but they evoke memories and associations at the same time that they exist as something entirely without precedent. Above all, the animated and vibrantly colored shapes are a means to fill the viewer with a suffusion of sheer energy and joy.
AT THE END OF 1928, Kandinsky himself described his work to Grohmann as being marked by “great calm and strong inner tension.”116 He did not see those forces as incompatible. His only way toward serenity was to live in the extreme. When he and Nina hosted a New Year’s Eve party to welcome 1929, people danced until three in the morning; nothing was done by half measures.
His life had grown easier. Schlemmer now observed, “Kandinsky, once one of the wildest, impossible to classify, has entered the ranks of the classics, clear and unruffled as a mirror.”117 The remark was deprecating in its way, a reference to the assuredness Schlemmer found unnerving, but it zeroes in on the new level of recognition Kandinsky was enjoying.
That success allowed a degree of luxury. For Christmas 1930, Kandinsky and Nina gave themselves a new radio as a present. Nina, Kandinsky wrote Scheyer, was “always enthusiastically turning the knobs. This way we are exploring all of Europe. Unfortunately one needs a special receiver for America, otherwise we might be able to hear your lectures! That would be nice! Perhaps a hole will soon be bored through the earth and then through the hole we can say hello. Radio is such a wonder that nowadays nothing astounds us anymore.”118 That imagined hole through the earth was like the shapes in his paintings of the time, evoking the feeling that anything is possible.
In that same period of relative well-being, however, he had become deeply concerned about his old friend Jawlensky, who was ill with severe rheumatism. In order to improve the patient’s morale, Kandinsky had managed to get Galka Scheyer to sell Jawlensky’s work. Kandinsky’s brief respite from problems and immersion in his private mental universe did not make him blind to other people’s needs or keep him from acting effectively on their behalf.
IN 1931, A SOPHISTICATED YOUNG WOMAN, Ursula Diederich, went to the Bauhaus specifically to study with Kandinsky. She had been educated in her native Hamburg and then in Berlin and Heidelberg before going to Paris to study art. In France, she saw Kandinsky’s work for the first time. In addition to the paintings she found in commercial galleries, there were reproductions in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Diederich was so moved by the energy and originality of the art that she became determined to work with the artist himself.
The adventurous Diederich, who would eventually marry the producer Oskar Fritz Schuh, was by her own account totally nervous and intimidated at her first class with the man she imagined would transform her entire existence. As she walked up the two seemingly vast flig
hts of stairs of Gropius’s building, passing students who were more animated and dressed less traditionally than most of the people she knew, she could not quite envision what lay ahead. She continued down the long corridors to get to the classroom. After the noise and liveliness of the stairs, the hallways seemed quiet and empty. Once she arrived at the classroom, she was glad to be seated before Kandinsky himself arrived. The benches and tables were the same as in other painting classes she had attended, although the polished linoleum floor was an advance over the usual paint-splattered wood. But Diederich knew that, even if the space had familiar elements, the master would be very different from her previous instructors, who had tried to teach her old-fashioned methods of painting in order to render the subject matter in a given style. She was waiting to replace those methods with a new approach that would give her life meaning.
As soon as Kandinsky strode in, the first thing Diederich noted was his “lively, fast-moving, pale blue eyes looking through sharp glasses. A glance interested in everything, which continuously seems to discover new secrets in the world around us.” The man whose vibrant compositions had so excited her quickly held up transparent tinted rectangles, squares, disks, and triangles. Superimposing one on top of the other in various arrangements, he created juxtapositions like those she had seen in his paintings. “Only later did I notice Kandinsky’s almost feminine, sensitive, but very controlled mouth, the graying hair, his dignified, rather perceptive appearance, the correctness of his dark suit, the snow-white shirt, the bow tie … brown shoes—the well-groomed elegance of a scientist in 1931.”119
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