The Bauhaus Group Page 19

  9

  Occasionally, Klee dined with Oskar Schlemmer, who at the start was his only real friend among the faculty members. But mostly he spent the evenings at home with Felix. Lily was still in Munich, and he did not want his son to be alone.

  Klee was an avid reader, and his passion at the beginning of his first full academic year at the Bauhaus was Voltaire, whose Candide he had illustrated for a publication that appeared just before he went to Weimar. In December, he read Voltaire’s last book, The Princess of Babylon. This obscure philosophical tale published in 1768 is the story of a beautiful princess who falls in love with Amazan, a man who is both highly civilized and devoutly vegetarian. But things go wrong, and they both end up traveling all over the world trying to find each other, then fleeing from each other. Voltaire evokes the charms of Catherine the Great’s Russia and Georgian England, while making Germany in the same epoch a form of inferno.

  In the nineteenth century, The Princess of Babylon had been censored. The passages about sex, between men and other men as well as between men and women, were removed; oddly enough, so was Voltaire’s invocation to the Muses. But Klee read the unexpurgated version. Afterward, he wrote Lily of Voltaire, “What a man! That art of being able to unite, in such a mysterious way, spirituality, wickedness, and profound kindness! Astonishing!”76 What he admired in the great Enlightenment writer was his own ideal.

  Klee himself had the optimism of Voltaire’s Candide. Felix’s success with the Bauhaus course was central to his happiness; beyond that, the cat was well, and the housekeeper was completely perfect, her most recent achievement being a mastery of potato pancakes. With Felix robust, the childhood illness a thing of the past, and the house tidy, Klee took unabashed delight in little things, like observing his son with a new watch. The teenager was fascinated by the instrument’s precision; the father marveled at the mechanical elements while also relating them to the process of painting.

  KLEE TITLED ONE of his 1922 lectures on pictorial form “Scenes in the Department Store.” It is a dialogue between a merchant and a patron in which the merchant charges the patron a hundred marks for a bucket of one product and then two hundred marks for the same bucket full of something else. When the patron asks why the price is double, the merchant explains that it is because the second product is twice as heavy. The patron then buys a third product, with the same weight as the second one, for which the merchant charges him four hundred marks. When the patron asks why, the merchant says, “Because this third merchandise is twice as good, more durable, much more tasty, more in demand, more beautiful.”

  The first encounter presents “measure … the realm of line … longer, shorter, coarser, and finer.” The second depicts “weight … the realm of tonality … brighter, darker, heavier, lighter.” The third is about “pure quality … the realm of color … more in demand, more beautiful, better, too saturating, cooking, too hot, ugly, too sweet, too sour, too beautiful.”77 This could be interpreted as a commentary on the nature of commodities—relevant to the Bauhaus students’ task of making designs both useful and alluring—or simply as an encomium on aesthetic beauty, and on Klee’s hierarchy of values in the world of the visible. It was also a perfect reflection of his own daily interchange between the practical issues of life (measurement in cooking, the cost of things) and the euphoric universe of pure color, musical sounds, and life’s other inexplicable thrills.

  FELIX KLEE DESCRIBES his father at work in the studio he used at home in Weimar when he didn’t go to the Bauhaus: “My father had at his disposal two rooms on the second floor, where he could work undisturbed. There he tried out all sorts of surface textures for his pictures, coating cardboard and canvas with plaster and stretching gauze of newspapers over it. Over the radiators of the central heating hovered strange paper shapes, swaying in the uprush of hot air. With plaster he made sculptures and reliefs; with broken cups or mussel shells he made saucers for mixing paints.”78

  When Klee’s students visited him at home, their main activity was to watch what was going on in the artist’s large aquarium. Klee acquired the components of this fish tank and its underwater plant garden shortly after moving into No. 53. Once he began to stock it with tropical fish, he was so thrilled by their colors and the abstract patterns on their skin, and by the sea sponges and the dramatic forms of the plants, that he wondered only why it had not occurred to him previously to have this treasure house. When the students were present, Klee would first switch the light on and off so that everyone could observe how the fish responded. Then he would gently coax some of the colorful creatures to swim away from the aquarium walls, so that the fish that they were concealing could become more visible.

  If the students hoped to see Klee’s artwork as clearly, they were out of luck. There were always a lot of paintings, both in progress and completed, propped against the furniture and attached to rods suspended from the picture molding, but Klee encouraged his visitors to focus more on the fish performing their underwater dance, arrayed in brilliant colors and bold markings.

  Nonetheless, the students admired Klee’s collection of fine paper and his large clay pots filled with meticulously kept brushes, as well as all his thinners and lacquers and varnishes. And when they were invited to dine, they became aware that he prepared food the way he painted: spontaneously, without a cookbook, taking his inspiration from the ingredients he had on hand, using only the recipes he had developed in his own mind and altering them easily in response to the number of diners expected and the time he had to prepare a meal.

  Occasionally, but never with advance warning, Klee would announce that it was a musical evening. He would then play Mozart on his violin, and if Lily was present, she would accompany him at the piano. There were at-home concerns at which Karl and Leo Grebe, from Jena, would join Paul and Lily to make up a quartet—or, with Felix, a quintet. In addition to the inevitable Mozart, they would perform Beethoven and Haydn. “Klee, who ordinarily seemed so calm and deliberate, would suddenly be blazing with a southern ardor and temperament; he played first violin with passion.”79 On other occasions, Felix would give his Punch and Judy performances, “which, irreverent but kind, gave away all the Bauhaus secrets.”80 That description was Lothar Schreyer’s, who said that the more of the feuds and conflicts Felix put into the puppet shows, the more thrilled his audience was.

  As an adult, Felix reminisced about those performances, and told what happened to the materials after the Bauhaus closed. The character he describes in a key role, Emilie Ester Scheyer, called Emmy by her contemporaries but always referred to as Galka historically, was a great supporter of Klee, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, and Feininger:

  It was in this Weimar period too that Klee, letting his fancy run free, created most of his last puppets (1920–1925). I had rigged up a fine puppet theatre for myself and my father supplied the scenery in answer to my desires. I kept pestering him for new figures and characters, and so it was that the puppets were made.

  Some hilarious performances were held at the Weimar Bauhaus, during which various confidential matters were aired in an unsparing and sarcastic way, vexing to those concerned and highly amusing to the others. Using plaster and an ox-bone, my father devised a puppet in the form of an unmistakable self-portrait, with huge painter’s eyes and a fur cap. A scene played in the kaffeetälchen of the Bauhaus in 1922, during the solstice holiday, was a memorable success. It featured Emmy-Galka Scheyer trying to coax my father into buying a picture by Jawlensky. Klee kept saying No and remained unyielding. Finally, working herself into a passion, Galka took the picture and smashed it to pieces over Klee’s head.

  The making of the heads was one thing, that of the clothes another. Except for the early puppets, Klee made all the clothes himself. To my mother’s annoyance, he would take strips of cloth from the drawer where she kept old clothes that needed mending, and he would sew them together on a hand-operated Singer sewing-machine. Our puppet theatre and all the scenery were left behind at Dessau in 1933. Twelve
of the puppets were destroyed in a British air-raid at Würzburg in 1945. Only thirty of them survived.81

  IN DECEMBER 1921, Klee wrote the text for a Bauhaus prospectus that addressed the rampant tensions within the school in a positive light.

  It’s a good thing that such diverse forces co-exist in our Bauhaus. I also approve of the fact that these forces fight against one another, if the result of the fighting is real creations.

  To collide with obstacles is a sensible test for each of these forces if the obstacles remain objective and impersonal in nature.

  Judgments of value always have the limitation of being subjective, and any opponent of an idea who opposes it negatively and in conflict won’t be able to determine the value of the idea as a general viewpoint.

  The general point of view won’t be decided by notions that can be called true or false; it lives and develops through a play of forces the way that the good and the bad in the universe act in unison to end up with productive results.82

  Klee regarded the Itten-Gropius battle and the feud between the factions supporting one or the other in this positive light, treating them as catalysts for creativity. It was the same outlook with which he managed to maintain a state of equilibrium in his own life.

  Klee’s impartial, temperate stance was the reason he was such a sage for his confreres. In spite of the belief of many viewers, mostly professional psychoanalysts, that Klee’s art was evidence of something between extreme neurosis and complete lunacy, he helped steady those who knew him in person. In fact, deliberately outrageous characters often found him schoolmasterishly dull. The painter Balthus once described an occasion when he and Alberto Giacometti met to call on Klee, with whom they had made an appointment, only to become so enraptured talking with each other that they failed to walk the short distance to Klee’s studio and simply stood him up. Neither felt guilty about the broken date because, much as they respected his work, they considered him unexciting as a conversationalist.

  Klee’s attitude toward Bauhaus politics was consistent with his view on the subject matter of his art. Rather than evaluate and cast judgment, he thought, one should attempt to see everything as part of a coherent whole. The same month he wrote the prospectus, he wrote to Gropius: “I welcome the fact that forces so diversely inspired are working together at our Bauhaus. I approve of the conflict between them if the effect is evident in the final product. … On the whole, there is no such thing as a right or a wrong; the work lives and develops through the interplay of opposing forces, just as in nature good and bad work together productively in the long run.” That determined neutrality made Klee, in Gropius’s eyes, “the authority on all moral questions.” The students and other teachers nicknamed him “the heavenly Father”—not because he dictated a code, but because he was above it all.83

  This was his role when, in April 1922, a circular was sent to each member of the Masters’ Council to discuss whether they should be addressed as “Professor.” There was a movement to formalize the hierarchy at the Bauhaus and reinstate the tradition Gropius had renounced.

  Klee and the other masters had to put their views in an allotted space on the circular. In his neat and intensely charged handwriting—with the letters close together, all slanted equally to the right, as in musical notation—he wrote, “I suffer more acutely under the half-measure of daily being addressed with a title without always being able to, nor wanting to, prevent this with explanations. I suffer more from this than I thought likely at first, and more than the formality of granting the title can seem harmful to me.”84 Four days after the circular was completed, there was a meeting of the masters at which Klee, taciturn but definite, voiced support for the use of titles, again reasoning that such usage would help to avoid confusion and disorder, more than emphasize rank, which didn’t interest him.

  Klee’s tempered, logical approach helped cool the atmosphere. Lothar Schreyer had made it seem as if the use of “Professor” was a catastrophic return to feudalism, but Klee’s less dramatic stance and quiet authority gave relief and prevailed.

  THE GOAL WAS SIMPLICITY that removed distractions from work. Klee decried the long meetings of the Masters’ Council as bureaucratic wastefulness that kept him from painting. After one session, he quipped that the only thing of value he had learned was that the semester would end on July 15.

  But Klee was not a curmudgeon. He generally showed up at the weekly dances where the Bauhaus band performed, in one of two Weimar pubs—the Ilmschlosschen and the Goldener Schwan—and at the costume parties. He usually didn’t dance, however. Rather, he puffed at his pipe and watched, sometimes grinning, sometimes looking bored, and then left early to go home to work.

  Yet when he wanted to, he could be as inventive in his costumes as in his paintings. One student, Farkas Molnár, wrote about a fancy dress party in those early years.85 There was a snail that squirted perfume and emitted light; Kandinsky was a radio aerial; Itten was a shapeless strange monster; and Feininger went as two triangles. Gropius was Le Corbusier. But what most impressed Molnár was “Klee as the song of the blue tree.” There are, alas, no details of what that looked like.

  10

  What today we call gender issues were not openly discussed at the Bauhaus. Active as people were, they did not talk a lot about sex. Klee, however, addressed through his art, with spectacular ease and openness, aspects of maleness and femaleness. He did so lightly and wittily, yet he brazenly depicted sexual instincts, in all their inherent complexity, without any inhibition.

  Klee’s Window Display for Lingerie invokes, in a way both worldly and carefree, sophisticated and childlike, a plethora of issues about male and female traits within a single human being. Four large figures either melt from or emerge into a shimmering, amorphous mosaic pattern. Some smaller figures, and parts of figures cut off by the picture’s right and left edges, suggest that there is a whole crowd out there of which we are seeing only part. Some of these characters sport stiletto-heeled boots and outfits that are like flared knee-length shorts or culottes; with their muscular legs and hourglass figures, they might be transvestites. They are not exactly androgynous because, rather than seeming like masculine women or feminine men, they are, alternately, very girlish or very soldierlike; instead of combining genders, they appear to flip back and forth between them. Their headgear might be helmets, large teardrops, or dunce caps. Several of the jaunty gnomelike creatures stand boldly; others look as if they are recoiling under attack.

  The words Klee has painted on the picture surface add to the incomprehensibility. They look like lettering on glass with the personages being part of a shopwindow display; this reading of the scene, the most evident one, would be even more logical were it not for the abstracted mountain peak behind these creatures who resemble marionettes as much as mannequins. The lettering at the top says “Anna Wenne Special.” The assumption we might make today, at a remove from the Weimar culture of the 1920s, is that Anna Wenne was either the brand name of a familiar product or a well-known actress. If so, the words “Feste Preise” (fixed prices) would perhaps make sense underneath the word “Special,” for which the crown on one of the ambiguous pieces of headgear serves as an exclamation point. And presumably the words “Eingang / Entrée” (“Entrance” in both German and, in smaller letters, French), with the accompanying arrow, would also make sense because, knowing what or who Anna Wenne was, we would know whether this indicates the entrance to a shop or to a theater.

  “Anna Wenne,” however, was as much an invention as everything else in the painting.

  Paul Klee, Window Display for Lingerie, 1922. On close reading, this painting is full of sexual ambiguity.

  A few years ago, Marta Schneider Brody, writing in The Psychoanalytic Review, astutely considered the significance of the name. She points out that Klee’s signature, although so small we almost cannot see it in reproductions of Window Display for Lingerie, is just to the right of the name Anna Wenne (not the usual place for a signature). The artist used
only his last name. Brody suggests he invented “Anna Wenne Klee” for a reason, a surmise corroborated by another painting, from 1923, that has the name Anna Wenne on the opposite side from the name Paul Ernst—a reversal of Ernst Paul, Klee’s actual first two names—as if both of these people were the artists. “Anna Wenne,” Brody writes, “may be an imperfect anagram for the German … Mann Nennen Ann, a man named Ann. The anagram is formed by transposing the letters and inverting the letter W to form the letter M.”86

  “Anna” was the name of Klee’s maternal grandmother. Anna Frick was the person who had started him, at about the age of three, making art, and who had protected him as a left-hander. It was under her guidance that he developed the idea of painting and drawing being forms of play. This occurred at the same time in his early childhood when he wanted to wear “ravishing lace-trimmed panties” and “was sorry I was not a girl myself.”87

  ANNI ALBERS JOYFULLY RECALLED that every six months or so Klee would tack his most recent work to the walls of a corridor at the Weimar Bauhaus. These displays were among the greatest experiences of her life. She and other people spent hours deliriously studying the work; it’s easy to see why.

  To someone like Anni—sexually ambivalent, determined to shake off the traditional expectations of what women were to do with their lives—the crossing over suggested by Window Display for Lingerie, the fanciful rather than grave approach to the issues at hand, was liberating. So was the further doubleness of “Eingang—Entrée.” The word for “entrance” is masculine in German (der Eingang) and feminine in French (une entrée). With entrance itself such a sexually suggestive idea, the use of both languages is a stroke of Klee’s genius. The combining of male and female roles not only pervaded Klee’s work at the Weimar Bauhaus; it was also apparent in his atypical life, where, in Lily’s absence, he was Felix’s main caregiver as well as the family cook.