The Bauhaus Group Page 23

  Paul Klee, Man-Fish-Man-Eater, 1920. Klee’s vivid imagination was grounded in natural elements, however startling the results.

  The man-fish-man-eater has no legs, one amputated arm, and female breasts. It looks vicious, but then so do the fish it has imbibed; only the little humanoid inside its stomach has an innocence to it.

  The ease with which this image has been drawn, the insouciance of the lines, and the overall impression of breeziness impart a casualness: we do not feel the call to any interpretation beyond the obvious. “We eat other creatures; we enjoy having them in our stomachs; we take the nourishment; and then we shit,” it says boldly. There is, however, neither commentary nor judgment.

  KLEE’S ATTITUDE IS WHAT Willi Rosenberg provided as evidence of the artist’s schizophrenia, even if to most of the people at the Bauhaus it defined his genius. To render such a surreal vision with Mozartian artistry, rather than in the strident style of artists like Dalí or Max Ernst, was disconcerting to the many people who shared Rosenberg’s views. They could not reconcile his light-touched, graceful, dexterous style with his imagination. They regarded Klee as neurotic because he was as restrained in his persona as he was uninhibited in his art, and more readily accepted the surrealist lifestyles of people like André Breton.

  Klee’s revelations were profound rather than superficial; he understood the distinction between human thought at its most expansive (not, as Rosenberg said, “bizarre,” but, rather, inevitable—to anyone willing to accept the wanderings of his own mind) and forms of behavior that he, and most of his admirers, would have found unsavory. The contrast between his distant persona and his uninhibited art was part of the fundamental fascination he elicited from the Bauhaus community. As Marta Schneider Brody points out, “No matter whom he happened to be with, Klee was always reserved, not deliberately, but because he could not be otherwise. Although intensely perceptive, he seemed to live in another world. Even on the occasion of festivities arranged in his honor, Klee remained his usual self. His withdrawal was so compellingly apparent that no one dared to trespass upon his private world.”154

  Klee had adopted his persona intentionally. He admitted:

  I have developed a cunning, practical strategy. … What is most intimate for me remains most sacredly locked up. By this, I mean not only love—for it is easy for me to talk about this—but all the exposed position around it, upon which the assaults of fate in one form or other have some prospect of success.

  Whether this strategy may not lead to a certain impoverishment will appear in time. I did not choose it freely, it developed early in me.

  Perhaps it is because my instincts as a creative artist are the most important.

  If I had to paint a perfectly truthful self-portrait, I would show a peculiar shell. And inside—it would have to be made clear to everyone—I sit [alive] like a kernel in a nut. This work might also be named allegory of incrustation.155

  In part he was protecting himself from the terrifying places to which his mind could lead him:

  I’m quite aware that I’m entering a vast region where no proper orientation is at first possible. This terra incognita is mysterious indeed.

  But the steps forward must be taken. Perhaps the hand of mother nature, now come much closer, will help me over many a rough spot. …

  I begin logically with chaos, it is the most natural start. In so doing, I feel at rest because I may, at first, be chaos myself.156

  He was comfortable with what others deemed his madness.

  KLEE HAD ALL the more reason to develop that appearance of control because his wife was increasingly lacking in it. As a devoted father, he knew at least one parent had to seem sane. It is impossible to get a clear image of Lily, who was regarded simply as a pleasant but distant figure by the Bauhaus community, and who in the literature, including Grohmann, is depicted mainly as the source of the couple’s financial stability in the early years and as Klee’s musical accompanist. But while Klee was at the Weimar Bauhaus, his wife became increasingly remote. She suffered frequently from respiratory problems and angina, was extremely sensitive to hot weather, and was, at least in Felix’s eyes, often very tense.

  Felix Klee wrote of Lily: “My mother’s nerves had probably suffered from the days when she gave all those piano lessons and felt under great stress. She had become impatient and unstable, and began spending long periods in sanatoriums, where she had time to read the paper, write letters and distance herself from her usual life.”157

  Klee’s insistence on privacy was in its own way also neurotic, but his was a neurosis tightly controlled. Lothar Schreyer’s recollections provide a clear image:

  Pausing in front of Paul Klee’s door, I listened for a moment. Not a sound. Knocked, giving the signal we had agreed on for our visits. Paul Klee unlocked the door and let me in. He locked it again, put the key into his pocket and pushed the piece of cardboard that hung from the latch over the keyhole. He did not like to have anyone peering through the keyhole. … In the center of his studio three easels stood side by side, an unfinished picture on each of them.158

  Schreyer conveyed the magic as well as the deliberate isolation of that secret universe: “And so I was back in the wizard’s kitchen. Of course the whole of our Bauhaus in Weimar was a kind of laboratory. But this was the place where the real magic potions were brewed. The studio smelled strongly of a pleasant mixture of coffee, tobacco, canvas, oil paints, fine French varnishes, lacquer, alcohol and peculiar compounds.”159

  The goal of all the props was, of course, the making of art. This was part of what enabled Klee to stand on solid ground, whatever the workings of his mind were. Unlike Lily, he had found the means to use the cacophonous mix of his conscious and his unconscious thought as catalysts for spectacular creations.

  15

  Klee’s 1923 Group Linked by Stars, an oil and watercolor on paper, could be seen as a portrait of his students taking in his ideas. Some of the animated sticklike figures stand on tiptoe; others are seated. Some reach upward as far as possible, while others hold their elbows crooked. Regardless, the blood is moving through their arteries and veins, and their bones and muscles are functioning in tandem—all as Klee has described.

  We don’t see any of this in detail, but we feel it because of the marvelous way in which Klee—for all the sophistication of this complex composition, with its musical overlays of forms and its translucent and opaque layers—has articulated his subject with childlike simplicity and corresponding childlike excitement. It is as if all the characters are connected by their exuberance. They are raising their arms to celebrate knowledge and nature, and while they stand in place on the ground, they are weightless, the way music and light are, as if the magnificence of thought and movement has caused them to levitate. Despite his concern about the cost of groceries, Klee was in another world, a cosmic universe in which music can be heard perpetually; in this depiction of the “group linked by stars,” the students are in that wonderful territory with him.

  The area directly above the simple flat ovals that represent the characters’ heads is a symphonic burst of square and diamond and circular forms. Suggesting a Renaissance pageant, it also captures the infatuation with these basic geometric shapes that prevailed in every domain at the Bauhaus.

  HALF A CENTURY AFTER STUDYING with Klee, when the precious world of the Weimar Bauhaus had long been shattered, Anni Albers claimed that she had heard him lecture on only one or two occasions. Her notebooks indicate, however, that she had in fact attended numerous talks by him. One can understand her confusion: Klee often restated the same idea, albeit always with renewed enthusiasm, as if it had just been born in him.

  He repeated himself deliberately, for this was the pattern of nature. On January 9, 1924, following the Christmas holidays, Klee drew a parallel between his teaching and plant growth as he had explained it in the first class. “When we began—one must make a start somewhere, even though there is no real starting point—we proceeded from a stage that ma
y be compared with a germinating seed.” The goal all along had been, he said, “to trace the mystery of creativity, the influence of which we felt even in the development of a line. … We were not bold enough to think we could actually uncover the secret mainsprings of creativity, but we did wish to get as close to them as possible.”160

  He counseled the weavers to immerse themselves in the materials at hand and the techniques for connecting them, not to focus on the larger goal. Klee excoriated the idea of artists anticipating foregone conclusions. “Form as semblance is an evil and dangerous spectre. What is good is form as movement, as action. … What is bad is form as immobility, as an end. … What is good is form-giving. What is bad is form. Form is the end, death. Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life.” This was the imperative of making art, and this was the urgency with which the most passionate creators at the Bauhaus viewed things. Klee continued: “These sentences constitute the gist of the elementary theory of creativity. We have got to the heart of it. Its significance is absolutely basic; and I don’t think I can repeat the sentences above often enough.” He was adamant, as the best of his students would be. Exult in the making! Feel growth and process! To be an artist, you must follow a similar course to the one he had charted in plants and rivers: “The approach, as the work’s essential dimension, must not tire us. It must be refined, develop interesting offshoots, rise, fall, dodge, become more or less clearly marked, grow wider or narrower, easier or harder.”161

  MANY OF THE IDEAS that Klee put into his teaching were published. In 1923, he wrote Ways of Studying Nature and in 1924 The Pedagogical Sketchbook. He also codified his views on creation in a lecture he gave in Jena in 1924, declaring that

  the artist has coped with this bewildering world—reasonably well, we shall assume—in his own quiet way. He knows how to find his way in it well enough to bring some order into the stream of impressions and experiences impinging on him. This orientation among the phenomena of nature and human life … that’s like the root part of our tree.

  From there the artist—who is the trunk of the tree—receives the sap that flows through him and through his eye.

  Under the pressure of this mighty flow, he transmits what he has seen to his work.

  His work, then, is like the crown of the tree, spreading in time and space for all to see.162

  The calm assuredness with which he said this betrayed the grace with which he saw himself as transmitter and receiver. He took neither blame nor credit for what he had done, and while acknowledging that “both his competence and his sincerity” had been doubted in attacks on his lack of verisimilitude, he easily dismissed the loud criticism of his own work. It was all okay because the artist “is neither master nor servant but only a mediator. His position, then, is a modest one indeed; and the beauty of the crown, that’s not the artist himself—it has only passed through him.”163

  This was the humility with which the greatest of the Bauhauslers had embarked on their life’s work. To see the Bauhaus as a design agenda in which a few gifted people tried to impose a single style on society is totally off course.

  When the notes for the Jena lecture were translated by Douglas Cooper and published in English, Herbert Read, one of the greatest proponents of modern art in its early years, wrote in his introduction that Klee’s notes “constitute the most profound and illuminating statement of the aesthetic basis of the modern movement in art ever made by a practicing artist.”164 Yet in that period of hostility toward the Bauhaus, Klee was one of the main butts of mockery. The painter Vilmos Huszar personally attacked Klee in the magazine De Stijl, writing, “Klee … scribbles sickly dreams.”165 This was the time when a Weimar newspaper article in 1924 described Bauhaus people rolling around naked outside, resulting in unmarried women getting pregnant. The school administration was accused of being irresponsible, not only permitting this but even encouraging it; the coup de grace was that a cradle built in the furniture workshop was carried to the flat of an unwed mother-to-be as a sort of victory celebration. Klee’s art was considered further evidence of the lunacy encouraged at the school.

  Gropius, according to Huszar, had made a monument in the Weimar cemetery that was “the result of a cheap literary idea. … In a country which is torn politically and economically, can one justify the spending of large sums of money on as institute such as the Bauhaus is today? My answer is: No—No—No!”166

  With attacks like this becoming widespread, Klee, as unperturbed and unflappable as ever, demonstrated that art gave both meaning and stability to life. Wrestling joy and a sense of plenitude out of the morass caused by the invective and nastiness of outsiders, it was the answer.

  16

  In 1924, Galka Scheyer created the Blue Four, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of Klee and her three other chosen artists—Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky—with exhibitions and lectures in the United States. Scheyer, then thirty-five, came from a cultured Jewish family from Braunschweig. Owners of a canning factory, Scheyer’s parents were sufficiently prosperous that their only daughter had been able to study music and art and then to study English at Oxford. But while they gave her some financial support, she still needed to earn her own living, and intended to do so by selling the art of these four painters.

  In October 1919, Jawlensky introduced Scheyer to Klee in Munich. Scheyer immediately developed a love for his work, and also became unusually close to the elusive Lily, whom she called Kleelilien. She first stayed with the Klees at the Weimar Bauhaus at the end of 1921, spending New Year’s with them. A photograph shows Scheyer and Klee standing outside in front of bare trees in the snow. The fair-skinned Scheyer, with her strong jaw and chiseled features, smiles radiantly, her eyes sparkling. She wears a jaunty knitted cap and a fantastic cape with a wide, Pierrot-style collar, and is bravely without a scarf, her long swanlike neck exposed to the winter temperatures.

  Scheyer appears consumed with happiness, standing next to Paul Klee, who, ten years her elder, resembles a little boy dressed as a grownup. This was the era when he sported a well-trimmed mustache and pointed beard, his sideburns looking as if they had been drawn with charcoal for a school play. He is wearing his Russian-style fur cap, and his officer’s overcoat is buttoned to the top, the sleeves too long. In his reserved way, he appears every bit as happy as she does.167

  Paul Klee and Galka Scheyer in Weimar, 1922, photographed by Felix Klee. The intrepid Scheyer adored Klee’s work and greatly enlarged its international audience.

  Scheyer was, indeed, pleased to be there. She wrote Jawlensky that she had been immersing herself in Klee’s work, starting with his childhood drawings, and considered him “the greatest draftsman we have.” For her, the art and the man had the same wonderful freshness and allure. “Klee’s hand, his line, has an immense vitality and already in his very earliest drawings was free of any external influences and leads its own life. Klee is a fantastic person—good-natured, well-balanced, harmonious, and delightful to be with.”168

  When Scheyer bought a work by Klee for herself at the start of 1924—his 1912 drawing Galloping Horse—he wrote her a letter that was, in its tone and priorities, pure Klee: droll, quirky, serious in the guise of being flip. The salutation is “Dear Emmy Scheier! Or Emmi Scheyer!” This is followed by his opening sentence: “My wife is more in favor of canned goods”—referring to an unusual form of payment Scheyer had proposed for the drawing. From there he launches into comments about the organization that Scheyer was then in the process of forming. He is adamant about the name: “Under no circumstances should it end in-ism or-isten or-ists; it should rather … suggest nothing less than … that which is the most beautiful about it, the friendship.”169

  In March, Klee wrote a poem on the back of a Munich New Secession envelope addressed to Paul Westheim, editor of Das Kunstblatt, a German art magazine. The poem is called “Under the Title,” which derived from the first sentence of the official announcement of the Blue Four: “Under the title ‘the
Blue Four,’ the artists Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee have joined together in order to introduce the youth of North America to a selection of their most important works.”170 The announcement explains that the organization would get going with lectures and an exhibition organized by “Mrs. E. E. Scheyer” at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Klee’s poem on the envelope declares:

  Under the title

  The Blue Four have banded together

  for the purpose

  of marketing

  bad art

  in the United States

  of America

  under the direction

  of Madame Nursemaid

  Emmy Scheyer

  the following four

  professors blue

  one from the occupied

  territory of Schablensky, the

  three in the heart

  of Germany called

  the State Bauhaus

  namely Linseed Oil

  Onefinger, Prince Schlabinsky

  and Lord Pauline von Grass

  request Lord

  Westheim

  to make this known

  in his Kunstblatt

  The Ladder

  The Easel

  The Impresaria

  The Expressaria

  The Express-Sahra

  The Four-Wheel Wagon171

  Lord Pauline von Grass had, in the last stanza, made a list that was practically singable, in German as in English. The sequence of words—in its flow, randomness, and vital sense of unity (the four-wheel wagon is a reference to Jawlensky, Feininger, Kandinsky, and him working in tandem)—invokes Klee’s own serious work of the period.

  A few days after writing his poem, Klee and the other three wheels went to the official Thuringischer notary and signed a power of attorney, written in English, authorizing Scheyer to represent their “Interests, Artistic and Pecuniary, in all foreign countries, particularly the United States of America.” The relationship led to exhibitions and minor sales for all of them and above all encouraged them with the knowledge that, regardless of the occasional critical diatribe directed their way, their work was now appreciated on more than one continent.