The Bauhaus Group Page 24

  THE KLEES WERE CONTENT with the way of life Weimar eventually afforded them. After a while they were playing chamber music more regularly, generally twice a week, and there were first-rate concert performances to attend when Klee wanted a break from his routine of painting, teaching, and homemaking. He had an unusually discerning ear. On one occasion, when Lily was away and he went to an all-Mozart event, he reported to her that a violin concerto had been performed with great sensitivity, except for the kettledrum—an image that would appear in his later paintings—which remained “slightly somber and deaf.” “The beautiful clarinet concerto” had “unfortunately [been] played rather academically. And to finish, a sequence of six dances, splendidly played: among them a German dance, Canary, Organgrinder, Sleigh ride. All wonderfully pleasing compositions, you laugh and cry at the same time. The conductor is a real artist, virtuosic, subtle. Primarily intellectual. Owl-faced, still quite young. He understands the strings particularly well, the schoolmasters had to sparkle with wit, he dictated every last note. We all have our failings and one regrets that he shows no naïveté at all. His shaping of every detail sometimes borders on the excessive.”172

  Klee judged music using many of the same criteria he applied to his own paintings: the emphasis on balance, the wish for simultaneous insouciance and professionalism. If art and music were to provide grace and beauty in a turbulent world and to be the source of stability and salvation, they needed to be flawless yet fresh. For Klee, Mozartian qualities could ward off despair. Only the onset of World War II, and the recognizable approach of his own death, would reverse the salubrious effects of his work and make it more a requiem than a celebration. At the end, the kettledrum, one of Klee’s chosen subjects, would be unmistakably thunderous.

  AT JUST ABOUT THE SAME TIME that he attended the Mozart concert, Klee painted Dance of the Red Skirts (see color plate 15). Unlike the conductor of the Mozart, he managed the extraordinary feat of maintaining his naïveté. The dancing figures—at first there appear to be four of them, but then fragments of others begin to come into view—have sticklike limbs and facial features denoted only by dots and lines that could have been drawn by a child. This is not the case of a grownup trying to be cute. The drawing has the freshness of art by an eight-year-old, but its consummate technical virtuosity is undisguised.

  Klee had all the skills he admired in the young orchestra conductor. For Dance of the Red Skirts, he sprayed many of the colors through an atomizer to achieve the harmonic blend he desired. Beyond the sprayed hues, intense dashes of vivid red bring to life some mysterious swirls of a more somber, browner red in the background of the painting. That darker red relates elegantly to the rich earthy green with which it is enmeshed. The minor and major notes have been given equal attention; in the entire mélange, every element performs impeccably.

  As for being academic: no one could accuse Klee of this trait he looked down upon for its lack of imagination and its conformity to tired rules. The subject matter of Dance of the Red Skirts was unique. Characters float hither and yon in a universe that is simultaneously a city and a forest, and is paint-brushed vividly. Klee’s invented world is as sinister as it is lighthearted, not only because of the color effects and the frightening hidden depths of space created by the caves and black windows, but also because of the macabre looks on some of the dancers’ faces, and the extreme separateness of each of them. Like Mozart in his dances, Klee invested his subject with pulse and tension; these are whirling dervishes.

  His Battle Scene from the Comic-Fantastic Opera The Seafarer, from the previous year, is similar (see color plate 4). The orchestration is exquisite. The background moves to the left, to the right, above, and below simultaneously; a blue-white-black spectrum, created by the juxtaposition of hand-drawn squares and rectangles, vibrates and shimmers like a jewel. There is opacity, translucency, and the creation of light all at once—with the result that the painting initially fills us with joy.

  Then, as one looks closely at the drama in front of this stained-glass-like background, the mood changes. Although the scenario is patterned with the delicacy of a Byzantine mosaic, and is composed as carefully as a fine miniature, it is nasty. A warrior, whose helmet gives him brutal force, is balanced on a boat he dominates; from his position of power he is spearing a fish in the mouth. But the fish is no innocent victim; the creature has jagged teeth, and is some sort of sea monster who is using his tail to try to penetrate yet another monstrous fish—unless, perhaps, this second fish is about to capture the monster that is poking it. A third sea creature, like a seal, looks more innocent, but miserable.

  The placid, even-tempered man revealed great violence in his graceful art!

  17

  In his first years in Weimar, Klee could not afford to travel far during the holidays, but he still relished the occasional chance to get away. In 1923, he stayed on the island of Baltrum in the North Sea, and, on the way back to Weimar, visited Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky. Schwitters, who made wonderfully inventive collages out of detritus like discarded bus tickets and newspaper fragments, and assembled junk into sculptures, the largest of which filled an entire room, lived in Hannover. The Russian Jewish Lissitzky, who had gotten his start illustrating Yiddish children’s books in order to advance Jewish culture in his homeland, and who was now an avant-garde architect, painter, photographer, and designer, recently involved with Kazimir Malevich in the development of Suprematism and working on horizontal skyscrapers intended to encircle Moscow, lived in Berlin. Klee valued the contact with these younger artists.

  Klee habitually bought fourth-class train tickets, but he did not always travel in the worst car. On one occasion when he, Lily, and Felix were going to Erfurt, he had them sit in a second-class coach. He and Lily were both wearing fur coats, which did the trick; the conductor looked at the tickets, then looked at them, and said it was fine. The whole family felt triumphant. On a trip from Weimar to Munich, however, a less tolerant conductor said a ticket was required for Fritz. “Since when are there cat tickets?” asked Klee.173 The conductor gave in.

  In September 1924, thanks to sales through Goltz and Galka Scheyer, Klee’s financial situation had improved enough for them to take a spectacular trip to Sicily. Lily was in good form, happy about her own experience and also about what it was for Klee. She wrote “Emmy” Scheyer about the journey, her first south of the Italian lakes. Although she was not as articulate as her husband, Lily was enthusiastic about the same things: “a tremendous artistic experience for Klee. … The bar cliffs, burned to a brown, rising up, steep and menacing. The sky always sunny and blue. African building techniques. Dazzlingly white. The singing of the people, African. Monstrous vegetation. Orange groves, cypress groves, lemon groves. Olives, and the cliffs covered all the way up with cacti full of thousands and thousands of figs. The sea deep blue …”174 The highlights for Klee were in Taormina, the vertical village in the shadow of Mount Etna, and the Greek theater at Syracuse. In the village of Gela, he stopped his car and became reverent, knowing that Aeschylus had died there.

  After Sicily, the Klees spent nine days in Rome, where Lily was enchanted by the women dressed so beautifully in black silk. She noted with delight that none had short hair—in contrast to her own, which had recently been cropped and curled, prompting her to write Scheyer, “Yielding a very round page-boy’s head. Wonderfully comfortable.”175 Lily also reported on the stockings, “mostly salmon or light fleshtones,” and the admirable Roman women’s leather shoes. “An incomparable impression. We’ve decided, as soon as possible, to spend an entire winter in the South, and possibly in Southern Italy.”176

  Once back in Weimar, Klee used his memory of the trip to nourish his art, painting the enchanting landscapes and ruins of sunny Sicily. He stayed as remote as he could from the mounting hostilities that were dominating Bauhaus life: the faculty members pitted against one another, the townspeople and new government threatening the school’s future, the grave financial situation—by making vib
rant paintings of the place where he had been so happy.

  WHILE THE WEIMAR BAUHAUS was on the brink of folding in the bitter cold November of 1924, Klee wrote Lily recollections of Taormina and Syracuse and said that he had “the sunshine inside” him. “I am still penetrated by the warmth of the impressions of Sicily; I think only of that, am completely in the landscape, in its abstraction; there are some things which are beginning to emerge; two days ago, I started to paint again. What else is there to do?”177

  A week later, when the future of the Bauhaus was in even greater doubt, he wrote Lily, “I am carrying inside myself the mountains and sun of Sicily. Everything else is insipid.”178

  Klee did not particularly care about the important exhibitions of his work at Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin and in New York with the Societé Anonyme, or about the way the success of these shows led to sales both to collectors and to museums. What had a greater impact was when Fritz died, leaving him “inconsolable.” Yet, even after the new, conservative Thuringian government was elected in Weimar and he knew funding for the Bauhaus would dry up, he maintained his usual imperturbability in writing Lily, “I am impregnated to such a degree by my Sicilian impressions that this touches me little inside. The beauty of the park as it withers.”179

  AS THE BAUHAUS BEGAN to fall out of favor with the government, Klee’s Swiss nationality was one of the reasons the school was accused of “favouring Jews and foreigners at the expense of true Germans.” Powerful nationalists were vocal in charging the school with “promoting ‘Spartacist-Jewish’ tendencies.”180 Besides Klee, the other foreigners at the Bauhaus included Lyonel Feininger, who was American, and several Hungarians, among them Marcel Breuer.

  Klee himself abhorred nationalism. In that same time period, he corrected a phrase in an essay by Oskar Schlemmer, changing it from “German art” to “art in Germany.”181 It’s just the sort of detail he would have noticed, drawing a distinction between xenophobic language and the information about where art happened to be made.

  Once Gropius learned that the Bauhaus masters’ teaching contracts would be renewed for a maximum of six months and could be terminated at any point, and it was clear that the Bauhaus would not survive, Klee was the least vociferous of the masters, but he was also the conscience of the group. Although he would rather have avoided the politics and escaped anything that distracted him from painting, fostering the creativity of his students, and living harmoniously, Klee faced his new situation squarely. Recognizing that the consequence of the government’s refusal to continue to pay faculty salaries was that the school could not go on, even though the Weimar officials were not technically shutting it down, he was one of the nine signatories to a public statement declaring that the Bauhaus would be dissolved. He and Director Gropius, together with his fellow masters Feininger, Kandinsky, Marcks, Adolf Meyer, Moholy-Nagy, Muche, and Schlemmer, had no choice but to acknowledge that the end had come.

  The Bauhaus, these signatories announced through their terse statement to the press, had been “built out of their initiative and conviction.” But now the government that had formerly supported this wonderful and idealistic venture had undermined it just at the crucial moment when the state was going to be relieved of the financial burden it had borne, and when a Bauhaus Corporation, backed by private industry (120,000 marks had already been invested), was about to be established. “We deplore the fact that interference in the objective and always nonpolitical cultural work of the Bauhaus by party-political intrigues has been tolerated and supported,” declared Klee and the other unhappy masters.182

  The notion of six-month revocable contracts made the idea of the new corporation “illusory for the people responsible for it.”183 There is no knowing who worded what in the public statement, but the word “illusory” could well have been picked by Klee, who had the rare ability to ferret out and label the essential nature of human action.

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  Once everyone had accepted the idea that the Bauhaus in Weimar was no more and was preparing to leave, Klee decided to move to Frankfurt. But when representatives from the city of Dessau came to Weimar on February 12, 1925, they met with the Bauhaus faculty in Klee’s studio. It was there that Kandinsky and Muche were delegated to go to Dessau a week later to look around.

  Lyonel Feininger felt that Klee had contemplated moving to Frankfurt instead of staying with the school because he thought only of his own interests, not of the future of the Bauhaus. While others respected Klee’s detachment, Feininger considered it unacceptable. Feininger wrote Julia that Klee was concerned “entirely” with his own “business and no one else’s.”184

  Feininger’s resentment grew into rage. The only Bauhaus faculty member who was jumping ship was Gerhardt Marcks, who was moving to Halle. Everyone else, except for Klee, was valiantly struggling with the decision to move to Dessau, accepting the requisite personal sacrifices and inconvenience. While all of the painters were suffering from financial problems and would have preferred to work independently had that been possible, Feininger disparaged the way Klee kept his head in the clouds and was the last to wake up to the realities the rest of the group had already acknowledged. “Dear old Klee, he was quite upset yesterday, and said, ‘Yes, now I am beginning to understand you!’ He would have preferred to take ‘a good long pause.’ “185

  That Klee only now grasped the urgency of the situation, and did so phlegmatically, was intolerable to the American. Most of the people at the Bauhaus admired that this was an intrinsic part of who Klee was, but Feininger was among the bitter few who were enraged by Klee’s apparent calm.

  WHEN KANDINSKY AND MUCHE and their wives reported that the masters’ houses would be ready in October, their future inhabitants were ecstatic. The location where the Mulde and Elbe rivers met—at a confluence with fine prospects for fishing, sailing, and motorboating—was ideal. Yet while everyone else was enthusiastic, Klee was not. Feininger complained to Julia that Klee remained passive while still waiting to hear about his possible employment in Frankfurt. “Does nothing!” he barked.186

  In fact, Klee was assessing the overall situation—with warranted skepticism. Gropius, having embraced the move initially, got cold feed about it in mid-March. Only a third of the necessary funding had been assured; the masters’ houses were not such a certain thing after all.

  Felix Klee later recalled, “Klee remained rather reserved even towards his students. At the Bauhaus, we had nicknamed him ‘The Good God,’ which held a hint of nastiness, and you can easily imagine that he had to show some reserve. But it was a protection rampart needed by the modest and thoughtful man he was.”187 If Feininger did not find him an enthusiastic part of the team, it’s because he always needed to mull things over and contemplate the various aspects of a situation in his own way.

  AS THE BAUHAUS PREPARED to leave Weimar for Dessau, there was considerable disagreement concerning the overall direction of the school. Moholy-Nagy saw the direction of art depending more and more on mechanical effects, and favored projected images, both slides and movies, over old-fashioned “static painting.” It was an approach that made Klee “very uneasy.” Klee’s own belief that nature, and what was organic and instinctive, was vital to art, and his attachment to ancient and so-called primitive forms of expression for their direct connection to human feeling and handwork had no place in the trend championed by Moholy-Nagy. Moreover, Gropius deemed Moholy-Nagy’s approach “the most important at the Bauhaus.”188 All of this added to Klee’s uncertainty as to whether he should remain with the school. What was going to happen, and would he be able to continue on his own terms, once they left the city of Goethe?

  1. PAUL KLEE, Gifts for J, 1929. This painting commemorated the unusual arrival of Klee’s gifts for his fiftieth birthday.

  2. PAUL KLEE, The Potter, 1921. While most of Klee’s subject matter had no precise location, this watercolor depicted one of the most active workshops at the Bauhaus.

  3. PAUL KLEE, Postcard for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibiti
on. In this small image, Klee evoked the fantastic energy and originality of the upcoming presentation of the Bauhaus’s achievement from its first four years.

  4. PAUL KLEE, Battle Scene from the Comic-Fantastic Opera The Seafarer, 1923. In a single painting, Klee made violence seem comic, and presented what was initially charming as being fraught with danger.

  5. PAUL KLEE, Individualized Measurement of Strata, 1930. This painting, completely opposite in nature from its formulaic title, reveals Klee’s extraordinary ability to make lively movement and establish rich rhythm with limited forms and colors.

  6. PAUL KLEE, Fish Magic (Large Fish Picture), 1925. With an aquarium full of tropical fish at home, Klee was riveted to the underwater universe.

  7. GABRIELE MÜNTER, Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table in Murnau, 1912. In Münter’s country house in a Bavarian mountain village, Kandinsky pushed his art into unprecedented realms of abstraction.

  8. WASSILY KANDINSKY, Theory of Three Primary Colors Applied to the Three Elementary Forms. This image was printed in Staatliches Weimar in 1923.

  9. WASSILY KANDINSKY, Small Worlds IV, 1922. Shortly after arriving at the Weimar Bauhaus, Kandinsky produced a series of prints in various media that remain to this day among his best-known work.