In his dealings with the art world, as in his relationships with the other faculty members at the Bauhaus, Klee was generally disposed to like people. That May, when the Berlin-based art dealer Alfred Flechtheim called on him, Klee put aside the many negative things he had heard and found his visitor “a purebred, and very amusing.” What counted was that when he showed Flechtheim a variety of works, the dealer found them “mouthwatering.”66 For Klee, the assurance that his pictures brought pleasure to others was more important than almost anything else.
Klee depended on the calm of his home life, even if he and Lily were geographically separated. They both enjoyed keeping everything placid, although they delighted in the shenanigans of others. Klee wrote his wife that once they had both definitively left Munich, they would need someone who was still there to keep them posted on the latest scandals, but the two of them never were grist for the sort of gossip they both relished about others. Klee was so domestic that he wrote, “Laundry is the household task I haven’t tried yet. If I could take it on, I’d be more universal than Goethe.”67 In the pictures, there was eccentricity and madness, as well as unabashed sexual fantasizing; in Klee’s life, all was order and calm. Fritz, the cat to whom he always sent greetings in his many letters home, was the only capricious member of the family.
That even keel, the simplicity and openness, enabled Klee to pour complexity and drama into his work. Gropius, juggling three women and needing to keep secrets, made architecture that had a look of utmost frankness, coolness, and clarity; Klee, for whom the greatest drama was Felix having a cold, or the unexpectedly wintry weather that June of 1921, made art full of mystery. He could afford to celebrate irresolution.
TO KLEE, life in the park was more important than the Bauhaus. In mid-June, once winter seemed over at last, he wrote Lily: “The weather is fine. The morning scene in the valley of the Saal: a delight; the blossoming, velvet fields. There are no more flowers other than the wild roses.”68 These seasonal transformations, the spring blossoms and the new textures that came to life as the earth warmed up, were the subject of his paintings. The tensions and joys of trees and flowers fighting their way into existence animate Klee’s work of the period.
On June 21, he wrote Lily, “I’m well, which is to say that I’m working.”69 But he was getting more and more restless to have Lily and Felix and Fritz there. Klee met the seventeen-year-old Manon Gropius when she was visiting, which increased his longing to have his own child around. He felt that Mutzi physically resembled Alma more than Walter, and thought she was nice and intelligent. He empathized with this child who did not get along well with others her own age. The evening he met Mutzi, the strawberries were delicious; he wrote Lily a glowing report, penning it on such good-quality stationery that the surface and weight of the paper brought on further encomia about the pleasures of writing on such a wonderful substance. His only complaint was that she and Felix and Fritz were not there.
IN THE FALL OF 1921, Felix, who was soon to turn fifteen, became the youngest student at the Bauhaus. Itten may have seemed bizarre to Klee in his red suit, but the boy did well in Itten’s class. The Bauhaus offered a freedom unimaginable in normal school settings.
Felix soon began to perform puppet shows, which were so entertaining that large audiences flocked to them. Bauhaus students and faculty delighted in these spoofs of school life, richly enhanced by the colorful costumes on the puppets Klee had made for his talented son. There were some fifty different characters in all, their faces vivid caricatures of people at the Bauhaus, most of them easily recognized.
Lily had to remain in Munich to fulfill her obligations as a piano teacher, and Klee was in charge of the new household in Weimar. At last the apartment at Am Horn 53 was ready. When father and son moved in, the furnishings were still sparse, but it had an enchanting view over the park, and once Fritz arrived and the grand piano was put in place, Klee felt it had the essential ingredients of home. He was perfectly content to attend to the various domestic details. He cooked competently, and tried to make home life agreeable for his teenage son. He ordered a living room sofa; when it arrived, he thought the upholstery was hideous, but the form amused him, so he settled for it. On November 29, he wrote Lily, “I began with the principles of perspective to end up with the sensation of equilibrium in human beings.”70 Nothing in life was static; everything went through stages—whether it was responding to a new piece of furniture, making a painting, or dealing with life in general.
Having initially gone to the Bauhaus to organize an exhibition of Klee’s drawings shortly after Klee arrived in Weimar, Will Grohmann became an exceptionally astute, impartial observer of the elusive Swiss. It is from Grohmann that we have some of the sharpest images of Klee. Every morning, as Klee walked to the Bauhaus from the large apartment he loved, he would pass Goethe’s garden house. He admired its rustic style. Visiting Weimar today, one can still observe its rough plaster surface covered with a lattice for climbing plants, under a steep roof of wooden shingles; this picturesque dwelling must have enchanted Klee after he left his own wonderful house, a more standard nineteenth-century residence, also still standing, with its splendid large dormer window overlooking the park. But more important, Grohmann observed, Klee “lingered to marvel at every bird he saw or to ponder the parallel between the ages of man and the changes of season. He might talk to a snake that happened to cross his path, as if it were a human being, because after all snakes, too, form part of the cosmos.”71 Those one-sided conversations with the snakes became part of his legacy.
Paul Klee with his son, Felix, cat Fritz, and sister Mathilde in Weimar in the autumn of 1922. Klee was Felix’s more involved parent; Mathilde helped make the artist’s life run smoothly.
Klee had a choice of dirt paths in this vast park, which for the most part felt like pure countryside even if it sat alongside a city. Some of the possible routes meandered through tall grass more than a meter high in springtime—a perfect shield for snakes. The impressive trees, many more than a hundred years old, gave Klee a chance to observe the complex structure in the network of roots bulging to various heights out of the earth surrounding their massive trunks. It was not easy walking over the hilly terrain; the journey to and from the Bauhaus necessitated some fairly steep climbing and was more of an athletic feat than a promenade. But Klee delighted in listening to the chorus of birds, taking in the smells of the dense foliage, and, when he reached the river in whose clean water Goethe was known to swim, observing the strong flow over the weed beds that were visible in the shallow stretches. In the patterns of the running water, Klee gleaned a logic that he would apply to his teaching on the shared principles of natural events and the making of art.
Felix Klee would later recall:
In the fall of 1921 we moved into our new four-room apartment: Am Horn 53, second floor. At various times and in all seasons, the two of us, Klee the master and Klee the apprentice, would make our way each day through the romantic park from home to our places of work and back again. How fascinating my father made these walks with his observations about nature. The world of birds and flowers had especially bewitched him. Every day we marched along the meanderings of the gently flowing Ilm, passing by the Dessau stone and the Serpent monument or the log cabin, by Goethe’s garden house and Euphrosyne’s stone. After the beloved metropolis of Munich, we led an almost cloistered and rather irksome existence in the little town of Weimar; but even though we were shunned and ridiculed by the townspeople, we enjoyed a great deal of intellectual stimulation in the many castles, museums, and the national theater.72
If father and son did not start out together but rather walked separately, Klee would always make a mark at a precise spot in front of the bridge over the River Ilm, drawing his insignia with his cane, to let Felix know he had preceded him. Once the first snows fell, whenever there was sufficient accumulation, Klee made drawings in it for his happy son.
Felix also had vivid memories of family vacations: “From 1920 to 1922, there were also the holidays at Possenhofen by the lake of Starnberg; Klee liked fishing, and one day, as the cabin’s handrail broke, he fell in the water with his line. Lily and I were at home, in the skipper’s apartment, when we heard pflotch, pflotch in the stairway. My father was soaked. We undressed him and his clothes were hanged by the stove.”73
IN TIME, Klee was given a larger studio on the third floor of the main Bauhaus building, behind the cabinetmaker’s workshop and above the ceramics studio. Smoking a pipe while he worked, he developed numerous pictures simultaneously. Klee had a dozen easels, and each had a painting on it, in stages ranging from preliminary outlines to the verge of completion. His art supplies were well organized, as was his collection of butterflies, sea shells, tree roots, and pressed leaves. He also had a large supply of toys he had made for Felix and now used as props in his art.
Klee worked calmly, painting on holidays, scarcely noting the day of the week, always seeming relaxed. Making art was as natural for him as breathing, and easier than speaking. But the subject matter troubled others, even if it didn’t bother him. Many viewers were put off by the serpents he seemed to deify in his work. They were related to the snakes in the Goethe park, but larger. Klee readily grasped why these creatures that terrified some people had been the object of worship in ancient Egypt. They moved in such a fascinating and unusual way, and protected their mysteriousness. Like cats, his favorite of all animals, they left their human viewers with unanswered questions, evoking the ambiguity that Klee considered one of life’s great thrills.
The same year that Klee married Lily, his mother had become paralyzed. Klee had often cared for her up until her death during his first year at the Bauhaus. The next evening he had a dream in which a female ghost walked through his studio. The bereaved son then began making paintings with pronounced black borders in which he depicted the afterlife or the passage into it. His Women’s Pavilion (1921), which shows a lush forest inhabited by translucent, all-white women, should be seen as an imagined heaven. His Dying Plants (1922) is a morose watercolor in which the figure at the bottom appears to be a recently buried female corpse.
KLEE DOTED ON FELIX and heaped praise on the boy’s work. In 1985, the seventy-seven-year-old Felix recalled, “Klee followed with attention my efforts at drawing and painting. He kept all my productions, then mounted my works with the same care he used for his, and wrote on them the titles I told him. ‘The paintings of my little Felix are better than mine, too often filtered through my brain,’ said Klee to Lothar Schreyer.”74
Nonetheless, Klee cautioned his son against following in his footsteps. Felix would recall, “In 1925, when I received the title of journeyman, my father asked me: ‘And now what do you want to do? You know if I can give you advice, don’t become a painter, your life would be too difficult. Paint as much as you want, but don’t make it your main job.’—‘Then I’d like to go on the stage.’ And Klee: ‘Well, you will go on the stage.’ ”75 Klee may never have said it, but he must have recognized that his son would always be seen as the child of a better artist. His advice was clear-headed and in everyone’s best interest.