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.