In 1923, seventeen-year-old Marianne Heymann arrived at the Bauhaus and attended the classes Klee gave for the weaving students. In 1957, in Haifa—where she ended up as a Jewish refugee from Nazism—she remembered those classes as having changed the course of her life.
Heymann describes the effect of Klee’s teaching on her and the other young women in the textile workshop: “While his words fell haltingly, we students experienced an inner transformation.” The teaching was “intimidating, intoxicating. … The absoluteness … that Klee opened our eyes to had the initial effect of overwhelming and inhibiting us. Thus, suddenly transported into a world of perception for which we were not yet mentally equipped, we naturally felt shaky, or as in a trance.”121
In the state of being induced by Klee’s teaching, the students experienced annihilation and resurrection:
Klee could “destroy” us with a single word, i.e., make our inadequacies starkly evident. We would be “dead” for several days. Then, when he felt it was enough, he would say a few friendly magical words and we would “return to life.” Klee did not look at us while he was lecturing and did not even face us. His eyes were usually fixed on his inner world. If he did look at [our efforts at textile design], it was as if he were looking through them, as though they were some inessential material, and it was necessary to discern the essence hidden by their outward appearance. … His external appearance has often been described. He reminded one of a Moorish wizard. Particularly his eyes, beard, and the oriental placidity of his movements. He had a pronounced Bernese accent and its slightly singsong tone would give all his utterances an amiable air. There was something almost plantlike about his poise and calmness.122
Heymann also vividly recalled Klee at the violin:
When he was making music, Klee’s eyes shone with an extraordinary brilliance. It was as though they were illuminated from within and radiated light. He always gave off this strange luminance while and after playing or listening to music. If I met him after a performance of a Mozart opera, I had the impression that he consisted only of his eyes, which radiated the music he had just heard. This radiance affected us with such immediacy that we had the feeling that we had been standing in the dark and had suddenly been flooded with light.123
Heymann was among the students whom Klee invited home for impromptu meals. He was gracious and would joke with his guests, but the man who was always conjuring unexpected things in the studio and kitchen alike remained distant. “We always felt as if Klee were a wizard traveling incognito from a different world.”124
Klee gave Heymann an etching of a donkey, which he inscribed to her. She was astonished to receive this gift from someone so phlegmatic in his comportment, but the element of surprise was essential to who he was. “We expected that any moment something extraordinary would happen, and it always did: a word or an allusion would transport us into his magical realm.”125
ONE OF THE PLACES where unexpected things happened was in the kitchen. Klee had always been obsessed with the details of what he ate. Starting shortly after his marriage to Lily in 1906, whenever they were apart, he would write her precise descriptions of the exact type of ham someone had served at lunch; in recounting a meeting with a friend, he would delight in such specifics as really “good coffee. The skin on the milk was, thank God, so tough that it stuck to the pot. But there were also macaroons—extra for me.”126
In one letter, he did a drawing of an extraordinary creation he called “caviar bread,” explaining that it had inspired him to take a brief holiday at a village near Bern because it was served at every meal there. “Hunger and thirst are a sensation for me!” he wrote Lily in 1916 from his military encampment in Landshut, adding, “I drink a liter of beer every day without any worries.”127 When he was a teenager, he and his cranky father often got along best when they deliberately drank a lot of beer together; Klee had developed a remarkable capacity for the yeast-fermented drink. He particularly prized “wheat beer, which tastes utterly delicious, with a piece of lemon swimming in it.”128
His taste in food was as eclectic as the subject matter of his painting, and he approached it with the same lust. During wartime, he savored “a bowl of sauerkraut with blood sausage—the best dinner very appreciated” and “a lovely dinner consisting of tea, liverwurst, herring, chocolate, bread, apple-cake, apples, no hunger.”129 Near his air force base in Cologne, early in December 1916, he “had the good luck to find a little pub where I got veal ragout with potatoes, and bread with a thick layer of liverwurst on top. I was starving like a wolf.”130 His preferred dishes and ingredients were at times like the beasts and other images in his art: suckling pig, roast mutton, on numerous occasions a horrible-sounding “sour liver,” which he describes as “very good, and useful on a winter night,”131 as well as cabbage, beets, lots of bread, and the inevitable potatoes, in various forms.
In early 1917, Klee started putting his own creative cooking ideas into letters to Lily. He advised her on how to make what sounds like a coarse hash out of leftover roast meat and “steinpilzen” (porcini mushrooms): “Cut some fat into small pieces when raw and put them through the sausage machine. Add some onions and potatoes. Fry on low heat, and use any other leftover in the sausage maker. Put the bones into the soup.”132 As in his art, what was vital was to use everything and waste nothing, and to assemble a range of small parts into something whole.
Klee was as enchanted by cooking ingredients as he was by tubes of paint, and he sometimes invested fruits or vegetables with human feelings, just as he did lines or colors. In one letter to Lily, describing the new potatoes and tomatoes (“all fine except one moldy one”) and other vegetables he will cook with two roosters, he reports, “The cucumber was lying there happily too.” Often he had to make do without the desired ingredients, preparing “fried potatoes (not in oil unfortunately)” or malt coffee instead of the real thing.133 The right food could have a direct impact on what he painted after eating it. “Ein schön gebratenes Gochelchen” someone sent to his house “made for a nice, inspiring meal and provided me with the energy for a very colorful watercolor.”134
ONCE KLEE ARRIVED in Weimar, the subject of what he had eaten preoccupied him all the more. He wrote Lily that his solution to living alone in that period before she and Felix moved to the Bauhaus was, every day, to make himself boiled eggs and eat them with poppy seed bread, ham, and tea, and in that period before inflation worsened to dine at a restaurant in the evening: this strategy intruded least on his painting time. Once Felix was in Weimar and they had a maid helping out, Klee delighted in the maid’s potato pancakes and instructed her on how to fry chops and exactly how to use a pullet to make a soup. He sometimes invited Oskar Schlemmer for lunch, and wanted everything to be good.
Klee regularly told Lily how famished he was, and emphasized that he needed the right foods to keep his moods in balance. On one occasion when he ate mainly wilted winter cabbage, at least there was enough leftover schnitzel so he still could paint with force. Whenever he dined on something out of the ordinary, he described it to Lily with gusto. A museum director served crab followed by what he assumed was pheasant but might have been another game bird. But the most vivid descriptions were of his own concoctions. These consisted mainly of throwing together ingredients and cooking in a completely relaxed and intuitive way. He was proud of having prepared a true “sugo”—a sauce of tomatoes and ground meat—for spaghetti, of having assembled “Háhnchen in Topf à la caccia” with onions and apples, and of giving canned peas some extra oomph with a homemade sauce of which the main ingredients were butter and flour. The repasts were frugal; he would often eat the ingredients he used for a soup the previous day, warmed up at lunchtime and then cold at night. Soup meat and beans were staples, and if the food was humble, so much the better: “It was a meal like on laundry day, and I don’t even do the laundry.”135
As in his art, Klee was obsessed with innards. He made risotto with a steamed calf’s heart—he was so happy with the cooking wine that he drank a glass as he stirred—and was pleased with tart kidneys and rice “which behaved extremely well in a piquant wine sauce.” The next night, he used the leftover sauce from the kidneys to make a minestrone “mit Blumenkohlgrûnreis und Zweibely und zum Schluss Parmesan.”136 Klee delighted in reconfiguring the same ingredients, the way he did arrows and staircases and other recurring elements in his art; he put butter and cheese into or on top of almost everything, but always in different forms or proportions.
Technique interested him in the kitchen as in the studio. He was proud to concoct a chicken soup using only a leg, to mix calf’s tongue with vegetables, and to make a mutton roast that he tied up with a string, advising his wife, “It isn’t a lot of work once one has the hang of it.”137 Returning to a favorite ingredient, the form of which was also a leitmotif in his work, he prepared calf’s heart, steamed, with vegetables. Timing was a central issue; he made a meat soup about which he instructed Lily that it was vital to add the barley only toward the end of the cooking process. He loved to experiment, and then to describe the process to his wife. On one occasion, he wrote Lily,
Yesterday I cooked and dined on a very blond but very tasty dish. I had bought sweetbreads, which at home you always eat as a lightly fried brunette dish. I remembered fairy-tale days of long ago at Marienstrasse 8 in Kirchfeld, where they looked different, and attempted a reconstruction. This was successful. I skinned them carefully and placed them in hot butter, over a low flame, and closed the lid, leaving enough time, while they steadily gave off sufficient water. Then I added a little cold water with flour and some drops of lemon juice. During this process I set the sweetbreads aside and only returned them when the sauce, which needed constant stirring, had come to the boil. That was all. Served with flat noodles—very good and very light.138
There were family politics at play here. It was an insult to his wife that a preparation he remembered from his childhood was superior to her quicker method, which had heavier results. But Klee was proud of his expertise in the kitchen. On one occasion when he was a lunch guest back in Bern and he thought he was eating “asparagus with tartar sauce”—not as unlikely as it sounds, given Bernese cooking—he wanted to confirm the ingredients, but was unwilling to have anyone think he might not have recognized them accurately. “I didn’t dare ask so I wouldn’t diminish my reputation as a chef.”139
THERE WAS A PERIOD during which Klee wrote his menus for lunch and dinner in his diary on a daily basis. He listed the meals in the same meticulous way that he catalogued his paintings, with every entry numbered to show the date.
Some of what he described were recipes to the extent that he followed a prescribed method, but he never measured ingredients, and instinct ruled. A typical entry was the one for “Gerstotto (risotto with barley instead of rice), cauliflower, mixed salad. Time ¾ hrs. Butter, onion, a bit of garlic, celery—steam 10 minutes. Brown the barley, boiling water, cheese at the end.”140 The essential ingredients were, time and again, every conceivable part of a calf, chicken in multiple preparations, more cauliflower than anyone else in history may have eaten, lots of spaghetti, often with sugo, and, otherwise, potatoes.
When he cooked offal, he saw it with his painter’s eye. Not only did the forms of hearts, kidneys, livers, and lungs figure in his art, but the functions of these organs depended on the sorts of processes he emulated on paper and canvas. The particular language, spare and direct, in which he wrote his cooking methods was consistent with the relaxed approach, and pervading ease and enjoyment, with which he painted. On one January day, following Gerstotto, he prepared “Pork kidneys. Recipe: melt butter, add finely chopped onions and garlic, celery, beets, leeks, apple, mildly steamed with a bit of water, ca. ½ hr, at the end add finely cut kidneys, increase heat, a few minutes. 3) Salad.” The combinations were his own invention. “Veal knuckles with yellow beets, celery, and leeks” called for taking out the vegetables and buttering them and then serving everything with “potatoes in their peel” and a “salad ‘Sonnenwirbel.’ ”141 The mix of textures in this rib-sticking comfort food also had parallels in his art.
The most remarkable of all Klee’s culinary inventions was lung ragout, which he first made for a midday meal on a winter Tuesday in January. Here he was more specific than usual about the timing, if as imprecise as always about the measurements:
Tuesday, a) a ragout of lungs spiced with blond spices. Recipe—Start at ½ past II—boil a little water with some salt, add the whole lungs, 12 o’clock remove the lungs and slice finely on a board, 5 past 12 return the lungs to the pot. Ingredients added immediately: a chopped onion, some garlic, a strip of lemon peel, some horseradish, two carrots, butter and pepper. Ingredients at ¼ to I: Flour dissolved in cold water, some vinegar, a lot of chopped parsley, a little nutmeg. Serve at I o’clock. b) macaroni c) salad.142
Highly unusual, structured but playful, belonging to the obscure reaches of the cosmos, two of the essentials of his life—food and art—were of a piece.