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 may 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.