In 1924, Galka Scheyer created the Blue Four, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of Klee and her three other chosen artists—Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky—with exhibitions and lectures in the United States. Scheyer, then thirty-five, came from a cultured Jewish family from Braunschweig. Owners of a canning factory, Scheyer’s parents were sufficiently prosperous that their only daughter had been able to study music and art and then to study English at Oxford. But while they gave her some financial support, she still needed to earn her own living, and intended to do so by selling the art of these four painters.
In October 1919, Jawlensky introduced Scheyer to Klee in Munich. Scheyer immediately developed a love for his work, and also became unusually close to the elusive Lily, whom she called Kleelilien. She first stayed with the Klees at the Weimar Bauhaus at the end of 1921, spending New Year’s with them. A photograph shows Scheyer and Klee standing outside in front of bare trees in the snow. The fair-skinned Scheyer, with her strong jaw and chiseled features, smiles radiantly, her eyes sparkling. She wears a jaunty knitted cap and a fantastic cape with a wide, Pierrot-style collar, and is bravely without a scarf, her long swanlike neck exposed to the winter temperatures.
Scheyer appears consumed with happiness, standing next to Paul Klee, who, ten years her elder, resembles a little boy dressed as a grownup. This was the era when he sported a well-trimmed mustache and pointed beard, his sideburns looking as if they had been drawn with charcoal for a school play. He is wearing his Russian-style fur cap, and his officer’s overcoat is buttoned to the top, the sleeves too long. In his reserved way, he appears every bit as happy as she does.167
Paul Klee and Galka Scheyer in Weimar, 1922, photographed by Felix Klee. The intrepid Scheyer adored Klee’s work and greatly enlarged its international audience.
Scheyer was, indeed, pleased to be there. She wrote Jawlensky that she had been immersing herself in Klee’s work, starting with his childhood drawings, and considered him “the greatest draftsman we have.” For her, the art and the man had the same wonderful freshness and allure. “Klee’s hand, his line, has an immense vitality and already in his very earliest drawings was free of any external influences and leads its own life. Klee is a fantastic person—good-natured, well-balanced, harmonious, and delightful to be with.”168
When Scheyer bought a work by Klee for herself at the start of 1924—his 1912 drawing Galloping Horse—he wrote her a letter that was, in its tone and priorities, pure Klee: droll, quirky, serious in the guise of being flip. The salutation is “Dear Emmy Scheier! Or Emmi Scheyer!” This is followed by his opening sentence: “My wife is more in favor of canned goods”—referring to an unusual form of payment Scheyer had proposed for the drawing. From there he launches into comments about the organization that Scheyer was then in the process of forming. He is adamant about the name: “Under no circumstances should it end in-ism or-isten or-ists; it should rather … suggest nothing less than … that which is the most beautiful about it, the friendship.”169
In March, Klee wrote a poem on the back of a Munich New Secession envelope addressed to Paul Westheim, editor of Das Kunstblatt, a German art magazine. The poem is called “Under the Title,” which derived from the first sentence of the official announcement of the Blue Four: “Under the title ‘the Blue Four,’ the artists Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee have joined together in order to introduce the youth of North America to a selection of their most important works.”170 The announcement explains that the organization would get going with lectures and an exhibition organized by “Mrs. E. E. Scheyer” at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Klee’s poem on the envelope declares:
Under the title
The Blue Four have banded together
for the purpose
of marketing
bad art
in the United States
of America
under the direction
of Madame Nursemaid
Emmy Scheyer
the following four
professors blue
one from the occupied
territory of Schablensky, the
three in the heart
of Germany called
the State Bauhaus
namely Linseed Oil
Onefinger, Prince Schlabinsky
and Lord Pauline von Grass
request Lord
Westheim
to make this known
in his Kunstblatt
The Ladder
The Easel
The Impresaria
The Expressaria
The Express-Sahra
The Four-Wheel Wagon171
Lord Pauline von Grass had, in the last stanza, made a list that was practically singable, in German as in English. The sequence of words—in its flow, randomness, and vital sense of unity (the four-wheel wagon is a reference to Jawlensky, Feininger, Kandinsky, and him working in tandem)—invokes Klee’s own serious work of the period.
A few days after writing his poem, Klee and the other three wheels went to the official Thuringischer notary and signed a power of attorney, written in English, authorizing Scheyer to represent their “Interests, Artistic and Pecuniary, in all foreign countries, particularly the United States of America.” The relationship led to exhibitions and minor sales for all of them and above all encouraged them with the knowledge that, regardless of the occasional critical diatribe directed their way, their work was now appreciated on more than one continent.
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!