However reluctant he may have been, Klee moved to Dessau. Shortly after he got there, his Pedagogical Sketchbook was published as a Bauhaus book and began to find a broad audience. His international reputation was growing; his work was included in the surrealist exhibition in Paris, and he had his first solo Paris exhibition at the Galerie Vavin-Raspail.
In the midst of this complex time period—when he had success on some levels but serious financial worries and skepticism about the move—Klee painted Fish Magic (see color plate 6). While the turmoil surrounding him, and the stressful process of uprooting his family and moving to a new city where little about their life was certain, was not specifically referred to in Klee’s art, it was indirectly reflected in this particular painting. Klee told his students, “One can, once in a while, take a picture as a dream.”189 Like all rich dreams, this one begs to be read. In what initially seems to be a vision in an aquarium or through a diver’s mask, this underwater scene has, at its center, a stretched vertical canvas that fades into the horizontal canvas on which Fish Magic is actually painted. This device of a painting within a painting becomes a commentary on the illusion of art; the vertical canvas has the same proportions as the real one, a reminder that everything changes when you turn your painting ninety degrees, and the painting illustrated dissolves into the actual painting in such a way that the question of what is real and what is a reproduction of reality becomes tantalizing.
In the part of Fish Magic that appears to be on the painted vertical canvas, a clock is suspended in a fishnet that has the form of a belfry. A moon is next to the clock. These were certainly the dominant issues of Klee’s life at the time: his desire to control the passing of time so that he could, above all else, make paintings, and his wish to evoke the cosmic and eternal, as represented by the moon. Meanwhile, the fish moving this way and that, an orange one swimming eastward from behind the illusory canvas, a lavender one gliding westward in front of it, suggest transition. This was just the time that Klee, like the fish, was moving back and forth, in one direction and then another—in his case, between Weimar and Dessau. Paul had gone to Dessau, but since the only housing there was temporary, Felix and Lily had stayed behind, and he commuted. Although Klee had decided that he would be part of the new Bauhaus after all, it was as if he had put one leg into a cold ocean while keeping the other one on shore. Lily and Felix stayed in the apartment they all loved overlooking the English park in Weimar, so Klee spent a week in Dessau at the Hotel Kaiserhof, then a week back in Weimar.
What of the other elements of this pictorial enchanted land? There is a two-faced girl, one of whose mouths is like a tiny heart under a large geometric nose, with large glovelike hands that resemble sea creatures. The only other human figure is a clown, peering in from our left like an actor sticking his head out from backstage. There are large and small flowers, a pink sun, and some inexplicable objects that appear to have dropped down into the scene. And there are more fish: exotic inventions in mauve, turquoise, and red-gold, with lavish decoration and faces that give them personalities. All of this is painted with Klee’s Mozartian lightness of touch, his delicacy of line and brushwork, his tissuelike filmy layers of paint, so that the end result has none of the stridency of the surrealist art to which it might otherwise be compared, but rather is deliciously insouciant. We are left with the feeling that anything can happen, and that art, like music, takes us into new and unknown territory rather than recapitulate the familiar or the literal.
Most of all, as Klee’s knowing friend Will Grohmann pointed out, “Fish and flowers predominate by their very precision; the human beings are entirely schematic and play the part of visitors.”190 Such was Klee’s perspective: Whatever the exigencies of the Bauhaus, whatever the issues of the day, the vast and wonderful cosmos was there before us and will be there afterward. With art, one can capture the miracles.
AT FIRST, KLEE FELT that Dessau had little to offer. It was dominated by its industrial quarter and had none of the allure of the city where Goethe had lived. But the Bauhaus had been given temporary space and was moving forward. To cut down on travel time, Klee switched to spending two weeks in Weimar, two in Dessau, rather than moving every week. And he now moved from his hotel to a furnished room in the house where the Kandinskys were renting an apartment.
Klee taught in the provisional school building, and began to explore the city on the Elbe. By June 1925, after he had been there for a couple of months, he wrote his father and sister that the area where he and Lily and Felix would live was really very beautiful, the junction of the Mulde and Elbe rivers magnificent, and the parks enticing.
One mid-September day, Klee wrote Lily from Dessau that when he was walking to school in the morning he ran into Gropius. The Bauhaus director, Klee told his wife, was “very nice.”191 Ise Gropius, who had just returned after one of her sanatorium treatments, was less to his taste; she visited his studio with her sister, and it had not been pleasurable. But Klee was pleased because “Gropi” was going to take him the next day to a concert that would include a Hindemith violin concerto, and life at the new location held more promise than he had anticipated.
Klee was pleased that the Bauhaus theater was doing its own version of The Enchanted Flute. Moreover, “Gropi” had assured him that progress was being made on the new house, and that the construction site warranted a visit. Klee also told Lily that every student had shown up for his class and been very attentive, and that he had gone to a restaurant that served decent food for little money—”an unpretentious place, frequented by the good petit-bourgeois”—although the next day he would cook for himself.192 He was seeing lots of the Kandinskys, and also enjoyed being with Franz von Hoesslin, a music conductor, and his wife, and with the Muches.
Klee, however, disliked a lot of what was “in” at the Bauhaus. On Saturday, October 24, he went to an evening of dance performed by the Bauhauslers; the next morning, he wrote Lily, “The ambiance there was vulgar and the people wild. A dreadful noise, extremely disagreeable.” Nonetheless, with his usual quest for balance, he concluded, “One can say that the settling in Dessau is, little by little, taking place.”193
THE GOAL OF THE SETTLING WAS, of course, a maximum amount of time at the easel. When the Kandinskys came in late from parties, Klee, who generally went to bed early, would hear them from his adjacent room; rather than feeling that he was missing out, since his schedule revolved entirely around his studio time, he was glad to live more calmly. If he socialized, it was likely to be at midday on weekends. He reported to Lily on a Saturday lunch with the Kandinskys—venison and noodles—and lunch at the Gropiuses the next day, although in that case the food was not good enough to mention.
On December 18, when Klee returned from a day of travel, he found on his worktable an apple, an orange, and a hand-colored lithograph, all from Kandinsky in honor of his birthday. The gesture touched him. In spite of the antipathy from the outside, as long as the heat was working and his paycheck was coming in, Klee was content. He grudgingly accepted his obligation to give lectures—while he enjoyed teaching, once he was doing it, he dreaded any incursion into his painting time—and found his fellow senior faculty members amiable. They would get together in cafés, and everyone always sent warm greetings to Lily.
Then Lily appeared in Dessau, and the two of them spent New Year’s Eve with the recently wed Alberses, and the Grotes and the Muches. When others danced, Klee smoked his pipe on the sidelines—though Anni Albers, who was lame, did not dance either, it would never have occurred to her to disrupt his reverie—but, in his own way, he was part of the reborn Bauhaus.