20

At the start of 1926, Lily returned to Weimar to the apartment she preferred, but Klee was increasingly content with the new arrangements. The owner of the local movie theater would put on special films for the Bauhauslers. The Kandinskys, Muches, Moholys, and Klee went fairly often. When the theater owner showed his favorite new audience a film that took place in an artist’s studio with a lusty nude model, Klee wrote Lily, “It was movvvvvving and edifffffffying.”¹⁹⁴

During the days, Klee often took long walks along the Mulde. A connoisseur of weather conditions, he was delighted when the first signs of spring began to appear in late February, but he was equally content when winter reappeared in all its majesty at the start of March, providing a heavy snow that enabled him to make a superb snowman.

Klee particularly enjoyed going to the English Grounds of Wörlitz, created in the late eighteenth century on a tributary of the Elbe on the outskirts of Dessau. The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau had inspired the design of this pastoral paradise, which embodied certain Enlightenment principles that were vital to Klee. Rousseau considered botanical growth to be the model for all of life and fundamental to education, much as Klee himself did.

For Klee, this enchanting park was one of the great attractions of the Dessau Bauhaus. He regularly walked around its lake and along the canals, visited the landscaped “Rousseau Island,” which was a near facsimile of the island of Ermenonville where Rousseau was buried, and studied the neoclassical and Gothic architectural follies. Klee’s usual stopping points included the Temple of Flora, an artificial version of Vesuvius, and a climbing rock. The whimsy and imagination of it all delighted him; he had no agenda on those walks, but they provided material that later showed up in his work.

Though he enjoyed his solitude, when important art gallery owners from major cities appeared to work with Kandinsky on plans for exhibitions honoring Kandinsky’s sixtieth birthday in December 1926, Klee was content that they dropped in on him as well. Klee recognized that those connections with the outside world made it easier to push on with his own work, just as he now acknowledged the need to teach. On April 23, 1926, the Vorkurs was offered for the first time in Dessau, and Klee taught twenty men and one woman. Once he accepted the inevitability of losing time in the studio, he enjoyed giving the lectures, because they demanded concentration, and he felt that each time he taught, he did a better job.

In close consultation with Lily, Klee was working on making their future residence everything they wanted it to be. They would be moving to 6/7 Burgkuhnauer Allee on August 1. When he went to see how the construction was going, he was especially thrilled with the closets: one for linen, two for clothing. And his studio was the “summa.” After one of those visits, he reported to Lily with childlike joy about walking with Julia Feininger along the Elbe, and buying “beautiful herrings” for dinner.

He and Lily were very precise about the colors they wanted for the interior of the house; Klee specified that more saturated paints be used for the window trim than for the walls. While Lily was still in Weimar, having decided to spend spring there, they both anticipated unprecedented comfort once their new life was in order. It was a miracle to be able to live so well when the economic situation was so terrible. Klee in this period was having large exhibitions at his usual galleries, and the reviews were excellent, but, as Lily wrote Galka Scheyer, “The financial success was almost nil. The scarcity of money in Europe is catastrophic. It affects everything and not a single person has money.”¹⁹⁵

“Paulie,” she said, was now receiving eight hundred marks a month in salary, but it did not go as far as the two hundred fifty he had been getting before. Even with his painting sales, he could not afford the new clothing he would have liked. To have a new house being built according to their specifications was part of the Bauhaus miracle.

KLEE ATTENDED A PERFORMANCE of Parsifal that lasted five hours, with a fifty-minute intermission. Again, his account to Lily reads like a review by a savvy music critic. “The orchestra made a pure and harmonious sound from the first to the last note. … The baritone was superb from every point of view. … The dramatic soprano … sang well but lacked personality. …

Not the least lack of taste in the scenery.”¹⁹⁶ He elaborated on the lighting, sets, and costumes, complaining that the only real weakness was with the voices of the men’s choir.

Mainly, he focused on the household. Felix was entering the Bauhaus theater workshop, and Klee helped him get settled into it. The painting of the house was proceeding—the studio was “magnificent” and their bedroom “superb”—and he was especially happy with the armoires.¹⁹⁷ Life was coming into shape again.

OF THE LECTURES on form that Klee gave to the students that spring at the weaving workshop, one observer reported, “Those who were able to follow the differentiated theoretical lectures with which Paul Klee supplemented the instruction in the weaving workshop found essential enrichment in them.”¹⁹⁸ They were, as many students noted, hard to grasp. Klee was often speaking in his own language. Another listener would recall that the talks were “like the formula of a mathematician or physicist, but, considered carefully, it was pure poetry.”¹⁹⁹ But his method had an impact. Klee would draw on a small slate to show how to develop a form, and then would erase it to let the student proceed on his or her own rather than copy. He would, for example, focus on the cube. The students were encouraged not just to learn how to create one, but how to give it a passive or active personality so that it was not merely an inert reproduction of a form.²⁰⁰

Klee’s appointment calendar reports concerts, opera performances, class days, exhibition plans, evenings at the Kandinskys’, hikes, even an occasion of being naked in the garden of the mausoleum.²⁰¹ Then came the great moment in July 1926 when Paul, Lily, and Felix Klee moved into No. 7 Burgkuhnauer Allee, with only a wall separating them from the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half. On the ground floor there was, in addition to the pantry, kitchen, and maid’s room, one large space that served as both the music and dining room. Above there were two bedrooms, a room just for Lily, and Klee’s studio, while the top floor had Felix’s workroom and a guest room. Klee’s large square studio contained a black wall that made a dramatic backdrop for looking at art.

The little row of four residences—all except for Gropius’s accommodated two families—was in a pine forest. In that bucolic setting, the houses were in the latest, streamlined modern style, but they imposed no orthodoxy. The Klees kept the furniture they had always had, so that even with its very modern architecture, it was home as always. Klee also had his ever-expanding collection of the sea shells and snails he brought back from travels to the Baltic and Mediterranean seas. Mollusks were an obsession: he had a second collection of photographs, X-rays, and cross-sections of them.

Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the masters’ houses in Dessau. The masters’ houses had wonderful roof gardens and lawns.

In 1929, a journalist from Das Kunstblatt would visit the house the Klees and the Kandinskys shared. Writing about it, she never referred to the men’s wives, or to Felix; it was as if the houses reflected only the “two powerful artistic personalities” of the Bauhaus masters, and nothing of their families.²⁰²

In Kandinsky’s house, the writer noted a pale pink room with a gilded wall, followed by a pure black one “made brighter—as though by two suns—by paintings whose colors give off a powerful glow, and by a large round table shining white.” Kandinsky’s love for “pure cold colours” was evident everywhere.²⁰³ But Klee’s house, separated from Kandinsky’s by only a thin wall, made an opposite impression. “The air which meets us already at the entrance … seems so different, much more intimate, closer to the earth, more humid even. So different, too—soft but impressive—is the language spoken here.”²⁰⁴

For Klee, the greatest luxury of all was the location, which meant that he could enjoy long walks to the Elbe valley without having to go on city streets. He took whatever route caught his fancy, paying no attention to trespassing laws. It was as if the grounds of private castles existed only to fuel his imagination and provide material for his art.

IN LATE SUMMER OF 1926, the Klees took another trip to Italy. They started in Bern—to make the necessary banking arrangements and to change currency—and then thrilled to the many tunnels in the Alps on the train to Milan, where they changed for Genoa. Leading his wife and son on a tour of the harbor, Klee bargained toughly with the boatman. Will Grohmann, who knew his subject so well that he sounded as if he were there, observed, “Displaying a surprising amount of southern temperament …he seemed transformed …at home. The reserve he always presented to the outside world gave way to a natural openheartedness.”²⁰⁵

From Genoa they took a sailboat across the bay and stayed in a pensione in a vast overgrown garden. Klee’s quest for snakes was insatiable: they were different from those he encountered in German parks, who hid in the brush in a plant he described as spitting its seed.

Then the Klees worked their way down the Italian Riviera to Livorno, eating well at every stop. On a boat to Elba, Klee marveled at dolphins that appeared to race the ship. He ate “spaghetti al sugo with the captain,” declaring it “Gotterasse”—food for the gods.²⁰⁶

In Pisa, he stood for hours in front of the frescos of Campo Santo, and for ten splendid days in Florence he went to the Uffizi every day. Then came three days in Ravenna, where the mosaics overwhelmed him. When he returned to Dessau to start the first full academic year there, his energy was renewed.

Once he was back at the Bauhaus, Klee’s parsimoniousness and his abhorrence of politics were both tested severely. The school was off to a shaky start in its new location. Money was tight for the local government, which was the school’s exclusive source of funding beyond the modest income it earned from the sale of Bauhaus products. This was when Gropius, scrimping to save money for the workshops, proposed that the masters temporarily give up 10 percent of their salary.

All except for Klee and Kandinsky accepted the inevitability of that personal sacrifice. Having stayed at the Bauhaus mainly for the financial security of teaching, and knowing that they were the most acclaimed of its artists, they would not take a mark less than what they had been promised.

Klee could not stop feeling insecure about money. When Lily had written Galka Scheyer that art sales were almost nonexistent, it was an exaggeration; times were tough, but Klee’s work was now selling at decent prices in a number of places. Klee himself recognized his and Lily’s inability to accept their well-being. Shortly after they had arrived in Dessau, he told Schlemmer that the next generation would do better with fame and success, that they would adjust more easily than his and Kandinsky’s age group. He recognized that he and Kandinsky were both too scarred by the war and the hardships that followed to know how to enjoy their new prosperity.

Klee was in Bern on the way to Italy for his holiday when Gropius wrote him, on September 1, 1926, about the salary reduction. He immediately answered by saying, “I look gloomily ahead to further negotiations and am afraid of something that was avoided even during the worst phase at Weimar: an inner disruption. I am traveling south with the burden of such thoughts.” Then, after the Bauhaus director beseeched him a second time, Klee replied to “Herr Gropius”:

The impression gained at the last meeting remains extremely disgruntling, despite the vacation spirit, sunny days, etc. It seems not to be given to us to breathe nonpolitical air, and time and again we are being forced (unfortunately) into politics. …

The fact that the Mayor declares himself powerless in regard to the additional financing necessary for our Bauhaus, and the fact that every one of us is supposed to bleed for it, must be taken into consideration. But as far as I am concerned, I have to reject any attempt to push part the moral responsibility for this onto me.²⁰⁷

THE BAUHAUS WAS GETTING READY for the inauguration of its new building. Klee told Lily he was keeping his distance from all the festivities; he wrote his father and sister that he was doing his best to ignore such distractions and simply to work on his art and teach his course. In addition, Klee was on his own with Felix that November, and even though his son was now eighteen, for Klee it was a priority to have the household functioning well while Felix was rehearsing opera every day. Klee often attended his son’s rehearsals, frequently talking with the director, and enjoyed getting to know Felix’s friends, but other Bauhaus events held little interest for him. Order at home mattered more; he was pleased with a new housekeeper who was as helpful with the meals as with keeping his evening clothes pressed. This last service was important to Klee, since formal attire was expected for concerts, where he regularly sat in the first row of the loge.

KLEE HAD BROUGHT a lot of unfinished work from Weimar and wanted to get immediately to the task of completing it. His “plan of attack,” however, was taking time. He needed the right inspiration, and even fewer interruptions. And it was at precisely this moment that he was beginning to find himself in conflict with Ise Gropius concerning the concert program organized by the Friends of the Bauhaus.

Even Klee could not manage to stay completely apart from the personality conflicts that riddled the school. The concert on November 8 with Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin epitomized what he most valued in life. “There are always so many things to learn from Bach! These sonatas have such richness that one is never done with them. These two men are outstanding musicians, profoundly honest.” It was after the concert, when the best-known of the Bauhaus masters repaired to Gropius’s house and were joined by the musicians, that the problems began. Klee had reluctantly consented to perform on November 27 at a concert for a large audience, because it was raising money for the Bauhaus canteen. At the reception after the Serkin-Busch concert, Ise was desperate to know if Lily would be there to play piano, with Mme. Schelper singing. Writing Lily about this, Klee characterized “Frau Gropius” as having “put herself in charge of trying to divert her husband as much as possible.”²⁰⁸ Pressured by his teaching obligations and Mrs. Gropius’s badgering, Klee now felt the glorious two months in Italy, from which he had only returned on October 28, disappearing in a radiant light.

At least he loved the new classroom, which was light and spacious. And he was delighted by a cleverly designed piece of furniture there. It was a dark green board on wheels. If you turned a crank, the place for writing rolled away, leaving a new space for more drawing. Moreover, his students seemed interested in what he was saying.

On November 27, 1926, Klee, Lily, and Frau Schelper gave the all-Mozart concert that Ise Gropius had inveigled them to perform. Even if Klee would not consent to the salary reduction, he was willing to give in to pressure in other ways. After all, he had a new studio and a new place to live.