Shortly after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Wassily Kandinsky wrote a letter to Lily Klee. This was in the period when Lily preferred to remain in the pleasant apartment in Weimar rather than move to temporary digs near the school’s new location.
Lily had given Kandinsky some polenta. Addressing her with a Russianized version of her name, he wrote,
Dear Elisaveta Ludwigovna,
For years I have wanted to eat polenta—so you will easily understand what pleasure you have given me. My heartfelt thanks. For me polenta is a synaesthetic delight, for in some strange way, it stimulates three senses perfectly harmoniously: first the eye perceives that wonderful yellow, then the nose savors an aroma that definitely includes the yellow within itself, at last the palate relishes a flavor which unites the color and the aroma. Then there are further “associations”—for the fingers (mental fingers) polenta has a deep softness (there are also things which have a shallow softness!) and finally for the ear—the middle range of the flute. A gentle sound, subdued but energetic …
And the polenta which you served me had pink tones in its yellow color … definitely flute!
Kind regards to you, dear Pavel Ivanovitch, and dear Felix Pavlovitch, with best wishes for you all,
Yours,
Kandinsky1
Kandinsky’s paintings of the period have elements of the marvelous Italian cornmeal. The word “synaesthetic” was key; the Russian invented it to describe the commingling of the various senses that was one of his artistic goals. The soft explosions of polenta cooking, the repetitive popping noise, conjured a realm that increasingly obsessed him: the sonic effects of visual experience. Beyond that, the abstract forms that appear to be in continuous motion—growing, bursting, and condensing—are like polenta when it is being cooked, with the delicate grains absorbing water and air and transmogrifying. Inevitably, too, Kandinsky’s oils and watercolors have a sphere of the same vibrant yellow that the painter admired in the cornmeal, which evokes a spiritual force.
Gabriele Münter, Wassily Kandinsky, 1906. The year before Münter painted this, Kandinsky had started to live with her in Munich, where he had gone from Russia after practicing law in Moscow. He went to Germany to devote himself to art full-time.
The smells and tastes of food were less directly connected to Kandinsky’s art, but his alertness to their subtle unfolding in the polenta reflects his priorities. Sharp observation of everyday experience was fundamental. A keen appreciation for the processes perpetually occurring in the kitchen, the human body, and the wooded parks where he and Klee and Albers took their daily walks, governed his life. What was essential was to stop and look. In his pervading appreciation of existence and his overwhelming desire both to celebrate and to add to the world’s store of beauty, he was possessed by a determination to make the most of every source of wonder; he would rest only in order to gain strength for action.
THOSE SAME DESIRES ruled the lives of several of his colleagues, but Kandinsky was distinguished among them in bringing to the mix “the Russian soul.” He had the particular intensity that fired Pushkin and Tolstoy, that permeates the chants of the steppes and the icons of the Russian Orthodox Church, and that has characterized an entire people through all the transformations of their nation. Will Grohmann, who observed Kandinsky firsthand at the Bauhaus, writes, “His uncompromising attitude to life and art, his faith in the unconquerability of the human spirit, came with him from Russia.”2 Although Kandinsky spent most of his life in Germany and Paris, he not only retained his fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity, remained immersed in Slavic literature and music, and continued to speak his native language with his wife; he also guarded his secrets, and relished a sense of inexplicable mysteries.
Of the Russian types, he was a nobleman out of Turgenev. He looked every bit the aristocrat, and struck people “as more like a diplomat or a widely traveled scholar than as an artist.3 While Johannes Itten wore his outlandish costumes and the Bauhaus students flaunted their bohemianism, Kandinsky dressed with meticulous elegance. This was true not just in society but also when he painted. Unleashing his furies as he brazenly applied vivid pigments to canvas, he wore, at his most casual, a bow tie and jacket. “I could paint in a dinner jacket,” he once quipped.4 But Kandinsky was marked by correctness and reserve rather than dandyism. In his appearance and demeanor, he had no wish to attract attention; he “spoke quietly and attentively, and was never wounding. He behaved impeccably even in painful situations.”5 He had genuine style; he was not a showman.
His propriety teetered at the edge of aloofness. For his students and colleagues, there was always the sense that Kandinsky, however amiable and cheerful he might appear, had some very private issues he was deliberately keeping from view. He was older than everyone else by at least a decade, but it wasn’t just age that kept him apart. What was that veneer meant to guard? Grohmann thinks it was masking an overriding instability. “The more Kandinsky became aware of his psychic constitution, the more he developed a capacity to control himself …to save face.” Kandinsky was so eager to conceal the vagaries of his mind that he preferred “chance acquaintances to half friendships.”6 The person at the Bauhaus to whom he was closest was Klee; this suited him in part because Klee, too, eschewed intimacy. It was like befriending a flock of birds or an image of St. Christopher—highly rewarding, but without threat to the privacy Kandinsky guarded so carefully.
KANDINSKY’S FACE rarely came into focus behind the cloud of smoke from the cigarettes he puffed all day long. The screening served him well. By the time he was at the Bauhaus, he had effectively excised from his story the woman who had been his truest partner, the brilliant painter Gabriele Münter; all that one could glean about Münter from the elusive Kandinsky was that, in her bitterness over his having left her and, shortly thereafter, taken up with the young playgirl who was now his wife, she had refused to return a lot of the art he had left in her care a decade earlier.
But even if Kandinsky would not discuss the details of his past, students and teachers of every level and a range of styles admired him immensely. He was the voice of reason in Bauhaus disputes, where his ability to keep his personal reactions hidden set him apart, and he was respected for his balanced perspective on complex issues. While establishing careful perimeters around his private self, he was open to infinite approaches in most matters. Anni Albers recalled, with a broad smile, “Kandinsky often said, ‘There is always an and.’ “Grohmann refers to Kandinsky’s wish “to express mystery in terms of mystery.”7 There were layers beyond and beneath the layers; that complexity inspired extraordinary thinking and completely original art.