Unlike Münter, Kandinsky quickly got over their split-up. Toward the end of 1916, he met Nina de Andreesky and hired her as his maid. Though now reduced to domestic service, she was the daughter of a Russian general—or so she told people. She was nineteen when she met Kandinsky, who was then forty-six. But she never let anyone know her exact age, and at the Bauhaus she wanted to be thought even younger. Anni Albers never got over Nina’s refusal to give the information to a policeman who requested it after stopping her for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk in Dessau; facing the cop, Nina simply batted her long eyelashes and told him she was younger than he was.
Shortly before she met Kandinsky, a fortune-teller who was subsequently thrown out of Moscow because of the scary accuracy of her predictions had told Nina “that she would marry a famous man.”38 On February 11, 1917, she proved the seer right by wedding Kandinsky, at whose side she would remain for the rest of his life. Beautiful, coy, and frivolous, Nina would be an amusing but peripheral presence at the Bauhaus. It’s hard to imagine what things would have been like if Gabriele Münter had been there in her stead.
IN SEPTEMBER 1917, Nina, who was two months pregnant on her wedding day, gave birth to a son, Vsevolod. A 1918 photograph shows the toddler seated in his father’s lap. Kandinsky and his adorable son both appear uncomfortable; they are pasty-faced and languid. Wartime rations were scarce in Moscow, and no one had enough to eat.
Photograph of Wassily Kandinsky with his son, Vsevolod, 1918. No one at the Bauhaus knew about the little boy who died of malnutrition before his third birthday.
Nina struggled to scrounge additional food for Vsevolod as he started to grow. The responsibility for the toddler’s nourishment was primarily hers. In addition to now being Kandinsky’s secretary, bookkeeper, and general assistant, she took charge of the household tasks and child care. She did her best to feed her son, but it was impossible to find adequate sustenance. Before his third birthday, Vsevolod was dead from gastroenteritis attributed to malnutrition.
The Kandinskys never referred to their tragic loss at the Bauhaus. They would periodically leave Weimar, and later Dessau, to go to Moscow, but they carefully guarded the secret that the main reason they made the trip was to visit their son’s grave. Anni Albers said that in spite of the intimacy between Kandinsky and Josef, she only heard about Vsevolod years after the Bauhaus had closed. Even then, she was under the misconception that it had been a baby of six months who died.
The unknown fact would have shed some light on a great puzzle. Nearly everyone at the Bauhaus was struck by what an unlikely pair Kandinsky and Nina were. What the observers did not realize was that the couple’s shared loss, kept between them, was a linchpin of their marriage.
THE PERIOD in Moscow was a low point in Kandinsky’s artistic production. In 1915, he was so depressed about the war, as well as about his change of personal circumstances, that he made little art for almost a full year. Between 1916 and 1921, he gradually picked up speed, producing six to ten major paintings annually, but the time comprised of Vsevolod’s short life and its aftermath was mostly a creative lull. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky was appointed professor at the University of Moscow, and he founded the Institute for Art Culture, yet he still longed for a change that might re-energize him.
In 1921, shortly before New Year’s, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, determined to leave their tragedy behind, moved to Berlin. One reason was that the painter had, in 1914, stored approximately 150 paintings at the Sturm Gallery and now hoped to reclaim them. His dream of financial security was shattered when he discovered that the gallery owner had sold most of the work. Even if Kandinsky had managed to secure payment, the marks for which the paintings had been sold before the war now had practically no value. He was able to recover two unsold paintings, but nothing more.
Worse still, Gabriele Münter, who had been storing hundreds of Kandinsky’s paintings as well as most of his personal effects in Munich and Murnau, refused to release them. His struggles to get his things back obsessed him and were a constant thorn in his side throughout his first years at the Bauhaus—although few people knew about it, any more than they knew about the dead child.