On December 27, 1921, Kandinsky, still in Berlin, wrote to Klee, who had by then been teaching at the Bauhaus for a full year and was happily ensconced in his house on Am Horn in Weimar. Kandinsky made roses a metaphor for his situation and his hopes. He was delighted to have a bunch of the flowers in his rented flat in Berlin—they made him more content than he would have been otherwise—but he imagined that the same flowers would be cheaper in Weimar. Kandinsky told Klee that he was astonished by the rise in the price of roses since he had last bought them in Germany—in 1914.
This was Kandinsky’s way of asking Klee not just if life in Weimar would be more economical, but also if Weimar would be a good place to contemplate and explore the forms of beauty that were dear to him. Kandinsky then became more direct. He allowed to Klee that he had no idea how long he would stay in Berlin—and that he wanted to get to know the Bauhaus. Above all, it would be wonderful to see the Klees again after the seven-year hiatus.
Kandinsky wondered if the apartment situation in Weimar was as bad as that in Berlin, and whether it would be difficult to find a room for him and Nina. He would willingly put up with a makeshift solution; he told Klee how happy he was that he at last had enough money to buy new shoes, but even that acquisition was a reach with money so tight and the cost of living so high. As long as he and Nina could live somewhere that had minimal comforts, the emotional relief would more than compensate for other hardships.
It all went far better than he anticipated. The first time that Wassily and Nina Kandinsky traveled from Berlin to Weimar to case out the Bauhaus, Gropius hosted a dinner in their honor. Kandinsky may have had no money, but the esteem for him in avant-garde galleries and museums had the potential to forge links Gropius greatly desired for the Bauhaus.
The welcome dinner was one of the rare occasions when Alma Gropius was at her husband’s side. The coquettish Nina, attempting to be friendly to the formidable Alma, who she knew lived in Vienna, asked her when she would be back in Weimar. Alma’s reply was a loaded “That depends on you”—after which she proposed that the Kandinskys visit her in Vienna.39 Nina thought Alma was openly pursuing her husband. But Nina was also convinced that Wassily was blatantly rejecting the renowned seductress. Starting that evening, Nina developed a theory that Alma deliberately made Kandinsky’s life difficult whenever she could—to punish him for his resistance.
SAVVY OBSERVERS believed that Gropius wanted Kandinsky on the Bauhaus faculty mainly to help him with the power struggle with Johannes Itten. The pithy Oskar Schlemmer felt that the Russian was appointed to teach so he could serve as Gropius’s “chancellor”—a term Schlemmer used in private only.40 It wasn’t just the man Gropius wanted. He was also eager to establish connections with the prominent galleries in Berlin and Munich where Kandinsky was exhibiting, and with the organizers of the upcoming first International Exhibition in Düsseldorf, who had invited Kandinsky to have his work included.
It was, however, Paul Klee who—more than anyone else—paved the way for Kandinsky to come to the Bauhaus. The central issue was housing. The Kandinskys gave notice on their Berlin apartment that May, and needed Klee to help them find a place to live. They had raised their standards, and were hoping, ideally, to have two rooms in addition to a kitchen and bathroom, and to be near the park and the Bauhaus. When they moved to Weimar in June, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky had to make do at first with a single furnished room at 7 Cranachstrasse, but in July they moved to a more spacious apartment at 3 Sudstrasse, and were able to begin living again with some of their beloved Russian furniture. Klee helped them find both these places.
Not only had Klee rescued a friend and a painter he admired, but he had brought another reasonable voice into the circle. With the constant disputes at the Bauhaus, he was delighted to have a colleague who maintained the long view—and who cared so passionately about the priority of making art.
UNLIKE KLEE, Kandinsky did not find it easy to settle into the task of painting so long as other matters distracted him. He completed only five oils during the year of his relocation. He did, however, paint a number of watercolors, and the body of work, though small, shows the painter revitalized. These intensely animated, exuberant compositions reveal nothing of the harsh realities of his recent life. The individual elements look scattershot and as random as particles in a kaleidoscope, yet, while at first they resemble nothing precise, the flurry of shapes is organized so that they also form clouds, eyes, insects, stars, and seawater—and convey the glorious force of those natural phenomena.
Kandinsky had not yet arrived at the Bauhaus when the first round of debates on the “professor” or “master” question occurred, but the controversy was still alive, and it was no small matter, especially given the obsession with titles at every level of German society. The issue was among the many concerns that prevented him from painting more. One of the first things the Russian did after moving to Weimar was to hand in a statement on the subject. What was a burning topic for others was for him primarily an example of misguided priorities. His approach was as refreshingly free of cant or hidebound tradition as the way he painted. “As far as I am concerned, I would like to see every chance used to demonstrate that the title problem is a completely useless problem. … That which is important is the inner characteristic of the nut, not the naming of the shell.”41 If “professor” was now reinstated, at the insistence of those who wanted to be addressed as such, the students would be focused on extraneous meaning in a way Kandinsky considered detrimental. He proposed that the government let people know that “master” was the equivalent of “professor.”
THE SAME FRESHNESS AND SPARK—and irreverence—marked Kandinsky’s teaching. Once he and Nina settled in, he gave the basic Theory of Form course and served as master to the wall-painting workshop, quickly breaking new ground by getting students to experiment so that known forms took on unprecedented meanings. Rather than instruct, he encouraged students to try the unknown and to ask questions. Teaching was an interaction; according to Grohmann, “Kandinsky felt as Klee did when he said that he actually should be paying tuition to his pupils.”42 Nonetheless, he would not have been in a financial position to do so, because when he received his first paycheck, he used most of it to buy Nina a striking pair of earrings that juxtaposed black and white pearls.
One of his students in the form course that first year in Weimar, twenty- year-old Vincent Weber, said that Kandinsky was like “a drawn pantomime. … His expression was curious; sometimes comic, sometimes innocent, or also enigmatic, or cheery, or even gruesome. … He encouraged fantasy.” The first thing the quixotic teacher with his heavy Russian accent had the students do was to draw a pitcher and mug, “but it wasn’t long before the Master began to speak about … the expressive possibilities of line as active or passive element.”43
The students first arranged the elements of their still lifes with an eye to traditional representation. Their initial goal was to use lines to indicate the boundaries of forms. But Kandinsky quickly guided them into unexpected territory. They were encouraged to explore how each dash or curve could be used to build rhythm. They created linear rhythm on the picture plane, and an even more dynamic three-dimensional rhythm once they added the element of spatial depth. Kandinsky also encouraged his students to create imaginary relationships: connections between knowable images or abstract forms that had no logic or purpose.
He talked, too, about “the mystique of numbers … three as the divine number, four as a human number, and seven as a lucky number. From number mysticism he then moved to the symbolism of forms. … He pursued everything to the hundredth degree.”44 Familiar digits, everyday objects, and ordinary sights all became magical.
Coaxed by Kandinsky to animate his own drawings so that forms appear to devour or laugh at each other, Vincent Weber felt an unprecedented excitement about the possibilities of making art. He drew lines so that they skipped and danced all over the page. Weber was delighted to be using his pencils and brushes to create surfaces he had never before imagined, and that would not have been encouraged, or even permitted, anywhere else in the world.
The students who could not loosen up, however, encountered Kandinsky’s scurrilous side. One who diligently made an imitation of a Japanese screen was met with a scathing “Are you a Japanese, then?”45 Kandinsky looked at another student’s arrangement of a coffeepot, milk jug, and sugar bowl and started to laugh, pointing out that these objects standing in a row were not exciting. Then he spoke about the “special tensions, lyric or dramatic” that might exist among these objects.46
Look at the coffee pot: fat, stupid, and haughty. She has a very arrogant air when we turn her a little sideways and draw her spout still higher. Now the little milk jug: small, modest. It looks humble if we turn it down thus at an angle. An obeisance before the powerful coffee pot! And now the sugar bowl: satisfied, fat, well-to-do, content, because she is full of sugar. She laughs when we put her lid on at an angle.47
Once he had finished explaining this, his own laughter, which had initially seemed derisive, became an indication only of Kandinsky’s own excitement over these possibilities. He was giddy about the objects’ personalities.
Kandinsky, like Klee, wrote detailed notes before his classes. There was no existing textbook he could use for a course he was inventing, and he needed his own guide so as best “to train the artist in such a way that he will be able to realize his ‘dream’ with the highest degree of precision.”48 He had no doubt that painting, the highest of the arts, and abstract art in particular, was the means that would allow the dream to be realized and the spirit to emerge.
Also like Klee, he allowed his own work to demonstrate that principle. Color and forms, liberated from their former obligation to reproduce known subject matter, should flourish, he believed, in all the Bauhaus workshops. Every metal, wood, ceramics, or glass offered the chance to evoke wonder.
THAT FIRST FALL in Weimar, even if Kandinsky produced fewer large paintings than usual, he made new strides in printmaking in the Bauhaus graphic workshop. Depending as well on the capabilities of a local printing company, he created Small Worlds, a remarkable portfolio of twelve prints (see color plate 9). While each measured 14½ by 11 inches, they were in a range of media, and Kandinsky used the various technologies to achieve results that have the energy of machinery.
Kandinsky believed the prints could be heard. He also was convinced that they had their own emotions. Describing them according to a numeric system, which in his eyes had a mystical significance, he wrote:
The “Small Worlds” sound forth from 12 pages
4 of these pages were created with the aid of stone,
4—with that of wood
4—with that of copper
4 × 3 = 12
Three groups, three techniques …
In 6 cases, the “Small Worlds” contented themselves with black lines or black patches.
The remaining 6 needed the sound of other colors as well.
6 + 6 = 12
In all 12 cases, each of the “Small Worlds” adopted, in line or patch, its own necessary language.
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These exuberant gems, in spite of their varied techniques and differences of visual vocabulary, have in common their high charge of energy. Their animated, brightly colored shapes seem palpably alive. It isn’t that they convey specific emotions, any more than musical phrases do, but they are filled with intense feeling, a sense of experience taken to the extreme. They leave the responsive viewer invigorated.
NOT ONLY DID THE BAUHAUS provide Kandinsky with a chance to explore print-making in a new way, but it gave him an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate with his students in the wall-painting workshop. He painted extraordinary maquettes, which his students then executed as vast murals. The finished works were to go into the octagonal entrance room of a museum in Berlin.
While Small Worlds put Kandinsky’s ideas before a larger audience by realizing them in multiple forms, the murals were to reach an even greater number of viewers. Now his emotive abstractions were intended to exist on a monumental scale in a public space.
In Kandinsky’s vibrant maquettes for the murals, brilliant stripes, circles, and planar forms sing against a dark background (see color plate 10). As if they are modernized versions of the Tiepolo frescoes that grace the ceilings of Venetian palaces, their cacophony of starbursts and floating forms invokes a celebrative rococo spirit. With those maquettes in front of them, the workshop students, mostly young women, sat with their long skirts spread beneath their knees on the floor of the Bauhaus auditorium and executed Kandinsky’s images full scale in casein on canvas.
Wassily Kandinsky, Small Worlds VII, 1922. The print series Kandinsky created during his first year at the Bauhaus in Weimar made his revolutionary art available to a larger number of people.
The murals were never installed in Berlin. If they had been, painting would have served architecture as Gropius had intended, consistent with the Bauhaus’s mission of providing the broader public with a new way of seeing.