While Wassily was trying to paint and to conquer life’s imponderables, Nina in 1925 was miserable at the prospect of giving up the charms of living in Weimar and moving to industrial, unglamorous Dessau.
She had been among the original reconnaissance group to check out the Bauhaus’s future home and had acknowledged its potential, but for someone who loved the cosmopolitan offerings of Moscow and Berlin, and the charms of Weimar, it felt like repairing to the wilderness. For Kandinsky, however, the new location offered great opportunities. Mayor Fritz Hesse’s enthusiasm for the Bauhaus, and his determination to have the local government provide generous funding for new buildings, was a boon. Although much of the city consisted of manufacturing plants and bleak neighborhoods filled with workers’ houses, there was a Gothic church and the state theater; the Junkers aircraft factory added a dash of the modern era.
Kandinsky was among the few people who recognized that while Gropius was still the director of the Bauhaus, his interest in the administrative hassles was flagging even as he delighted in designing its new campus. As a distinguished figure with diplomatic capability, Kandinsky now assumed a major role in assuring the success of the school in its new home.
The first issue to resolve was the resistance of the local population in Dessau. Kandinsky organized a meeting of the most important Bauhauslers in the house where he and Nina were living temporarily. Kandinsky informed his colleagues that he had had a local government minister come for tea, and that the minister had proposed that the Bauhaus organize lectures and exhibitions to make the goals of the school clearer to an unsympathetic community. The minister told Kandinsky that many people were so enraged that luxurious houses were being built for Bauhaus faculty, at a time when some Dessau residents whose families had been there for generations could hardly afford roofs over their heads, that there was an outcry for Mayor Hesse’s impeachment.
Kandinsky’s centrist position within the school itself, and his wife’s capacity for socializing, enabled him to get along with almost everyone, even if he remained aloof. He and Nina often had people to their home for dinner, and even more often went out. He spearheaded a program that tried to help the citizens of Dessau understand the Bauhaus mission.
Klee—who was living with the Kandinskys and was, for the time being, without either Felix or Lily—often waited up at night for the Kandinskys to come home. Klee was happy to avoid the social life in which they constantly participated, but he liked to chat and hear the latest gossip. When Klee went out with the Kandinskys, it was more likely to go to the movies than to be with other people—there was an excellent cinema in Dessau, which showed the latest films—but he enjoyed the Kandinskys’ reports of the relatively convivial atmosphere at the Bauhaus’s new location. In his letters to Lily, Klee made clear how impressed he was with the way his great friend got on with Dessau’s upper echelons as well as with the various factions at the school, and the role he played in bridging the two communities.
Kandinsky was living with the appearance of more ease than he was actually feeling, however. From his and Nina’s temporary digs at Moltkestrasse, he wrote Galka Scheyer a telling letter in October 1925. Congratulating Scheyer on the enthusiasm she had found for the Blue Four in the United States, even if she had not yet made sales, Kandinsky compared it to his own reception in Europe. “I’ve been working for decades, for example, and have been treated like a dumb kid on numerous occasions by ‘the public opinion.’ You can hardly imagine what orgies the current ‘art critics’ in Germany are currently celebrating more and more often.” In his withering way, he pointed out that they were declaring expressionism dead—while misusing the term to denote his form of abstraction. Miserable about the triumph of the highly realistic painters then in vogue, Kandinsky called the “national thought …a superficialization.” He lamented to Scheyer that his sort of work was deemed “an aberration” or “an intentional lie;” in spite of his previous remarks, he now suggested that maybe Americans will end up being “the smarter ones after all.”89
ALMOST AS SOON as they got to Dessau, Kandinsky and Klee began their ritual of taking walks together in the valley of the Elbe River, which was often shrouded in a soft mist. After one such walk, in late November 1925, Kandinsky wrote Grohmann about that landscape in the fog: “Whistler could not paint this, nor could Monet.”90 In spite of threatened salary cuts and the awkwardness of living and working in temporary quarters, he did not lose his eye for magnificence.
And then life improved as the Kandinskys watched construction begin on the two-family master’s house they would share with the Klees. They saw the well-lit studios and marvelous living spaces begin to take form. In addition, improved financing—thanks largely to Fritz Hesse—meant increased support for a flurry of work at the Bauhaus. The furniture, metalwork, and printing workshops began producing designs that were quickly taken up by industry. Marcel Breuer was making splendid chairs and tables, Marianne Brandt streamlined lighting fixtures and teapots, and Herbert Bayer stunning graphic designs. Kandinsky enjoyed this sense of progress all around him and the buoyant mood that went with it. And even if he had to give up far more time than he would have liked for his administrative and teaching responsibilities—he had only three days a week for his own work—he was painting prodigiously. Anticipating his sixtieth birthday, he wrote Grohmann:
In a Russian novel there is this sentence: “The hair is dumb: ignorant of the youth of the heart, it turns white.” So far as I am concerned I neither respect nor fear white hair. … I’d like to live, say, another fifty years to be able to penetrate art ever more deeply. We are really forced to stop much, much too early, at the very moment when we have begun to understand something. But perhaps we can continue in the other world.91
The completion of the new house furthered his feeling of regeneration. After the Kandinskys had moved in, during the summer of 1926, Wassily wrote Galka Scheyer, “Where we are living is wonderful, … right in the woods. We are happy to be rid of the nasty Dessau smells (sugar refinery, gas works, etc., etc.) and are enjoying the real country air.” He was contending with disorder in the house, and had to unpack the boxes in which his and Nina’s possessions had been stored since they left Weimar, so he could not properly benefit from the most beautiful sunshine,”92 but he still had a new sense of well-being. When the Klees moved in next door, he was even happier.
Yet, as always with Kandinsky, things were never 100 percent. “I’m beginning only very slowly to work, although the burning desire has been torturing me for a long time already. The studio is very, very nice and hopefully the work that will be done there will also be respectable.”93
The Kandinskys decorated the house very much according to their own taste. They had antiques and traditional Russian furniture in almost every room. It was an unusual combination: tables and storage chests that looked as if they came from a dacha, with armchairs and commodes that belonged in an elegant St. Petersburg apartment, thrown together in Gropius’s modern functionalist shell. Furniture that called for rough wooden planks or ornate paneling now sat in front of flat white plaster walls.
The Kandinskys’ living room in Dessau. In most of this house, the Kandinskys had traditional Russian furniture that recalled their childhood homes.
The dining room, however, was stridently modern—with a new table and chairs that Marcel Breuer had designed especially for the Kandinskys. There was a china cabinet with a rigidly geometric design of black and white panels, and one of the walls was painted solid black. Kandinsky delighted in hanging his brightly colored paintings on this particular wall. If black had induced anguish in his childhood, it now had bravado.
The Kandinskys’ living room walls were a soft pink, except for the one behind the sofa, which was a creamy off-white. The ceiling was a cool neutral gray. The doors were in the same black as the dining room wall. There was also a niche in which the walls and ceiling were covered in shimmering gold leaf. Kandinsky as a person concealed the drama of his own feelings, his changing moods, in which darkness and high spirits both had their roles, but in the surfaces of his surroundings he was happy to have colors express the alternating humors of his soul.
IN DESSAU, the Bauhaus started to publish a new periodical to report on all that was being done at the school. Its first issue, which coincided with the inauguration in December 1926, was dedicated to Kandinsky on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. His birthday was also the occasion of a large show that received considerable attention in the press (see color plate 12).
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in the dining room of their masters’ house at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1927. Marcel Breuer designed the furniture especially for this space, where one wall was painted black and the ceiling gold
Most of the articles were favorable, but there was a stinging attack by an important critic, Carl Einstein, in a book on recent art. Einstein called Kandinsky “an artist who created things solely from within himself and was incapable of communication.” Kandinsky defended himself by responding that the attacks testified to “the inner strength of this art, its inner tension and the implications bound up with it in particular as concerns ‘life.’ “94 This was, once again, the blood boiling beneath the ice: his analogy to his own being.
Although Gabriele Münter would not permit him to communicate directly with her, “after long negotiations through intermediaries,” that same year she finally returned twenty-six crates of paintings Kandinsky had made before the war.95 She held on to many significant pictures—as well as to countless watercolors, drawings, sketchbooks, and personal papers, among them an important lecture manuscript—but the work she gave him back from storage provided the backbone of his exhibition. Münter also returned his beloved racing bicycle. With the show, the Bauhaus publication in his honor, the return of his early work, and the object that enabled him to pedal off to Wörlitz and other local pleasures, Kandinsky’s new life truly began in Dessau.
KANDINSKY’S 1926 PAINTINGS of circles are rich and imaginative. These spectral visions are rewarding to look at simply for the jolt of energy they give; they also present the basis of the artist’s latest theorizing, and therefore of his teaching following the Bauhaus’s move. Kandinsky was thriving, and it showed. He was reveling in the access to nature offered by his new house; he had written Grohmann following the move there, “We live as if we were in the country, not in the city: we can hear chickens, birds, dogs; we smell hay, linen blossoms, the woods. In a few short days we have become different people. Even the movies don’t attract us, that is saying a great deal.”96 Given his passion for Buster Keaton, to be able to forgo films was a mark of his contentment on Burgkuhnauer Allee. But there was no greater evidence of his high spirits than the work he did that summer and fall and put on view in his birthday exhibition at the end of the year.
Klee wrote the preface for the exhibition catalogue. Admiration shines in his text: “He developed in advance of me. I could have been his pupil and was, in a sense, because more than one of his remarks managed to illuminate my quest beneficently and confirmingly.” Klee wasn’t commenting so much on their age difference (he was only twelve years younger than Kandinsky) as on the courage of his Russian colleague’s early strides into pure form and vibrant color. Klee had witnessed this astonishing development firsthand in Munich before World War I. His preface is awkwardly written—”Emotional connections remained, it is true, uninterrupted, but also unverifiable, until Weimar realized my hope for a fresh encounter”—but testifies nonetheless to the splendid link between the two men who now shared a house in Dessau. He also extols Kandinsky’s youthful energy, declaring of the work the artist had completed while approaching his sixtieth birthday, “This is not sunset, it is simply action … which by the richness of its achievement transcends not only the life span of artistic experience but also the epoch.” This, Klee says, will surely continue after sixty. In summation, he encapsulates, in marvelously few words, what it is that made Kandinsky great: “the achievement of a work that concentrates all tensions within it.”97