In addition to the show in Dessau, Kandinsky had exhibitions that year in-Dresden and Berlin. He also had visits from the conductor Leopold Stokowski and the copper magnate Solomon Guggenheim, both of whom bought paintings. Major museums in Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg were collecting his art as well.
Yet his life was never simple. Oskar Schlemmer, who was designing costumes in 1926 for “The White Festival”—they were four-fifths white, one-fifth color—wrote his wife, Tut: “Quite a rivalry has sprung up among the women: I was designing the Kandinska’s costume (in the form of a little Kandinsky); the Gropia floated off with the sketches and was no more to be seen. I am curious.”98 Nina was both prettier and less intelligent than almost all of other women at the school, and the atmosphere at the Bauhaus could be as competitive and petty as in any other small town.
Schlemmer also reported on Kandinsky’s relationship to his students, as opposed to his connection with local officialdom. Kandinsky’s teaching aroused dissent in the Bauhaus community because of its stridency and dogmatism. On the other hand, Schlemmer admired Kandinsky’s diplomatic skills and rare ability to get along with some of the most prominent people in Dessau, whom most other Bauhauslers found unapproachable. Even if some of the students recoiled at his arrogance, and even though he would have preferred to devote more of his time and energy to his own work, Kandinsky had become the backbone of the Bauhaus at one of its shakiest moments.
AT THE END OF 1927, Kandinsky sent Galka Scheyer a miniature painting as a Christmas present. It was to be worn as a pendant. She wrote him that it was “a symbol of incomprehensible realities that is concentrated in this small surface but also streams endlessly forth, like the secret law of the forces of life in movement.”99 She wore the magical talisman often. To the few people who understood the fantastic realm of his art, the factors that were both patently visible and deliberately invisible, he was thrilled to give presents.
In 1928, Kandinsky painted Too Green, which he would give to Paul Klee the following year for his fiftieth birthday (see color plate 11). The water-color, created by using a spray gun, is an irregular sequence of gyrating circles. At the same time that they are purely abstract, representing nothing other than themselves, the disks, which appear to rotate and to be millions of miles away—the spray painting makes their surfaces appear to be in an atmospheric fog—resemble spectral bodies in orbit.
It was the perfect way for one friend to communicate to the other in the language they knew best. In visual rather than verbal language, Kandinsky was celebrating what he and Klee cherished: eternal beauties, the power of abstract form, and access to the larger cosmos. In addition, these intensely serious men were devoted to fun, and Too Green is as playful as it is accomplished.
THAT SAME YEAR, Kandinsky designed costumes and sets for a performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for which Felix Klee was production assistant. His engagement with the boy whom he had taken care of in Munich at age two, and who had inadvertently locked him in his temporary studio a few years later, was of great meaning to both of them.
Kandinsky used lighting for the ballet in such a way that he realized his own goal of synthesizing science and technology and art. He wrote a description:
At the first expressivo only three long vertical strips appear in the background. They vanish. At the next expressivo the great red perspective is introduced from the right (double color). Then, from the left, the green perspective. The middle figure emerges from the trap door. It is illuminated with intense colored light.100
It was Felix who made this fantastic scenario occur in sequence with Mussorgsky’s music as it went from dramatic to playful to lyrical to stormy. Felix managed the lighting changes and complex switches of backdrops and props through sixteen scenes.
Kandinsky made the backdrops and costumes, as well as props that moved around or hung from above. Rather than create the specific pictures Mussorgsky had in mind, they formed a sequence of abstractions that coincided with the changes in the music. Felix, whose puppet theater had trained him in rapid movements, controlled the action with dexterity.
The scene called “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle”—meant to represent two Polish Jews, one rich, the other poor—featured two figures standing behind tall and thin transparent rectangles, backlit so that their silhouettes were visible. “Promenade” and “Ballet of Unhatched Chickens” were both animated by flashlights moving along wavy lines. Grohmann vividly describes the penultimate scene, “The Hut of Baba Yaga”:
The central portion of the set was first concealed by a black cover, while hand-held spotlights positioned behind the scenery illuminated the various patterns of dots and lines cut into its left and right sides. When the central image, the hut of the witch of Russian folklore, was revealed, the clockface glowed with a yellow backlight while the single hand rotated. … The Great Gate of Kiev, the final scene … began with the side elements and twelve props representing abstract figures, to which were added successively the arch, the towered Russian city and the backdrop, each lowered slowly from above. At the end these were raised, the lighting became a strong red and then was completely extinguished and the transparent disk used at the beginning of the performance was lowered. Quickly this was illuminated at full strength from behind and the lights finally were extinguished once more.101
Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Pictures at an Exhibition: Gnomes, 1928. Kandinsky made numerous sets for the production, of which Felix Klee was stage manager. Lighting, music, and scenery all worked together in happy collaboration.
Music, mechanics, and artistic invention were thus combined to achieve an art form that was energetic, diverting, and unprecedented. At the same time, the collaboration of a sixty-year-old artist and his best friend’s teenage son showed what a community the Bauhaus could be.
ON MARCH 13, 1928, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky both became German citizens. The country from which Kandinsky had been forced into exile fourteen years earlier was now his official homeland. He and Nina were overjoyed.
Celebration at the house of Nina and Wassily Kandinsky, 1928. When the Kandinskys received their German citizenship, their friends organized a lavish costume part
The Kandinskys’ friends quickly organized a costume party to celebrate. Marcel Breuer and some of the other faculty members became “Schillian officers” at the festive evening. That chosen role encouraged great feats of imagination: Ferdinand von Schill had been a Prussian patriot who commanded a regiment of hussars and who, in 1809, unsuccessfully led an uprising against the French during the Napoleonic Wars. He did so independently and without government approval. He died in street fighting; his officers were court-martialed, after which most were shot or imprisoned. László Moholy-Nagy decided to be an old person from Dessau. Herbert Bayer, always as swashbuckling as possible, was an Austrian officer. Ludwig Grote and Hannes Meyer were officials—giving the evening an air of legitimacy—while Klee was a Turk. Kandinsky himself was “a half-breed, comical.” He was overcome with joy at the many times people raised their glasses to toast him and Nina as “real Anhalt natives,”102 and seemed to have no premonition that they would yet again be forced out of their chosen country.
In a letter Paul Klee wrote Lily in September 1928, he provided a splendid rendition of Nina’s conversational gambits. Lily was still in Bern. The Kandinskys had gotten back to their half of the house a couple of days earlier. Once they knew Klee had reinstalled himself, they started to knock on his door repeatedly, but he was invariably out on his long walks into the countryside whenever they called, and so they had no response. Finally the Kandinskys had left their visiting card, folded at the corner, in his mailbox.
Late one evening, the Kandinskys and Klee were at last reunited. Klee and Kandinsky were eager to talk about what had happened with their painting during the summer. Nina, however, completely dominated the conversation, making it impossible for the two men to discuss what most mattered to them. There was no stopping her monologue about her and Wassily’s recent holiday. Klee quoted Nina’s comments: “In France I’m proud to be a woman, because everyone is so polite—and—and—and above all Paris, but black suitcases get terribly beaten up; that comes from the automobile, when they’re put underneath them.”103
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in Dessau, 1929. This is a rare photograph by Paul Klee. Klee saw the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half of the same house, on a daily basis. While Wassily was a close friend, Nina was mainly an object of amusement.
A connoisseur of Nina’s silliness, Klee willingly subjected himself to her babbling. Nina was good-natured and devoted to her older husband, which counted for a lot. She was, at the same time, completely ditsy. In October 1929, Kandinsky was bedridden with a kidney infection. He was getting better, but there were high and low points, and while Klee knew it was not too serious, Nina, predictably, was alarmed. Klee mocked the way the nervous young wife went into action. Nina came to him for instructions on how to make hot compresses. Klee thought there was something quite fantastic about the idea that she could not figure out how to soak a washcloth in warm water.
THE KANDINSKYS’ GERMAN CITIZENSHIP enabled them to get new passports, which made it easier to travel. Naturally, Nina’s first choice was the French Riviera.
Wassily and Nina Kandinsky in Dessau, 1929. This is a rare photograph by Paul Klee. Klee saw the Kandinskys, who lived in the other half of the same house, on a daily basis. While Wassily was a close friend, Nina was mainly an object of amusement.
In 1930, when she and Kandinsky returned to Paris, she was thrilled by the latest fashions, but he was eager to get to Italy for the art. She complied, but not because she shared the interest. Kandinsky wrote Grohmann from Ravenna: “What I saw was beyond all my expectations. They are the best, the most powerful mosaics I have ever seen—not only as mosaics but as works of art.”104 As the pioneering abstractionist stood with his pretty young wife in front of those extraordinary fifth-century masterpieces, and marveled at the tiny squares of color forming graphically vivid images of biblical scenes, he was aware that his companion was happy because he was happy, yet did not truly understand. Nina adored him, perhaps in ways Gabriele Münter had not, yet she was alien to his capacity to be thrilled by ancient religious art just as she did not even try to understand his tireless experimentation.