In the late 1920s, a small group of young Americans with an eye for modern art became aware of the Bauhaus as a hotbed of new and exciting ideas. Kandinsky, along with Klee, loomed as an inventive genius whose presence at the school’s revolutionary headquarters in Dessau made it a center of pioneering ideas and artistic creativity.
In 1926, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who was teaching a course in modern art at Wellesley College near Boston, gave his students a quiz to evaluate their knowledge of modernism. The quiz subsequently appeared in the August 1927 issue of Vanity Fair, the fashionable monthly magazine whose editor, Frank Crowninshield, would two years later be one of the seven members of the founding committee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York—where Barr would be the first director.
Those who took the quiz had to answer the question “What is the significance of each of the following in relation to modern artistic expression?” Fifty names followed, among them George Gershwin, James Joyce, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Saks Fifth Avenue, Franz Werfel, the Sitwells, Arnold Schoenberg, and Das Bauhaus, which was number 48. The answers followed so that the quiz takers could see how well they had done. The answer for 48 was “Das Bauhaus: At Dessau, formerly at Weimar, Germany. A publicly supported institution for the study and creation of modern architecture, painting, ballet, cinema, decorative and industrial arts. Among the professors are Kandinsky, the Expressionist, Paul Klee claimed by the super-realists, and Moholy-Nagy, the Constructivist.”105 The labels for Kandinsky and Klee were inaccurate, but at least there was an awareness that something major was going on at this unique institution.
Barr had distinct impressions of the Bauhaus as a place with an overarching agenda. In 1928, on a trip to the Soviet Union with the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, he visited the School for Art-Culture in Moscow, where he engaged in a conversation with its director, Professor David Sterenberg, about what was happening in Dessau. Barr wrote in his diary, “They were very much interested in the Bauhaus and have evidently learned much from it. I asked Sterenberg what were the chief differences between the two. He replied that the Bauhaus aimed to develop the individual whereas the Moscow workshops worked for the development of the masses. This seemed superficial and doctrinaire since the real work at the Bauhaus seems as social, the spirit as communistic, as in the Moscow school. Kandinsky, Feininger, and Klee have actually very little influence among the Bauhaus students.”106
Barr had spent four days at the school on his way to Moscow. His quick impressions would do the Bauhaus considerable harm, because as the most influential person in America in cultivating attitudes toward the modern art movements of the era, he would convey the impression that the goals of the Bauhaus were primarily political in nature, having more to do with collaborative work and the spreading of design standards throughout society at large than with the making of great art. All the firsthand accounts from Bauhaus insiders make clear that Sterenberg was more accurate than Barr. By identifying the central issue as “the development of the individual,” the Russian pinpointed the goals of Kandinsky and Klee and Josef Albers as artists and teachers. None of these three was interested in a political agenda, even if Hannes Meyer was, and even if Gropius’s ultimate goal was societal transformation.
Another young American, the designer and future architect Philip Johnson, wrote Barr a letter about a year later in which he discussed Kandinsky specifically. He deemed the Russian “a little fool who is completely dominated by his swell Russian Grande Dame of a wife. He had millions of his sometimes painful abstractions sitting around the house and thinks he is still the leader of a new movement.”107 One man’s “little fool” was another’s tall gentleman. In his unpublished diary, the art dealer Hugo Perls describes Kandinsky, even at a slightly later point in his life, as “straight, tall, healthy, and jovial like a major or a professor!” Perls was greatly impressed, as well, by Kandinsky’s meticulous sense of order. “Once when we spoke about a certain painting of his, he fetched a diary with an exact inventory of his work. Vertical lines divided every page into 3 columns: in the first a pen-and-ink sketch of the painting, in the second a description of subject and colors, and in the third the date when it was finished and the time he had worked on it.”108
PHILIP JOHNSON WAS NOT the only person to make, from afar, a withering assessment of Kandinsky, even if most of the attacks focused on the art rather than the man and his wife. In April 1929, Ray Boynton, a highly respected American professor who taught at the University of California in Berkeley, wrote a broadside on the Blue Four that singled out Kandinsky as the worst culprit. Kandinsky’s response was more excitement than displeasure. He wrote Galka Scheyer, “So, there was a fight after all!” and asked her to send all the articles and tell him whatever she heard. He told her, “It’s very nice of you to defend me so energetically, … and to train the people to look through or behind the surface of my painting—woe to those who remain on the surface! Woe therefore to almost everyone!”109
Not only was he feeling that “almost everyone” from the outside was not getting beyond the surface, and was therefore seeing only his cold veneer without his inner fire, but the Bauhaus itself was becoming an increasingly unsympathetic environment for him. One problem was that Hannes Meyer, who had replaced Gropius as director, rejected the idea of Bauhaus theater productions. This forced Oskar Schlemmer to give up what had been his passion, and to leave the school. Kandinsky had been one of Schlemmer’s most vocal supporters: Schlemmer wrote his colleague Otto Mayer, “Kandinsky openly shows his sorrow at the end of the Theater in its present form.”110 Schlemmer asked Kandinsky if he wanted to take over the theater workshop, but the Russian declined, saying the whole notion of theater at the Bauhaus had become too controversial. But Kandinsky felt such affinity for Schlemmer’s ideas, in particular the way he used solid colors in the Triadic Ballet, that Schlemmer’s exile stung.
Kandinsky was increasingly pessimistic about the ability of people, anywhere and under any circumstances, to grasp truly new approaches. Shortly after moving to Dessau, he had written “And, Some Remarks on Synthetic Art.” It acknowledged his “despair at the slowness of the human spirit.” Kandinsky was impatient with the continued application of nineteenth-century values. He felt that painting itself had made progress—”with the principle of inner necessity, with the recognition that form is a bridge to inwardness”—but that even if he and other artists were finding the means to express the soul visually, and to illustrate the force of human feeling through color and line, the general population was lagging in its ability to understand. Another of his goals, the universal recognition “that science and technology both can co-operate with art,” was at least accorded proper respect at the Bauhaus.111
Kandinsky was criticized not just for painting work that people could not grasp, but for giving it names that didn’t provide the hints and instructions for which they were looking. Titles like Composition VIII were an affront to people who wanted something more lyrical and informative. In he wrote Grohmann, “My titles are supposed to make my paintings uninteresting, boring. But I have an aversion for pompous titles. No title is anything but an unavoidable evil, for it always has a limiting rather than a broadening effect—just like ‘the object.’ “112
Because “almost everyone” failed to understand his work, Kandinsky was, in spite of his guaranteed annual income from the syndicate of supporters who had formed the Kandinsky Society, short of money. Unlike Klee, he suffered from a lack of collectors. When his work did sell, the prices, in were three thousand reichmarks for a small painting, and up to ten thousand for the large ones. When Galka Scheyer arranged for the film director Josef von Sternberg to visit the Bauhaus to buy some of his work, Kandinsky cautioned her that von Sternberg must be told he would not lower those prices. He only made “exceptions for people who would like to buy out of pure interest but have no money”;113 but he never gave deals to the rich. Still, he hoped von Sternberg would pay the asking price, since Nina always needed more money.