Nothing was ever 100 percent right. In 1929, Kandinsky had a major exhibition in Cologne, where he was pleased to receive the Golden State Medal. But the success he was enjoying on many levels brought its own problems. Just being Kandinsky was becoming a profession in itself. Managing his exhibitions and sales exhausted him. Klee had his loyal sister to perform those functions; Kandinsky had to do it all on his own. He was desperate to get back to painting, but he had too much administrative work, too many letters to answer. It was a struggle to organize his days.
He chose to keep a meticulous catalogue of his work, going to great effort to track everything that was sold, applying numbers to each piece whether or not it was still in his hands. But that craving for order deprived him of many hours that might otherwise have been spent with a brush in hand.
Anguish, nevertheless, served as a catalyst. Kandinsky believed that an “antecedent psychic state” was essential for a work of art to “come into being.”114 His mental darkness affected his creative process and led to his exuberant art.
Despite all the pressures on him, Kandinsky’s paintings from the Dessau years appear to smile at us. Noticeably warmer than his work in Weimar, they are paeans to motion and a height of energy. His 1928 Little Black Bars infuses the viewer like a shot of adrenaline (see color plate 14).115 An ovoid—for some of us it is hard to resist reading it as a hurled football or rugby ball—descends from the heavens. A small glowing moon (or possibly sun) appears above the ovoid. It suggests the distant realm from which the fast-moving form originates—and which it is clearly descending from rather than rising toward, thanks to the way Kandinsky has weighted its downward point with heavier colors.
Then, just as we start to read things literally, we realize we cannot. What was the moon or possibly the sun is just a yellow sphere. What might be the sails of a junk are just billowing shapes. Lines that are remarkably spermatozoid are possibly only eager squiggles. Yes, these are sights we know—a world of forms, of objects that move through air or float on water—but they also belong to a universe that did not exist until Kandinsky invented and painted it. The richly mottled textures, the deliciously rich brick red and warm black and satisfyingly sturdy yellow are all pleasures in themselves, not suggestions of some other reality. A bold diagonal line is just that; it has no representational purpose, any more than the sound of a violin does. And the more we look, the more we feel the sheer life of the painting.
The artist’s mind was endlessly fertile. Attraversando, of the same year, has a background that resembles crossing rays of light. It seems that Kandinsky may have gone into the glass workshop, run by his friend Albers, and used the handheld gun essential to sandblasting; clearly Kandinsky sprayed the surface with a fine coat of granular paint, and applied tape to the canvas and then lifted it to create unfolding linear bands that are like the planes of a pleated fan. On top of this background, which has some of the same feeling as the sweep of spotlights at the start of an old-fashioned Hollywood film, there is a sequence of black verticals that would if they could extend above the top of the canvas and below the bottom. Are these tree trunks in a forest? Strips of material in front of a stage? Of course they are nothing literal, but they evoke memories and associations at the same time that they exist as something entirely without precedent. Above all, the animated and vibrantly colored shapes are a means to fill the viewer with a suffusion of sheer energy and joy.
AT THE END OF 1928, Kandinsky himself described his work to Grohmann as being marked by “great calm and strong inner tension.”116 He did not see those forces as incompatible. His only way toward serenity was to live in the extreme. When he and Nina hosted a New Year’s Eve party to welcome 1929, people danced until three in the morning; nothing was done by half measures.
His life had grown easier. Schlemmer now observed, “Kandinsky, once one of the wildest, impossible to classify, has entered the ranks of the classics, clear and unruffled as a mirror.”117 The remark was deprecating in its way, a reference to the assuredness Schlemmer found unnerving, but it zeroes in on the new level of recognition Kandinsky was enjoying.
That success allowed a degree of luxury. For Christmas 1930, Kandinsky and Nina gave themselves a new radio as a present. Nina, Kandinsky wrote Scheyer, was “always enthusiastically turning the knobs. This way we are exploring all of Europe. Unfortunately one needs a special receiver for America, otherwise we might be able to hear your lectures! That would be nice! Perhaps a hole will soon be bored through the earth and then through the hole we can say hello. Radio is such a wonder that nowadays nothing astounds us anymore.”118 That imagined hole through the earth was like the shapes in his paintings of the time, evoking the feeling that anything is possible.
In that same period of relative well-being, however, he had become deeply concerned about his old friend Jawlensky, who was ill with severe rheumatism. In order to improve the patient’s morale, Kandinsky had managed to get Galka Scheyer to sell Jawlensky’s work. Kandinsky’s brief respite from problems and immersion in his private mental universe did not make him blind to other people’s needs or keep him from acting effectively on their behalf.
IN 1931, A SOPHISTICATED YOUNG WOMAN, Ursula Diederich, went to the Bauhaus specifically to study with Kandinsky. She had been educated in her native Hamburg and then in Berlin and Heidelberg before going to Paris to study art. In France, she saw Kandinsky’s work for the first time. In addition to the paintings she found in commercial galleries, there were reproductions in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Diederich was so moved by the energy and originality of the art that she became determined to work with the artist himself.
The adventurous Diederich, who would eventually marry the producer Oskar Fritz Schuh, was by her own account totally nervous and intimidated at her first class with the man she imagined would transform her entire existence. As she walked up the two seemingly vast flights of stairs of Gropius’s building, passing students who were more animated and dressed less traditionally than most of the people she knew, she could not quite envision what lay ahead. She continued down the long corridors to get to the classroom. After the noise and liveliness of the stairs, the hallways seemed quiet and empty. Once she arrived at the classroom, she was glad to be seated before Kandinsky himself arrived. The benches and tables were the same as in other painting classes she had attended, although the polished linoleum floor was an advance over the usual paint-splattered wood. But Diederich knew that, even if the space had familiar elements, the master would be very different from her previous instructors, who had tried to teach her old-fashioned methods of painting in order to render the subject matter in a given style. She was waiting to replace those methods with a new approach that would give her life meaning.
As soon as Kandinsky strode in, the first thing Diederich noted was his “lively, fast-moving, pale blue eyes looking through sharp glasses. A glance interested in everything, which continuously seems to discover new secrets in the world around us.” The man whose vibrant compositions had so excited her quickly held up transparent tinted rectangles, squares, disks, and triangles. Superimposing one on top of the other in various arrangements, he created juxtapositions like those she had seen in his paintings. “Only later did I notice Kandinsky’s almost feminine, sensitive, but very controlled mouth, the graying hair, his dignified, rather perceptive appearance, the correctness of his dark suit, the snow-white shirt, the bow tie … brown shoes—the well-groomed elegance of a scientist in 1931.”119
Diederich found Kandinsky “altogether very attractive.” There was something “impersonal” about him, but this added to his aura. He certainly did not flirt with the female students, or engage with them directly, which made him and his task seem more noble to her. Kandinsky was in his own world, intensely dedicated to the act of painting with what Diederich termed “his relentlessness, his consistency, his love of truth in art.” Above all, Kandinsky was “drunk with the pleasure of exploring free use of color and form.”120
HE WAS ALSO extremely courtly, playfully so, when he chose to be. In June 1932, Kandinsky wrote Galka Scheyer a letter in which he addressed her as “Dearest Excellence, Minister President and Authorized Ambassador.” He continued, “In light of your deeds, efforts, and especially your successes, these titles are far from sufficient!”121 For Scheyer was now so successful with the exhibitions she organized of his, Klee’s, and their colleagues’ work that she was having to fend off requests from museums. Only a few years earlier she had been desperately seeking venues; now she did not have enough work with which to supply them.
Kandinsky wrote her, “I want to wish you the most lovely transformation from flea to human being.” This Kalkaesque image was typical of the quirky twist of his imagination, a way of thinking and speaking that was his alone. Scheyer had sent him a photo with one of his paintings in the background; he wrote, “I have the impression that you are just waking up and we could have a nice chat. It’s amazing how powerfully such a small picture with an impression of a head can transplant one across the ocean into an unknown land.”122 Again his words have the sense of otherworldly happenings, of the shifts between the consciousness of the waking state and the fascinating unconsciousness of sleep. In his mind as in his art, Kandinsky perpetually inhabited foreign and unvisited territories.
Yet the horrendous realities of the time penetrated the bubble provided by his imagination. Kandinsky wrote Scheyer that sales of art had almost come to a halt in Europe, “and things are getting steadily worse.”123 At least Ida Bienert, a collector in Dresden—whom Anni Albers described as one of the unsung heroes of the Bauhaus—had bought two paintings, for which she was paying in installments, but the National Socialists were now in the majority in the Dessau government, and he knew that the Bauhaus might possibly be forced to close.
That year, in September, once the Nazis had gained a majority in the Anhalt government, the Dessau Bauhaus did close. Once the school moved, under Mies van der Rohe’s directorship, to the derelict telephone factory in Berlin that would be its last home, the Kandinskys decided to move with it. Even as the Klees stayed behind in the house the two families shared, on December 10, 1932, Wassily and Nina left their paradise with its black wall and gold-leaf ceiling and again took modest digs in Berlin.
In April 1933, Wassily Kandinsky was among the seven remaining faculty members who voted to close the Bauhaus forever. Three months later, he wrote Galka Scheyer that his Dessau salary, which should have continued for another two years, “seems to have been permanently stopped, because …the BH functions as ‘a culturally destructive communist cell.’ Wonderful—isn’t it?” Even though he thought the closure of the school might be only temporary, Kandinsky complained that there were no exhibitions, and that any further sales were unlikely. He was considering going to America: “You know that this is an old dream of mine, to visit the ‘new land’ once.” He recognized that even if the Bauhaus were allowed to reopen, he would not be likely to remain on the faculty, for the new government, which held the view that “‘abstract art = subversive art,’” would not want him teaching.124 But he doubted that he could afford the steamship fare of nearly 1,500 marks ($360) for two people to cross the Atlantic.
Kandinsky begged Scheyer to let him know if she had any ideas about how he and Nina might make the trip to the United States. In August, she wrote him from Hollywood that they should be patient and hold on until she had sold enough of his work so that funds would await him and he would not have to deplete his savings in Europe. But at the moment, while there were some pending sales, nothing was certain, as hard as she was trying, and hopeful as she remained of some unexpected development, she could make him no promises.
Scheyer had hoped to get Solomon Guggenheim and his art adviser, the Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen—whom Scheyer repeatedly referred to as “Rabbi”—to buy Kandinsky’s work, but she complained that they were devoted exclusively to the work of Rudolph Bauer, an inferior abstract artist whose style seemed a thin imitation of Kandinsky’s. “Bauer is God and you are only a painter,” Scheyer wrote, dismayed.125
America would not be the answer. On June 16, following the closing of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer wrote the weaver Gunta Stolzl that Kandinsky “still cannot believe it has happened.”126 He and Nina soon had no choice but to recognize that reality, however. For Christmas of 1933 they went to Paris to decide whether to move there. The French capital was where the artist lived until his death in 1944. Eventually he attained some of the creature comforts that Nina craved. But he never again painted with the force and bravura, the profound texture, that made his art at the Bauhaus such a vibrant and rare universe.