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[ COLUMBIA FORUM] WINTER 2011–12 40 COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism Wassily Kandinsky’s creative journey from figurative realism to abstract painting Nicholas Fox Weber ’69, longtime director of The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation (albersfoundation.org), de- Nicholas Fox Weber ’69 PHOTO: MARION ET- TLINGER veloped an important friendship with Josef and Anni Albers while studying art history in graduate school at Yale. In the 1920s and ’30s, the artist couple had been the only husband-and-wife pair of artists at the Bauhaus, Ger- many’s pioneering art school. After grad school, Weber went on to write numerous acclaimed books on art, including Balthus: A Biography and The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Ma- chine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Col- lections, Their Forty-Year Feud. Now he has trained his art historian’s eye back on the Bauhaus and six of its main protagonists: architect Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, the Alberses, Mies van der Rohe and the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. In this excerpt from The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (Yale Univer- sity Press, 2011 in paperback), Weber follows Kandinsky on his adventurous artistic journey from the familiar world of figurative realism to the unexplored frontier of abstract painting. Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard Shortly after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Wassily Kandinsky wrote a letter to Lily Klee. This was in the period when Lily preferred to remain in the pleasant apartment in Weimar rather than move to temporary digs near the school’s new location. Lily had given Kandinsky some polenta. Addressing her with a Russianized version of her name, he wrote, Dear Elisaveta Ludwigovna, For years I have wanted to eat polenta — so you will easily understand what pleasure you have given me. My heartfelt thanks. For me polenta is a synaesthetic delight, for in some strange way, it stimulates three senses perfectly harmoniously: first the eye perceives that wonderful yellow, then the nose savors an aroma that definitely includes the yellow within itself, at last the palate relishes a flavor which unites the color and the aroma. Then there are further “associations” — for the fingers (mental fingers) polenta has a deep softness (there are also things which have a shallow softness!) and finally for the ear — the middle range of the flute. A gentle sound, subdued but energetic . . . And the polenta which you served me had pink tones in its yellow color . . . definitely flute! Kind regards to you, dear Pavel Ivanovitch, and dear Felix Pavlovitch, with best wishes for you all, Yours, Kandinsky Kandinsky’s paintings of the period have elements of the marvelous Italian cornmeal. The word “synaesthetic” was key; the Russian invented it to describe the commingling of the various senses that was one of his artistic goals. The soft explosions of polenta cooking, the repetitive popping noise, conjured a realm that increasingly obsessed him: the sonic effects of visual experience. Beyond that, the abstract forms that appear to be in continuous motion — growing, bursting, and condensing — are like polenta when it is being cooked, with the delicate grains absorbing water and air and transmogrifying. Inevitably, too, Kandinsky’s oils and watercolors have a sphere of the same vibrant yellow that the painter admired in the cornmeal, which evokes a spiritual force. The smells and tastes of food were less directly connected to Kandinsky’s art, but his alertness to their subtle unfolding in the polenta reflects
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY THE BAUHAUS GROUP: SIX MASTERS OF MODERNISM Murnau, 1907 Improvisation XIV, 1910 PHOTOS: © THE GALLERY COLLECTION/CORBIS WINTER 2011–12 41
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