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THE BAUHAUS GROUP: SIX MASTERS OF MODERNISM COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
his priorities. Sharp observation of everyday experience was fundamental.
A keen appreciation for the processes perpetually occurring
in the kitchen, the human body, and the wooded parks
where he and Klee and Albers took their daily walks, governed
his life. What was essential was to stop and look. In his pervading
appreciation of existence and his overwhelming desire both to
celebrate and to add to the world’s store of beauty, he was possessed
by a determination to make the most of every source of
wonder; he would rest only in order to gain strength for action.
Those same desires ruled the lives of several of his colleagues,
but Kandinsky was distinguished among them
in bringing to the mix “the Russian soul.” He had the
particular intensity that fired Pushkin and Tolstoy, that
permeates the chants of the steppes and the icons of the Russian
Orthodox Church, and that has characterized an entire people
through all the transformations of their nation. Will Grohmann,
who observed Kandinsky firsthand at the Bauhaus, writes, “His
uncompromising attitude to life and art, his faith in the unconquerability
of the human spirit, came with him from Russia.” Although
Kandinsky spent most of his life in Germany and Paris,
he not only retained his fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity,
remained immersed in Slavic literature and music, and continued
to speak his native language with his wife; he also guarded
his secrets, and relished a sense of inexplicable mysteries.
Of the Russian types, he was a nobleman out of Turgenev. He
looked every bit the aristocrat, and struck people “as more like
a diplomat or a widely traveled scholar than as an artist.” While
Johannes Itten wore his outlandish costumes and the Bauhaus
students flaunted their bohemianism, Kandinsky dressed with
meticulous elegance. This was true not just in society but also
when he painted. Unleashing his furies as he brazenly applied
vivid pigments to canvas, he wore, at his most casual, a bow tie
and jacket. “I could paint in a dinner jacket,” he once quipped.
But Kandinsky was marked by correctness and reserve rather
than dandyism. In his appearance and demeanor, he had no
wish to attract attention; he “spoke quietly and attentively, and
was never wounding. He behaved impeccably even in painful
situations.” He had genuine style; he was not a showman.
His propriety teetered at the edge of aloofness. For his students
and colleagues, there was always the sense that Kandinsky,
however amiable and cheerful he might appear, had some
very private issues he was deliberately keeping from view. He
was older than everyone else by at least a decade, but it wasn’t
just age that kept him apart. What was that veneer meant to
guard? Grohmann thinks it was masking an overriding instability.
“The more Kandinsky became aware of his psychic
constitution, the more he developed a capacity to control himself
. . . to save face.” Kandinsky was so eager to conceal the
vagaries of his mind that he preferred “chance acquaintances
to half friendships.” The person at the Bauhaus to whom he
was closest was Klee; this suited him in part because Klee, too,
eschewed intimacy. It was like befriending a flock of birds or
an image of St. Christopher — highly rewarding, but without
threat to the privacy Kandinsky guarded so carefully.
Kandinsky’s face rarely came into focus behind the
cloud of smoke from the cigarettes he puffed all day
long. The screening served him well. By the time he
was at the Bauhaus, he had effectively excised from his
story the woman who had been his truest partner, the brilliant
painter Gabriele Münter; all that one could glean about Münter
from the elusive Kandinsky was that, in her bitterness over his
having left her and, shortly thereafter, taken up with the young
playgirl who was now his wife, she had refused to return a lot
of the art he had left in her care a decade earlier.
But even if Kandinsky would not discuss the details of his
past, students and teachers of every level and a range of styles
admired him immensely. He was the voice of reason in Bauhaus
disputes, where his ability to keep his personal reactions hidden
set him apart, and he was respected for his balanced perspective
on complex issues. While establishing careful perimeters
around his private self, he was open to infinite approaches in
most matters. Anni Albers recalled, with a broad smile, “Kandinsky
often said, ‘There is always an and.’ ” Grohmann refers
to Kandinsky’s wish “to express mystery in terms of mystery.”
There were layers beyond and beneath the layers; that complexity
inspired extraordinary thinking and completely original art.
He was possessed by a determination to make
the most of every source of wonder.
WINTER 2011–12
42
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, on December
4, 1866 — in the same decade that Tolstoy’s
War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and
Punishment were published, and Mussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov was first performed. His earliest memories consisted
of shapes and colors of the sort that would eventually
become the substance of his art. When he was three years old,
the family’s coachman would strip spirals of bark from thin
branches, “cutting away both layers of bark from the first spiral,
and from the second only the top layer.” Little Wassily saw the
forms as abstracted horses, with the outer bark a “brownish yellow
. . . which I disliked, and would gladly have seen replaced,”
and the second layer a “juicy green . . . which I loved most particularly
and which, even in a withered state, still had something
magical about it.” The wood of the now-naked branch
was “ivory-white . . . which smelled damp, tempting one to lick
it, but soon withered miserably and dried, so that my pleasure
in this white was spoiled from the outset.” Colors would induce
intense emotions in him for the rest of his life.
Bright hues made him rapturous; black induced fear. At age
three, he also went to Italy with his parents and his Russian governess,
and retained an impression of a frightening black carriage
in which he and his mother crossed a bridge over “dirty yellow”
water in Florence when he was on his way to kindergarten. Even
more terrifying were “steps leading down into black water, on
which floats a frightening, long, black boat with a black box in the
middle. . . . I . . . bawled my head off.”
When Wassily was five, his family moved to Odessa, where he
spent the rest of his childhood. He had not been there long when
he painted a watercolor of a horse. His aunt — his mother’s older
sister, Elizaveta Ivanovna Tikheeva, who lived in the house and
helped him with his art — had asked him to hold off doing the
hooves until she was there to advise him. Initially, the boy was con-