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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY THE BAUHAUS GROUP: SIX MASTERS OF MODERNISM
to Dessau and he needed to describe his credentials to the Municipal
Council, he told the officials that he had been in deep trouble
at the Munich Academy for being so “intoxicated by nature” that
he tried to express “everything through color,” and that he failed
a drawing test there. He believed that this conflict with the establishment
in Munich a quarter century earlier was one of his main
qualifications for teaching at the Bauhaus.
Between those confrontations with the hidebound art establishment
and his joining the Weimar Bauhaus in 1922, Kandinsky
altered the course of world art. In 1901, he founded “the Phalanx,”
an organization to advance new artistic methods that was
named after a word invented by Homer for the battle line in ancient
Greece, where heavily armed soldiers, working in unison,
vanquish their enemy with heavy swords and twelve-foot-long
pikes. The Phalanx showed work
by Monet as well as other impressionists,
while Kandinsky pushed
his own work into a new realm by
using tempera to create vibrant
colors.
Teaching a breakthrough approach
to painting and drawing,
the Russian led his students to Bavaria
by bicycle and summoned
them for critiques with a police
whistle. In 1902, one of the students
who cycled in agreeably when
the whistle was blown was Gabriele
Münter, a quiet and thoughtful
twenty-five-year-old woman, of
slight build and almost Japanese
looks with her smooth dark hair
and porcelain skin. The mutual attraction
was immediate, and once
Anja moved out, Kandinsky and
Münter began to live together; they
traveled to Venice in 1903, and, in
the winter of 1904–5, to Tunis. Kandinsky
returned to Odessa and
Moscow on his own, but afterward
he and Münter moved to Sèvres,
near Paris, for a year, then for near-
ly another year to Berlin, before returning
to Munich.
In this period, during which
Kandinsky became one of the
principal painters in the Blue
Rider movement, his work went from animated woodcuts
based on Russian folk art and fairy tales to landscape paintings
in unprecedented combinations of saturated colors. Münter
worked similarly: there are paintings from 1908 and 1909 where
it is difficult to tell who painted which one. She had extraordinary
natural gifts, and was one of those rare people who
could spontaneously make dazzling art, almost primitive in its
untutored freshness yet revealing complete competence, that
evoked natural sights with unequivocal joy. Kandinsky learned
an immense amount from her approach — more than he would
ever acknowledge. At the Bauhaus, he would be with a woman
who had no such artistic skill, who worshipped him giddily;
it would be as if there was something intolerably threatening
about having once been with a fellow artist who had direct access
to her own brilliant instincts.
In his early abstract paintings, such as Improvisation XXXI, 1913,
Kandinsky pushed the limits and produced artworks that seemed
to convey sheer energy.
PHOTO: © THE GALLERY COLLECTION/CORBIS
WINTER 2011–12
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Münter and Kandinsky’s apartment on Munich’s Ainmillerstrasse
was two houses away from where
the recently married Paul and Lily Klee were living.
The moment that Klee and Kandinsky met,
they enjoyed a remarkable rapport. Each was delighted to meet
another person who cared so deeply about making art, and who
was so bent on exploring new means to imbue that art with vitality.
The rare sense of comfort and pleasure Kandinsky experienced
with Klee, in spite of Klee’s apparent remoteness, would
over a decade later be a lure to the Bauhaus.
There were halcyon evenings when Kandinsky and Münter
would go over to the Klees’ to hear Paul and Lily perform violin
and piano duets. Kandinsky adored little Felix, who, starting at
the age of two, in 1909, would spend time in the Russian’s studio
when his parents were busy.
Felix Klee would never forget
Kandinsky’s and Münter’s apartment,
which was larger and more
elegant than his parents’ and distinguished
by its white doors.
Once they were based in Munich,
Kandinsky and Münter spent
their summers in the Bavarian
Alps, in the picturesque country
town of Murnau, where Münter
bought a house in 1909. There,
Münter’s natural skill as a painter
became all the more evident. Her
exuberant renditions of idyllic life
in the countryside seemed effortless,
spontaneously evoking the
sweet local church, apple trees
bursting with fruit, and farmhouses
bathed in summer sunlight.
Kandinsky was more of a struggler,
perpetually intellectualizing and
pushing himself to the next step,
although he benefited immensely
from his exposure to Münter’s
forthright style. Kandinsky and
Münter were both affected by the
hinterglasmalerei — small folk art
pictures with the images painted
on the reverse side of glass — that
they collected together. With their
simplified forms and vibrant colors,
these anonymous works had
a charm and an immediacy that both painters sought to retain in
their more sophisticated work.
But the Russian could not stop his inner wheels from turning.
By 1910, he was determined to explode the boundaries of
painting. He started to improvise compositions that convey sheer
energy. Their charged, dark lines of scant representational value,
and their sequences of fantastic yellow, red, indigo, and mauve
biomorphic forms, pulse in deliberate dissonance. With these
paintings simply named Composition or Improvisation, Kandinsky
unleashed a way of painting that was unlike anything that anyone
else had ever done or even considered.
While Kandinsky’s fellow Blue Rider artists — Auguste Macke,
Franz Marc, and Klee — adhered to figurativism, they admired
his independence as well as the consuming zeal with which he
approached the task of painting. As Grohmann observed, “Kan-