The Bauhaus Group by Nicholas Fox Weber

Author:Nicholas Fox Weber [Weber, Nicholas Fox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307273345
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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