A Visit to Paul Klee's Studio
Klee shares his ideas about painting, children's art, his own legacy, and madness.
This article is adapted from a chapter of my unpublished nonfiction: “The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-1925.”
Theater instructor Lothar Schreyer was in his studio at the Bauhaus School in Weimar one afternoon when he heard a peculiar noise coming from overhead. Schreyer associated the sound with the footfalls of a large animal, pacing back and forth, and assumed the culprit was a cat. The animal he had in mind belonged to artist Paul Klee whose studio was upstairs, directly overhead from his own. “Fritzi,” Klee’s cat, was a very large beast, Schreyer recalled — “a cross between a housecat and a wildcat.”
Schreyer went upstairs and knocked on Klee’s door. Klee opened it, ushered Schreyer into his workshop, then closed the door, locking it. Klee put the key in the pocket of his smock, then hung a piece of cardboard on the doorknob in front of the keyhole, completely hiding his activities from prying eyes. Immediately, Schreyer noticed powerful smells emitting from different corners of Klee’s expansive room.
“It had a powerful and warming mix of coffee, tobacco, paste, oil paint, varnish, wood finish, turpentine, and strange mixtures,” Schreyer wrote.
While all of the Bauhaus School in Weimar was a laboratory, Klee’s studio was a genuine “magical kitchen,” according to Schreyer. Over here, by a washbasin, several tables held arrangements of tools and materials — paint boxes, palettes, tubes, paint cloths, flat bowls of laquer and varnish, liquid-fuel stoves, chalk mixes, odd pastes, long and short wooden handles for thick and thin brushes, a collection of small trowels, quill pens, etching needles and knives, tweezers, strips of linen, handmade paper, Japanese paper, cartons, pieces of canvas (some coated; others, not). And all of it, Schreyer said, seemed well-ordered, within easy reach of the master’s hand, “as demanded by his paintings.”
Klee’s dark and quiet eyes considered Schreyer from behind the cloud of bluish smoke that rose from his pipe. The artist’s smile expressed an ever-present sense of irony.