Friendship, competition and artistic exchange. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus
Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee met as early as 1911: Kandinsky was one of the founding members of the "Blaue Reiter," while Paul Klee was involved in their legendary group exhibitions starting in 1912. The group disbanded with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but the paths of the two artistic geniuses would soon cross again when they were appointed to the Bauhaus in Weimar. Paul Klee began his teaching career in April 1921, and Kandinsky in July 1922. Like Paul Klee, he was entrusted with some of the elementary training; he taught "Analytical Drawing" and "Design Theory of Color" and also became the artistic director of the mural painting workshop.
In the mid-1920s, the Bauhaus relocated from Weimar to Dessau. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee moved into one of the recently completed Master Houses in 1926. Designed as semi-detached houses, the Master Houses form a residential estate that Walter Gropius built according to his plans for the “Masters of the Bauhaus”. Henceforth, two artists lived in each of the modern semi-detached houses with a studio, often together with their wives and families: alongside Kandinsky and Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Lyonel Feininger, as well as Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer.
In the following years, Klee and Kandinsky developed a close professional and amicable relationship despite their sometimes contradictory artistic tendencies, competition and rivalry for exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions of their works. They engaged in intensive exchanges and cultivated their own neighborly rituals, including afternoon tea and chats on the terrace, which Nina Kandinsky captured in a few photographs. In the early 1930s, they went separate ways: Paul Klee left the Bauhaus in 1931 to take up a post at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He initially kept his apartment in the master house; however, their neighborly relationship ended in 1932. Kandinsky followed the Bauhaus to Berlin. The political rise of the National Socialists soon stopped the artistic careers of both men. Initially, Paul Klee was suspended from his professorship in Düsseldorf and dismissed. Kandinsky lost his job at the Bauhaus, which was closed in 1933 and searched and sealed by the police and the paramilitary SA. Almost simultaneously, the two artists emigrated; Klee went to his hometown of Bern, and Kandinsky went to Paris. In the following years, they kept in touch through the mail, primarily through their wives, Nina Kandinsky and Lily Klee: “Life in the forest of Dessau seems like a brief but happy episode of our lives” (Lily Klee to Nina Kandinsky in March 1934, quoted from: ex. cat. Klee & Kandinsky. Nachbarn, Freunde, Konkurrenten, Lenbachhaus, Munich 2015/16, p. 54).

"To my dear old friend"
Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky had already exchanged their first “art gifts” during the days of the Blauer Reiter (1911–1914). Yet after their reunion at the Bauhaus, the regular exchange of their artworks for birthdays, Christmas, and other special occasions would be a cherished tradition, particularly between 1923 and 1932. In a repetitive pattern, Klee gave Kandinsky one of his artworks, usually a watercolor or a drawing, sometimes a print or a painting, for his birthday on December 4. Kandinsky returned the favor two weeks later, giving Klee one of his artworks for his birthday on December 18. The whole procedure would repeat on Christmas. On December 4, 1931, Kandinsky also received a watercolor from Paul Klee entitled “Tripelmarionette” inscribed with the dedication “for Kandinsky on December 4, 1931, in old friendship K” (1927,3, catalogue raisonné Klee 4216, Centre Pompidou, Paris). Kandinsky responded on December 18, Paul Klee's birthday, with the present work inscribed with the dedication: “To my dear old friend / Paul Klee / for XII 31 / Cordially / Kandinsky”.
A comparison of these two works shows that the pieces that Kandinsky gave away often referenced the preceding gift that Klee had given him. “The gifts were more than just friendly tokens of appreciation; they also engaged in a subtle dialogue in which they exchanged their artistic views and once again juxtaposed abstraction and references to reality.” (Christine Hopfengart, in: ibid., p. 47)
With “Friedlich”, Kandinsky seems to be referring to Klee's “Tripelmarionette” in several regards, although the work had been created a year earlier and not after Paul Klee's gift had been delivered. On the one hand, Kandinsky's construction of forms floating in space roughly takes up the outlines of the figurative line structures found in “Tripelmarionette.” Both representations consist of elements that alternately expand and narrow. Beginning with a horizontal base, both compositions widen toward the top. Both contain bright red details. Furthermore, there are more surprising minor parallels. For example, where Paul Klee places a feather-like structure on the right, Kandinsky shows a triangle in a similar color scheme, and the right “wing” of Klee's figure resembles the small double tips in Kandinsky's watercolor.
The spray technique can also be found in both works: Paul Klee places sun-yellow touches in the upper corners of the sheet, while Kandinsky creates an atmospheric splashed background against which the contrasting, intense colors of the triangular forms float weightlessly in space and unfold exceptionally well. For Paul Klee, the spray technique had already been an essential means of design since the mid-1920s (towards the end of the Weimar Bauhaus period); Kandinsky discovered the technique later and used it for the first time in September 1927. At the Weimar Bauhaus, it emerged in connection with art theory courses and the inspiration of László Moholy-Nagy, who propagated the great potential of art liberated from subjective influences. Using a brush pulled over a sieve or an atomizer, with stencils, fine grids, or perforated sheets, the image carrier is covered with a fine mist of watercolor or gouache paint.


Kandinsky’s geometric abstraction
Inspired by Russian Constructivism, Kandinsky had already changed his pre-war expressionist style by the early 1920s. His palette became much lighter and his forms more geometric: his repertoire now included circles, squares, triangles, and arrow shapes, as well as clusters of lines, checkerboard structures, and distinctive symbols, while soft edges were replaced by sharp contours. He described this new direction as “cool abstraction” and also published an article on it in Cicerone in 1925.
Kandinsky's forms now float freely in space, crossing and piercing one another or grouping around an imaginary center. This resulted in highly complex compositions characterized by many forms and colors.
In his 1912 publication "On the Spiritual in Art," Kandinsky focused on the use of symbolic colors. He then began to devote himself especially to separate, objective, formal elements that harmonized with one another. The artist exemplified this approach in the 1926 Bauhaus book no. 9, "Point and Line to Plane. Contribution to the Analysis of Pictorial Elements."
While Paul Klee's delicate imaginative forms oscillate between figuration and abstraction, bursting with narrative details and containing clear references to reality in a dialogue with nature, Kandinsky no longer attempted to abstract the world of nature but to create an independent representation and meaning. His works convey a certain formal view of reality while not being entirely free of associations; however, only in a figurative sense and on a non-objective level. "As long as, for example, the pictorial elements in painting are suspended on the framework of natural forms, it remains impossible to avoid the secondary sound and thus to discover the pure law of painterly construction. [..] The consistent handling of the basic elements with the examination and application of their inner forces, that is, in general, the inner position, is the first and most unavoidable condition of abstract art" (Wassily Kandinsky, in: Der Cicerone, issue 17, 1925, p. 647).
"Friedlich" embodies the essence of Kandinsky's painting with its balanced composition between movement and calm stability, between consciously constructed geometric structures and a delicate, airy spray technique. At the same time, it is an important testimony to the intense artistic friendship between two painters who had a particularly lasting influence on 20th-century art and beyond. [CH]