A CACHE OF KLEES

February 1987 John Richardson

There's a fascinating drama behind the blockbuster Paul Klee show at New York's
MOMA this month. It's the story of a great artist denounced by the Nazis, of his
son's almost lost inheritance, and of the machinations of a gang of rich
collectors. JOHN RICHARDSON went to see Klee's son, Felix, in Switzerland, and
pieced it all together

Paul Klee's spectacular retrospective—opening seven years late for his centenary—at
the Museum of Modem Art this month and the munificent gift of ninety Klees by the
former dealer Heinz Berggruen (now one of the world's leading collectors) to the
Metropolitan Museum have revived interest in the life and death of the reclusive
genius. Klee was so reclusive, in fact, that he used to stop up the keyhole in his
studio door. And who better to tell us about this conundrum of a man and the
intrigue surrounding his legacy than his eighty-year-old son, Felix?

First a word about Felix Klee himself, and his second wife, Livia—goblins guarding
goblin treasure. Although they did not marry until Felix was seventy-four, they had
known each other as children—and in many respects children they appear to have
remained. When asked to do a voice test for a tape recorder, the spry old gentleman
will put a finger in his mouth and pop his cheek loud enough to scare the birds on
the windowsill. Apropos nothing in particular, he will keep his wife and visitors
amused by conjuring up denizens of the zoo or the farmyard or the Bauhaus with a
wealth of whimsical mimicry. He likewise loves to invoke the spirits of his
father's sacred cats: Bimbo, Negro, and Eskimo, for whom Klee invented a special
Joycean language. Felix and Livia never let us forget that they were—indeed still
are—Bauhaus babies. That is to say they were brought up at the famous German school
—founded at Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919 and stamped out by Hitler in 1933—
which was one of the principal cradles of the modem movement in art, architecture,
industrial design, and much else besides. With Kandinsky, Feininger, and Moholy-
Nagy, Paul Klee was one of the early teachers of art and, no less important,
artistic theory at the school; at the age of fourteen Felix became the youngest
Bauhausler (pupil). Livia was the daughter of Hannes Meyer, the controversial
architect who became the director of the Bauhaus and, after failing to communize
it, skipped to Moscow. No hothead, Livia stayed behind and became a dressmaker in
Zurich, and did not get married until 1982, by which time she was nearly sixty.
With her endearing appearance, like one of those one-within-another Russian dolls,
Livia seems to have stepped straight out of Paul Klee's fantasy world. She and
Felix still behave as if they were honeymooners, billing and cooing in Barndiitsch
(Bernese dialect) in a way that evokes any number of the artist's droll titles: The
Inventress of the Nest, or Twittering Machine.

The Felix Klees live very modestly in a modest apartment in a modest building bia.
in Small a modest rooms section crammed of Swiss with subura jumble of treasures
and everyday possessions recall one of those Egyptian tombs where things that the
occupant cherished during his journey through life are assembled for his journey
through death. Apart from the impedimenta of his art, musical instruments were
closest to Paul Klee's heart. Here we still find his grand piano and, perched on
top of a wardrobe, the precious violin on which the artist played—preferably Mozart
—virtually every day of his life, until he became terminally ill. In the kitchen we
come upon the batterie de cuisine which occupied almost as important a role, for
Klee was a highly professional cook (a metier learned from a French chef who worked
in his aunt's hotel) and, according to Felix, would routinely regale his family
with fiveor six-course meals in the French or Italian manner. This expertise
explains the culinary references in his work and his somewhat culinary approach to
the ingredients of art, not to speak of the recipes in his journals, such things as
"Barlotto," a kind of risotto he contrived out of barley and tomatoes, or his
excellent Schweinsnieren ("melt butter, add onions, garlic, finely chopped—celery,
small turnips, leeks, apples, stew gently in some water, circa Vi hour, at the end
add pork kidneys in small pieces, raise the flame for a few minutes'').

If Klee became a champion cook-housekeeper, it was because his wife was off all day
giving music lessons to augment the family income. Laundry, he wrote, is "the only
household task I haven't tried yet. If I could take it on, I'd be more universal
than Goethe.'' Thus, instead of being neglected, like so many children of great
men, Felix was lovingly brought up—fed, nursed, bathed, exercised—not by his mother
but his father, and a very doting mother his father proved to be. Countless entries
in the "Felix Calendar''—the "baby book" that recorded the child's development—bear
out that the artist was obsessively observant: "[Felix] imitates rotating objects
onomatopoetically by woo-woo-woo; dogs by hoo! hoo! hoof; horses by co! co! co!—
with his tongue clicked against the hard palate; ducks: heh! heh! heh! hoarsely in
the back of his throat." Felix has evidently not changed. What with the demands of
the baby, the violin, and the hot stove, it is a wonder that Klee had any time left
for painting. However, his industriousness matched his powers of organization, and
the works piled up, revealing the inordinate variety of the artist's pictorial
repertory—botanical, theatrical, geometrical, zoological, topographical,
anatomical, musical—as well as the inordinate variety of his techniques. The
versatility and virtuosity are staggering. The only trouble is that Klee's somewhat
limited existence—such as a Swiss watchmaker might lead—made for art which, for all
its imagination, variety, and invention, is apt to reduce human experience to a
celestial-toy-town level. Behold Sturm und Drang in a teacup! Hearken to the Alpine
tinkle of cowbell and glockenspiel! Klee kept so far within the limits of his
(admittedly great) gifts, seldom reaching out for the unreachable, that his work
can, on occasion, be too perfect, too pat, too contrived. It was only at the end of
his days, when he was painting in the shadow of death, that Klee gave up looking at
life through a watchmaker's lens and took colossal risks. That, to my mind, is when
his work came magnificently into its own.

In the long run Felix probably suffered as much as he benefited from his worship of
and identification with his benevolent tyrant of a father. Although he developed a
style, not to speak of a signature (only "Felix," never Klee), that was much like
the artist's, and (Continued from page 82) enrolled at an early age in the Bauhaus,
he was not in the end allowed to follow in his father's footsteps. Klee was too
wise not to foresee the traps that lie in wait for the sons of genius: for all the
encouragement he had lavished on Felix's childhood drawings, even to the extent of
mounting them like his own and exhibiting them, he urged his son to pursue his
other bent, drama. But not, as one might have expected, with the Bauhaus's great
dramaturge, Oskar Schlemmer. "My father did not want me wasting my time with a lot
of avant-garde bums,'' Felix says. If he was to make his way in the theater, it
could only be by way of the German equivalent of Broadway. And so in 1926 Felix
left the world of art for the commercial stage.

Meanwhile, Paul Klee stayed on at the Bauhaus, where teaching and theory had come
to play almost as important a role in his life as the practice of art. His students
held him in such awe that they called him "the heavenly Father," but it would seem
that nobody gained more from his pedagogical ideas than Klee himself: witness his
work of the so-called middle period—the Bauhaus years (1921-31)—in which the
artist, who was also something of a mathematician and a scientist (primarily a
botanist), tried out his theories of color and tone, statics and dynamics, with
results that are miraculous as a conjuring trick and precise as an equation. In the
twenties Klee had his first successes abroad, notably in America, but it was above
all in Germany and Switzerland that he won the greatest recognition. He had become
such a prophet in his own country that on his fiftieth birthday (1929) aeronautical
engineers from the nearby Junkers factory feted him by flying over his house and
dropping flowers and presents onto the roof—which gave way, allowing everything to
fall into the studio.

However, by the early thirties Klee was also coming under violent attack from the
Nazis for being a Galician Jew, which he wasn't, and an "entarteter" (degenerate)
artist, which he also wasn't, although he regarded both accusations in the nature
of an honor. Then, in 1933 the Nazis broke into the artist's house at Dessau,
ransacked it, and made off with some of his papers, which Frau Klee boldly forced
the storm troopers to return. It was time to emigrate. On December 23, 1933, Paul
and his wife left Germany for Bern, where he had spent the first twenty years of
his life and where his sister and father still lived. Stagestruck Felix and his
Bulgarian wife—the singer Efrossina Greschowa, known as Phroska—foolishly decided
to remain in Germany. Felix says he wanted to pursue his budding career in the
theater; I suspect he also wanted to cut the psychic cord that connected him with
his father.

Although the artist continued to provide his son with some financial support, he
was unhappy about this filial defection—with good reason. It turned out to be a
disastrous mistake, one that would cost Felix much of his inheritance. Not that
Klee's son was ever a Nazi—he says he longed to kill Hitler when he saw him at the
opera—but to survive in the German theater it was necessary to keep on the right
side of the Party. Especially in Felix's case, for besides denouncing his father,
the Nazis sequestered 102 Klees in German museums; 17 of the paintings were
included in the notorious "Degenerate" art exhibition held in Munich in 1937.
Survive Felix did, thanks to a succession of jobs in the theater and funds sent
from Switzerland.

Shortly after moving to Bern, Paul Klee contracted measles, which brought in its
train all kinds of complications, including the rare disease of the mucous membrane
(scleroderma) that ultimately killed him. "Is Europe limping or am I...?" he asked
around this time, as the imminence of death coupled with the imminence of war
spurred him on to work more obsessively and on a larger scale than ever before. No
question, his great late paintings reveal Klee scaling new heights and plumbing new
depths as he wrestled with the angels and devils lying in wait for him. "Like
Mozart, [he] wrote his own requiem" is how his biographer, Will Grohmann, put it.
When Klee died, on June 29, 1940, he left not only a neat apartment complete with
his beloved grand piano and violin but a neat studio neatly stacked with treasure—
most of his best work. There was also a formidable widow.

Back in Germany, Felix managed to keep out of the army until the last year or so of
the war, on the grounds that he was needed on the home front. Despite the birth of
a son, Aljoscha, in 1940 (Aljoscha now lives mostly in France and paints under the
name Segard), Felix was called up in 1944. After being sent to the Russian front,
he was taken prisoner on May 8, 1945, but he was not listed as such. Officially he
was missing in action.

Let us, however, leave poor Felix in Russia and return to neutral Switzerland,
where the denouement of our story takes place. With victory more or less assured,
the Allied powers—especially the Americans—brought all possible pressure to bear on
the Swiss to sign the Washington Agreement (May 1946), a commercial treaty that
obliged the Swiss authorities to turn over to the Allies all German assets held in
Switzerland. Anything that was not in the form of cash had to be sold by the Swiss,
and the proceeds paid to a Verrechnungsstelle—a special department set up for this
purpose. Although Klee was half Swiss, had spent half his life in Bern, and could
not have been more anti-Nazi, his estate (like that of Kirchner, another famous
German artist who died in Switzerland) was subject to this ruling, for the good
reason that he died before his prolonged struggle to become a Swiss citizen met
with success. By the time his naturalization papers came through, the artist was
too ill to go and sign them. The fact that Klee's son and heir served in the German
army cast a further shadow over the case.

The Allies thus had a perfectly good claim to whatever moneys could be realized
from the sale of Klee's estate. The problem was that this included most of his
masterpieces—the ones the artist had marked "Sonder-Classe" (special category),
i.e., not to be sold. If this vast accumulation—vast in value as well as quantity—
were to be thrown on the sluggish postwar art market, the artist's prices and
reputation would be irredeemably cheapened, and the city of Bern deprived of what
local art lovers regarded as part of their cultural heritage. How could this
disaster be circumvented?

A friend of mine, the late Rolf Biirgi—son of one of the artist's first patrons—
came up with an ingenious solution. Armed with a power of attorney from Klee's
widow, Biirgi rallied three local collectors—Hermann Rupf, Hans Meyer-Benteli, and
Werner Allenbach—and formed a Klee Gesellschaft (a Klee society). Thanks partly to
some high-powered string pulling by Biirgi's close friend, the British minister to
Bern, Sir Clifford Norton (whose wife was an ardent Klee fancier), the Gesellschaft
was able to acquire the estate— including works by Kandinsky, Fei-. ninger, and
Jawlensky—for some 250,000 Swiss francs (in those days about $60,000). This was
paid into a special frozen account set up to legitimize the deal and satisfy any
possible claims. Given that a top-quality painting would now fetch around $1
million, a top-quality watercolor around $300,000, and a top-quality drawing around
$75,000, the value of the estate today would be close to a quarter of a billion
dollars. This deal was perfectly legal, and morally defensible to the extent that
the artist's heir was generally believed to be dead.

Everybody involved kept the story of the Klee inheritance so hush-hush that rumors
abounded: for instance, the Gesellschaft was said to have offered the entire estate
for several times the purchase price to a prominent Swiss collector. I doubt it.
The partners behaved honorably in setting up a Stiftung (a foundation), consisting
of the cream of the collection (forty paintings, 150 colored works, and 1,500
drawings). This Stiftung was then vested in the Bern museum where it can be seen to
this day.

The gang of four behaved less honorably—although quite legally—when they rewarded
themselves for their initiative by augmenting their private collections with many
very choice items. Less honorably still: separately, and in greatest secrecy, they
put a number of works from the Gesellschaft on the market. Certain dealers did
very, very well out of this situation. So did certain collectors, as Douglas Cooper
and I discovered on a trip to Bern around 1950. * Of the marvelous watercolors we
were offered by one of the partners, Cooper bought four or five; I was obliged to
ration myself to one. Three hundred dollars is what my purchase (,Fireworks) cost,
and how I regretted selling it in a needy moment some years later. Ten times what I
had paid seemed like a good profit, until I discovered that the late G. David
Thompson, the speculator-collector who bought it, had employed a restorer to
enlarge the background, and thus add two more zeros to its value. Over to Heinz
Berggruen, the celebrated dealer and collector who has just donated ninety Klees to
the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, and who has interesting
footnotes to add to the Klee saga. "In 1945-46,1 was an information-control officer
with the U.S. Army," he told me, "and I was stationed in Munich. Karl Nierendorf,
the New York dealer in modem German art, knew about the Klee Gesellschaft and asked
me to keep an eye on things. Communications were chaotic, but Nierendorf had
contacts all over Europe and was often better informed in New York than we who were
on the spot. All the same, what a surprise, one summer's day in 1946, when
Nierendorf called from New York with the news—God knows where he got it—that Felix
Klee was not dead, as we all thought, but alive in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp,
and about to be released. Nierendorf had managed to get a message to Felix: that as
soon as he was repatriated and able to rejoin his wife and child, who were living
in the Munich area, he should contact me, and I would give all necessary
assistance-When Felix ma-

terialized [September 1946], he was in sorry shape. You never saw anyone so dirty,
hungry, and ragged, but we clothed him and fed him and put him up in our luxurious
Schwabing villa."

Berggruen says that he cabled the news of Felix's safety to his mother in Bern.
"But to our amazement we got no reply from her. This was puzzling, since she had
been worrying herself to death over her son's fate. What could have happened? As
usual it was Nierendorf who came up with the explanation. So elated was the ailing
Frau Klee to hear her son was alive that she suffered a relapse and died before
being able to cable or telephone, let alone see her son again." And, like her
husband, she died shortly before her Swiss naturalization papers came through. An
eerie postscript to this eerie story: a few months later, at a dinner in New York
given by Grete Mosheim (a well-known German actress married to an American
businessman), Nierendorf had just finished telling his fellow guests about Felix
Klee's dramatic reappearance and his mother's dramatic demise, when he in turn
expired.

Imagine Felix's horror at discovering, after his mother's death, that he had been
done out of his inheritance. It took two years of frantic effort before he finally
obtained a pass from the Americans and a visa—valid for only three months—to visit
Bern and institute legal action. Three decades later, Felix is still too full of
hurt and outrage to discuss this episode with any detachment. He claims that the
Gesellschaft created difficulties for him with the Swiss authorities, and that he
was falsely accused of being a Nazi and a member of the SS. Fortunately he had a
few supportive friends, and they helped him bring a case against the Gesellschaft—
no easy task, given that he was without money and, for some time, work. In the end
he managed to keep himself and his family and pay legal expenses by directing plays
for Swiss radio. It was not until 1952, after four years of litigation, that the
case was settled.

The Swiss courts dissolved the Gesellschaft. In exchange for accepting the
existence of the Stiftung—that is to say all the works now at the Bern museum—and
condoning the various dispensations made by the gang of four, the son, after
settling with the Verrechnungsstelle, was awarded everything that remained in the
estate. And a great deal did. Felix was particularly lucky in that his share turned
out to include a number of the late masterpieces—"difficult" symphonic works which
in the blinkered fifties were deemed inferior to the intricate chamber music of
Klee's earlier period, and hence less popular with the Gesellschaft and its
customers. The last thirty years have witnessed a considerable advance in
perception: nothing seems as difficult as it once did, and Klee's final flowering—
notably his last major painting, which, as we can see in the photograph of Felix's
living room, includes a drawing of the Angel of Death—can now be recognized as the
culmination of his life's work. "All of a sudden everybody wants a late painting,"
a dealer told me apropos the MOMA exhibition. "The trouble is there is nothing of
real importance on the market." Felix's walls are lined with these rarities, but
they are certainly not for sale.

Among much else, Felix acquired the set of thirty spooky puppets that his father
had made for him out of odds and ends (matchboxes and discarded lamp sockets) when
he was teaching at the Bauhaus—works that will be conspicuously absent from the
MOMA retrospective. If Felix is averse to lending them, it is doubtless because
they represent the dramatis personae of his childhood. To watch this ex-Bauhdusler
put on a falsetto voice and mimic the shrieks these puppets once made is to be
wafted back sixty years or more to the heyday of modern German art. For all its
pedagogical seriousness, the Bauhaus evidently countenanced farce.

Was the 1952 settlement a happy ending to an unhappy situation? One might have
thought so. Had Burgi & Co. not intervened vis-a-vis the Allies, Felix stood to
lose everything; as it was, all the parties involved, not least Felix, emerged with
vast holdings. Rancor, however, has taken its corrosive toll. To this day, Felix
rails at the injustice of his fate, at not being his father's sole heir. There is
paranoid talk of swindling and skulduggery, as if the Klee affair were another
Rothko affair. Hence the heavy veils that have been drawn over the whole episode.
Felix's resentment may be tinged with envy, certainly not with greed. On the
contrary, he and his wife have nothing but contempt for material things. The
innocent pride that they take in their frugality is more than justified in that it
obviates the need to sell off heirlooms. The artist's legacy could not be in better
hands.

"The essence of happiness is to live unpretentiously," Paul Klee announced early in

his career. And the extent of the son's observance of this dictum should be
apparent from Simon Brown's photographs of his apartment, with its cuckoo-clock
coziness. Isn't there a moral to be drawn from the very different fates of the
heirs of Klee and Kandinsky—two families

who were so close in Bauhaus days? Whereas Felix's wife, Livia, for much of her
life a professional dressmaker, continues to sew her own dresses (even on occasion
contriving them out of a couple of Lanvin towels) as well as much of Felix's linen,
Nina Kandinsky sold off her husband's works to indulge a taste for expensive
jewelry and a chalet at Gstaad—luxuries for the sake of which she was ultimately
murdered. In the circumstances, isn't it fortunate that luxuries are anathema to
the Klees?

No, if Felix bewails his lot and reviles the Gesellschaft, it is less for material
reasons than for the way partial disinheritance has diminished his role as keeper
of his father's flame. And yet, hasn't he become president of the Klee Stiftung,
and, more to the point, don't he and Livia keep the sacred flame burning at maximum
intensity in their snug suburban fastness?