The German Genius

Maggi. He visited London, Paris, and Zurich, where he met the Swedish playwright August Strindberg and had an affair—and a child—with his wife.
    Back in Munich Wedekind led a bohemian life, producing work that often flirted with the censor, and sometimes went well beyond what even the liberal Munich authorities would allow. His first full-length drama of importance was Frühlingserwachen ( Spring Awakening ; 1891), which appeared in book form and wasn’t realized on stage until Max Reinhardt produced it fifteen years later. Its theme was adolescent sexuality, and most people found it far too obscene to be actually performed (a fourteen-yearold girl dies as the result of a botched abortion).
    Wedekind, as we have seen, was one of the cofounders of Simplicissimus , with Langen. For his satire on the Kaiser he was forced into exile, then jailed, but in 1901 he paraded with a group of artists, writers, and students, denouncing censorship, after which eleven of the demonstrators established a cabaret called Die 11 Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners). 31 They rented a smallish room at the back of an inn (it seated only eighty people) and decorated it with paintings by their friends from Jugend and Simplicissimus as well as some instruments of torture—which appealed to Wedekind’s love of the grotesque. In the cabaret, Wedekind sang his own songs and accompanied himself on the guitar. 32
    Among the many women in Wedekind’s life, there was only one, Tilly Newes, the actress he married in 1906. Tilly starred in Wedekind’s magnum opus, Lulu , which appeared in two parts, Erdgeist ( Earth Spirit ) in 1895, and Die Büchse der Pandora ( Pandora’s Box ) in 1904. 33 She played Lulu to Wedekind’s Jack the Ripper. Lulu is a wild, untameable, beautiful beast, the very embodiment of female sexuality—or what men would like female sexuality to be. “She was created to stir up great disaster,” is how Wedekind himself described his greatest creation. She became even better known when Karl Kraus staged Pandora’s Box privately in Vienna in 1905. Sitting in the sixth row was the composer Alban Berg (1885–1935). His postwar opera would introduce a whole new public to Lulu .
    T HE R OAD TO A BSTRACTION
     
    In 1896 the Russian Wassily Kandinsky inherited enough money from an uncle for him to become financially independent. His interest in art was kindled by seeing one of Monet’s haystack paintings at an exhibition in Moscow and also by a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bolshoi which he later said he experienced mainly as “a series of wild lines and colours.” He moved to Munich where he entered the private art school run by Anton Azbe.
    There he met Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, fellow students at the school and, the following year, he visited the Sezession exhibition, encountering the works of Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Hermann Obrist. Kandinsky’s own works were rejected by the Munich Art Academy but in 1900 he was accepted into Franz von Stuck’s class, where Paul Klee was a fellow student. Stuck encouraged Kandinsky to work with strong light and dark contrasts, and he began a series of color works on black paper and some early woodcuts. In May 1901 he was instrumental in the founding of the Phalanx group with Waldemar Hecker and Ernst Stern. The Phalanx artists were—like the Sezessionists—opposed to old-fashioned and conservative art.
    Kandinsky was by now integrated into the German art scene: he was friendly with Behrens and Obrist, his work showed the influence of Jugendstil, and he exhibited at the Berlin Sezession. On a visit to the Netherlands in 1904 with Gabriele Münter, a fellow Phalanx artist eleven years his junior, Kandinsky began to apply paint mainly with a palette knife and at the same time started to make notes about his new theories on color and form. 34 His first solo show took place in Munich in 1905, at the Galerie Krause. That year, too, he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, after which he and Gabriele moved to Sèvres, west of Paris, where he could observe the work of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Rouault, Henri Rousseau, and Edvard Munch and where he formed a friendship with Gertrude Stein, who had a comprehensive collection of paintings by these masters. That year too his pictures were shown again in the Berlin Sezession, next to the painters of Die