ANDREAS HÃ홢NEKE

HANS REICHEL AND VASILII KANDINSKY

There was still a nearly-impermeable border running through the middle of Germany when Vivian Barnett announced her visit to me in Potsdam in 1988 - from the other side of the Wall - to hear more details about the Vasilii Kandinsky watercolor that had been seized as "degenerate " by the Nazis in 1937 (the "" project was one of the emphases of my re- search). On the way to see me, Vivian stopped in Paris and there visited her friend Lucie Schimek, the widow of the painter Hans Reichel. Schimek showed her an art magazine from the DDR that someone had sent her, and she was completely astounded that an article on Reichel had appeared there.' Vivian took one look at it and said, "I am just on my way to see the author." When she arrived at my place, she told me about this little episode, and we spoke about Reichel before ever even speaking a word about Kandinsky. Since the beginning of the 1960s, I was fascinated with the three small by Reichel that were exhibited in the state museum of Moritzburg in , which Alois Schardt had acquired for the museum in 1927, and I had tried to learn more about the painter. But in the DDR this was not possi- ble. It was only on my first trip to the West, to a 1987 exhibition of Paul Klee in , that I came across the large book on Reichel by Francois Mathey22 and thereby had enough information to write the aforementioned little essay for the magazine Bildende Kunst. Vivian, for her part, had taken the Reichel holdings of the Guggenheim Museum as the occasion to mount a small exhi- bition of the artist in 1988. And so our friendship began not only under the sign of Kandinsky, but also that of Hans Reichel, the so much less well- known painter of a close bond with the most unlikely elements of nature. For that reason, I write here, in honor of Vivian, on Hans Reichel and Vasilii Kandinsky. It is occasionally assumed that Reichel had already had contact with the artists of the Blue Rider before the First World War in at the Cafe Stefanie, and that he had even become friends with them.3 No authentic evi- dence for that has yet been found. A later letter from Reichel to Lily Klee,

1. A. Hiincke, "Das kleine Reich des Hans Reichel," Bildende Kunst (Berlin), 30, No. 8 (1988), 354-56. 2. F. Mathey, Han.s Reichel (Zurich: Scheidegger, 1980). 3. Ibid., pp. 14, 15. from the time of his internment in France during the Second World War, happens to speak of the earlier encounters: "Do you from time to time hear from Kandinsky? And Jawlensky? I think so often, oh, so often of the splen- did and rich hours with you at your place - with all the works, and Bach and Mozart and and and the still, sleepy, and of course so impor- tant Ainmiller Street."4 It is not entirely clear whether the mention of Mu- nich's Ainmiller Street, where the Klee family lived until 1921, refers only to their last three years there, when there was demonstrable contact between Reichel and Klee, or actually to an even earlier time. This is not only because when they were not staying in Murnau, Kandinsky lived with Gabriele Munter in another house on the same street until 1914. Also, Reichel's memories may shift from time spent there to his visits to the , founded in Weimar in 1919 and moved to Dessau in 1925, where Klee and Kandinsky taught. And after all, an earlier meeting would have been possible. In 1912 Reichel was twenty years old and was active in Munich as a poet. But it is not very likely that he found access to the tight circle of the painters of the Blue Rider. Rather, on the basis of very few documents, the record indicates approxi- mately the following: through his sister Grete Lichtenstein, who was friendly with and took piano lessons at the home of Lily Klee, Reichel met Paul Klee in 1918, when Reichel began to concentrate on paint- ing rather than . In 1917 Reichel and his wife moved into the small Chateau Suresnes on Werneck Street, and Klee obtained a studio there in spring of 1919. So, both of them worked in close proximity for nearly three years, which explains the strong influence of Klee on Reichel's definition and conception of form. In any event, we can deduct about three-quarters of a year from that span of time, because from April to the beginning of June of 1919 Reichel was hiding the wanted fugitive, revolutionary writer Ernst Tol- ler, in his studio. As this hideout was betrayed and Klee's studio searched by the police as well, Klee retreated to for a while. In 1920, as pun- ishment for abetting the flight of a criminal, Reichel had to spend four months in confinement in Waldheim prison. And from January 1921 Klee spent half of his time in Weimar, where he had already entered his professor- ship at the Bauhaus. Before his ultimate move to Weimar in September 1921, Emmy [Galka] Scheyer visited him in Munich. She had become acquainted with Alexej Jawlensky in 1916, had given up her own and since then dedicated herself to distributing his work and that of his friends. Klee made her aware of Reichel and she kept a few of his works on offer. A 1922 letter from Jawlensky to Reichel testifies to that: "Yesterday I came to Essen to see Emmy and saw your 'Pink Star.' The picture is so wonderful and has touched

4. Reichel to Lily Klee, July 31, 1941 (Paul Klee Foundation, Bern).