Bronislava Rokytová

‘Lieber Herr Beckmann…’ From Wassily Kandinsky’s letters to Hannes Beckmann in Prague (1934–1939)

In the collections of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles eleven letters have been preserved written from Paris by Wassily Kandinsky (1896–1944) to a former student of his from the Bauhaus in Dassau, who was now living in Prague. The German artist Hannes Beckmann (1909–1977) was one of the emigrants from Germany with anti-Nazi views, many of whom found refuge in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The bundle of letters written to him by Wassily Kandinsky in the years 1934–1939 is kept in the Hannes Beckmann collection, together with further correspondence with people of interest, some of them from Czechoslovakia. Wassily Kandinsky’s letters shed light on the friendly relationship that the artist maintained with his students even after the Bauhaus had been closed down. Hannes Beckmann regularly sent him photographic reproductions of his new works to Paris, and consulted with Kandinsky about the articles on art that he published in Prague. One of the letters contains detailed comments by Kandinsky on Beckmann’s article on the group Der Blaue Reiter, a reaction to the exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich. The first part of the correspondence, up until 1935, deals more with cultural and social events. The letters written after 1937, however, are noticeably affected by the impact of the increasing strength of Nazi policies, which began to influence the lives of artists in both Prague and Paris. The events leading to the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Germany prompted Hannes Beckmann to search for ways of leaving the country. Wassily Kandinsky, who approached Josef Albers, among others, about this, tried to help Beckmann and his family to emigrate to the United States of America. After the proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, however, this became extremely difficult. In spite of this, the last letter by Kandinsky to have been preserved ends with the hope: ‘manchmal kommt die Chance “über Nacht”, und so wird es wohl auch in Ihrem Fall werden.’ [Sometimes the chance comes ‘overnight’, and that is how it will surely be in your case, too.]

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