Kandinsky / Attenborough

Ergo

Slipping and climbing at the same time is no miracle.

Like diving to the summit of Mont Blanc.

Little dashes (thus: -----------) are a miracle, because some time they stop.

When?
If all the bread-crumbs, all the pharaohs, all the gnats, all the malignant gaps, the torn into scraps, together with all the wars, and aeons, and skiers (not forgetting the boxers!), all the painters whoever painted, the horse trams, which have turned into flying machines, the stockings, the ichthyosaurs, the Milky Way, all the drops of milk from the cows, whales, goats, seals lionesses of the entire prehistoric and simply historic periods, which were sometimes black, sometimes red, and sometimes white – from time immemorial until today, until the second that has just elapsed, were black red and white and … are

HAVE

Determined

Attained

Their end.

Rather not.

Paris, May 1937

(Published in Transition, 1938; Lindsay and Vergo, p.810)

Yesterday, I watched on TV an episode of David Attenborough’s The Perfect Planet. I now find myself thinking of Kandinsky’s quest to call attention to the interconnectedness of all things and his revulsion at what he called the ‘disease of separation’ that blighted not just the art world but the world in general. From the microscopic to the astronomic, he sought continuities. 

It’s the lack of recognition of the interconnected, holistic nature of things that has allowed humanity to bring our planet and its inhabitants to the poor state of health that Attenborough describes. Pillaging the earth for what we can use and abuse, burn and sell, without regard for the impact it has elsewhere in the system. 

Bread crumbs and pharaohs, wars and skiers and the Milky Way. I came looking for Ergo this morning, because I remembered its listings of diverse phenomena and its suggestions of hidden continuities, the same quest that we see in Kandinsky’s paintings and in his theory. 

I remember in the 1990s, a colleague writing to the OU to ask why it was focusing so much on French art of the 20^th century, to the detriment of German art. We guessed the reason was some French art, particularly Surrealism in certain of its dissident forms, seemed to lay the ground for postmodernism in the arts. The importance of postmodernism hasn’t passed and, for sure, that particular thread of art history is interesting.

But, I’d contend, while that historical trend may speak lots of culture in a late capitalist economy, it offers little in terms of how to conceive and overcome the more fundamental crises of our age at the start of the third decade of the 21^st century. Certain moments of Modernism were thrown under the bus, carelessly identified as perpetuating modernist tropes and therefore seen as no longer relevant. 

Contrary to what lazy-minded summaries might lead you to think, the holistic, synthetic world-view that Kandinsky developed – particularly after about 1918 - was grounded in a quest rather than a simple system of belief. He explored ‘the spirit’ in his early work, but he also went on to explore and increasingly use the methods of scientific enquiry. He doesn’t pretend to have the answers: like the shaping of the potentially endless list in Ergo, his work is an on-going enquiry into the nature of connections, a quest to find what holds things together.

In his terms, a quest to replace 

‘either – or’ with ‘AND’.

A better model for us as we head toward the depths of the 21^st century and all that it threatens. 

Untitled, 1944

 Untitled, 1944, Watercolour, Indian ink and pencil on paper, 30.2 x 46cm.

I’m intrigued by the thought of works that Kandinsky left unfinished on his death, and this appears to be one – it’s taped to a drawing board, which adds to its look of incompleteness, though the date is only assumed. Apart from what might have happened to this work had it been completed, I wonder what the next one would have been.

Running diagonally from bottom left to top right is a series of lines, a kind of framework for the hieroglyphs (biomorphic and geometric) contained within; top right, a circle, lighter than the ground, containing its own forms but through which the hieroglyphic structure can be seen; directly below this, four lines of hieroglyphs without any framework; top left, a rectangle, another picture within the picture, this time containing the detail of a quite different composition; and running bottom to top, through the centre and dominating the whole, an energetic black line or whiplash.

The dominant compositional opposition is between the circle and the rectangle in the top right and left; the whiplash line mediates between the two. Two geometric forms, mediated by an organic form. Variations of this line recur throughout Kandinsky oeuvre. At one moment, it is the trailing gown of an angel (see for eg, St Gabriel, 1911 (R&B, 419)); then it is the horrific sound of trumpets described in the Revelation to St John (see Composition V, 1911 (R&B, 400)); then it is a purely abstract line (see, for eg, Reunited Surfaces, 1934, (VEB, 1162)). In this untitled, unfinished work, the line falls into the latter category. 

The Munich to which Kandinsky moved in 1896 was under the spell – like so many other European cities – of the arts and crafts movement, and of Jugendstil in particular. In 1902, Henry Van de Velde described ‘The line as a force […] it derives its power from the energy of him who drew it.’ (Weiss, p.8) In various theoretical writings of the time, the line was already conceived as an expressive force, a manifestation of the artist’s body and mind. Perhaps most important for Kandinsky in these early years was the work of August Endell, whose analyses of the psychological function of lines seem to have shaped Kandinsky’s own fairly directly (Weiss, p.34ff). [I’m trying to avoid academic referencing in these posts, but since I’m stealing these bits from Weiss’s Kandinsky in Munich, I feel I have to.] Anyway, Endell’s colleague, Hermann Obrist did this about 1895 (embroidery, entitled subsequently Whiplash (Cyclamen)):

What we wouldn’t want to do is see this work as the origin of Kandinsky’s line(s); rather, the embroidered line stands for a new understanding of the potential of line in art, and in abstract art in particular. Kandinsky’s variations of what we might call the ‘Jugendstil line’ make use of that expanded potential of the line, and draws on the visual and psychological qualities it made available.

In our untitled piece, the line suggests great movement and energy. It reminds me of one of those films about water snakes, not really having the bits to propel themselves through the water but making up for this by enormously strenuous writhing movements. (What looks like a snake hieroglyph appears in the diagonal framework, a motif quite common in certain of the later works.) The line contrasts the relatively static geometric forms to either side. Though it echoes the curve of the circle somewhat, it is quite at odds with them, speaking of dynamic, gestural and psychological human qualities. Further down, it writhes across the central hieroglyphic script that, as noted, consists of biomorphic forms, suggestive of microscopic life, and geometric forms, side-by-side. A fleeting gesture runs through an ancient script. Lower right, winding annelid-like forms (related to the dominant line) invade the space of some other organism, composed of tiny, strict circles. 

In a strictly non-art historical way, I find the work mind-blowing. It’s too much, too many things, in one. Ancient history, momentary expression, microscopic life, pure abstraction, figuration, writing, drawing, geometry. Yet compositionally, it coheres. It's somewhere between sublime and beautiful. 

Kandinsky manages to articulate his most fundamental principle 

the interconnectedness of all things, including those most radically at odds with each other 

as an aesthetic whole.

In this work, it's the expressive gesture of the artist, with all that that signifies, which calls the disparate pieces together. And in that, the line functions as a kind of signature, one that repeats throughout his oeuvre. 

Black Accompaniment

Black Accompaniment, 1924, Oil on canvas, 166 x 135 cm 

It’s hard to know where to begin. At first glance, the painting is a cacophony of abstract forms and contrasting colours. An explosion, whose white heat occupies left of centre, around which a constellation of mostly geometric forms appear against a dark ground. To the left of the bright area appears a violet triangle, and to its right a reddish-brown circle. The circle is the primary form in the painting – it’s the largest form apart form the ground, and it is complete, nothing crosses it or breaks its perimeter. Symbolically, the circle has a long history of being conceived as representing unity and wholeness, and Kandinsky himself compared it to ‘a snake biting its own tail (the symbol of infinity and eternity)’ (Lindsay and Vergo, p.189). The most perfect form, it stands unchallenged in the painting. The triangle to the left struggles to make itself heard in comparison, and a host of other forms call our attentions from it. Nonetheless, I see the circle and triangle, mediated by a white heat, as the dominant compositional relationship, the only significant challenge coming form the strong diagonal running from the lower right toward the top left corner and contacting the violet triangle. You could see things differently. 

But the structure I’ve been struggling not to see as I attend to this as a purely abstract painting imposes itself strongly, once you’ve seen it. The painting tells a story common to Kandinsky’s oeuvre since before the First World War, and that would stay with his paintings til the end, that of St George at battle with the dragon. Kandinsky adopted it as a metaphor for the battle of good against evil, the triumph of the spiritual over the ‘nightmare of materialism’ he thought characterized his age. We see it clearly in a work such as St George I (1911) 

in which George (toward top right, wearing a feathered helmet) sits on his blue horse (centre to lower right), his green lance (running top right toward lower left) penetrating the dragon’s mouth, his clawed foot in the very lower left corner, his tail running bottom to top just left of centre, and a green wing flowing out of the picture at centre bottom. 

All motifs in Black Accompaniment are contained by the picture’s border, nothing exceeds it except possibly the vacuous ground. The violet triangle identified above now becomes his horse’s head with one eye (the small, light circle), the arcs running from just above its top right corner with red lines emanating are its mane, the black chevron almost contacting the triangle’s lowest point a foreleg, the fan of repeated arcs just below and right of  the main circle, its tail. The quadrangle above the circle, with its own small light circle, is now George’s head with three yellow triangles above to suggest feathers, the circle itself his body or a shield, and below that a trailing cape composed of various blocks of colour. Running across this, the diagonal noted above is now George’s lance. Bottom left, almost comically depicted, is the dragon, now in a shape reminiscent of some basic aquatic life form and predictive of the microscopic creatures that would become so important in the Paris works. 

Suddenly, much of the compositional uncertainty vanishes as a simple narrative begins to cohere what til then were largely chaotic elements strewn as in an explosion across the canvas. But that conflict – between coherence (recognizable motifs) and incoherence (vague structure for abstract forms) does not disappear. So much remains unresolved in the painting as forms escape the story that unfolds, abstract forms that add nothing to the mythical battle described. None more so than the tableau, bottom right. It stands there, like the printer’s colour blocks we find around the edges of cardboard packaging – nothing to do with the printed image and text, but nonetheless essential to the control of printing. Each colour in the tableau seems to be used in the painting. The practice of including a picture within the main picture occurs frequently in Kandinsky’s works from about 1920, sometimes as a key motif of the works, sometimes standing aside, as if a commentary on what’s taking place elsewhere in the work. This tableau falls into the latter category, and while it maps the colour scheme used in the painting, its manner is radically at odds with the rest of the painting. To the initial, apparent chaos of the whole, it adds a moment of calm structure, simple horizontals and verticals dividing the space, filled with blocks of colour, clearly reminiscent of De Stijl paintings. 

For me, the relationship between the whole and the tableau at lower right is the most important in the painting. It signals conflict: clearly it is connected intimately to the whole through its colours, but its form contradicts the whole. Were it a one-off, I’d see it as far less significant, but repeatedly Kandinsky set up an opposition in precisely this way. It’s the conflict between order and apparent chaos, and the possibility of resolution of these two forces, just as we see resolution between the struggle for purely abstract order and the order of a mythical story in the painting. The tableau, then, offers a commentary on the whole painting, and on the struggle for meaning and structure in the world in general. 

In a Nietzschean way, the tableau asks: ‘Have I been understood?’

Portrait of Gabriele Münter

Portrait of Gabriele Münter, 1905, Oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm. 

In the years from the turn of the century til this work was done, Kandinsky had been experimenting with a variety styles and techniques, principally of landscape, but also of folkish/ fairytale scenes. We clearly see pointillist, even divisionist methods of painting, together with Post-Impressionist and Symbolist use of extended blobs and strokes of paint. Holland – Beach Chairs (1904) is an example: 

It tends more toward the  abstract in its use of discrete colour strokes in the foreground, leaving bare canvas between, but in both technique and subject I’d say it’s pretty typical. In these years, Kandinsky is trying out different techniques of painting, drawn from different art movements of the late 19th and turn of the century. His move to a fairly abstract-looking manner – still clearly anchored in recognizable motifs and format - seems to have been quite quick and purposeful, which makes his portrait of Münter unusual in relation to other works done in 1905. 

In 1900 Kandinsky had organized the Phalanx exhibition association and from that, an art school with the same name. It was in that school that he met and developed a relationship with a student, Gabriele Münter. As their affair developed, he explained that his relationship with his wife, Ania, had been falling apart, that they were interested in different things, and he’d considered leaving her even before they met. That old chestnut. Anyway, by 1905, he jettisoned much of the progressive style and techniques he’d been exploring in order to do this very conventional painting. 

Traditional portraiture was very much at odds with his priorities as an artist, and I can only think this work had more to do with his feelings for the woman and her physical appearance than anything relating to ‘art’ more generally. At the time, he called it a ‘lousy painting.’ Indeed, perhaps Kandinsky hadn’t seen enough models for thinking the historical form of a head-and-shoulders portrait in a modernist style? They existed in the work of Van Gogh, for example, but he’d not yet seen Matisse’s Green Stripe, completed the same year but to radically different ends. (https://www.henrimatisse.org/green-stripe.jsp) Whatever the reasons, this is the painting he did, and it’s quite old-fashioned and at odds with everything else he was doing at the time. 

Of course, it’s not an academic painting. Brush strokes far too visible, background too vague, lack of historical context. It learns its technique from Impressionism, its loose, visible brushwork a rejection of naturalism and an opening to the terms on which immediate perception takes place. I think the vacuous space in which the subject is depicted owes much to Jugendstil portraiture and possibly his previous teacher, Franz Stuck in particular. But there are many possible sources. 

She is situated centrally in the painting, balanced, self-contained yet her gaze open to Kandinsky/ the viewer. Her look is one of calm resignation. The near void in which she stands is unthreatening, not psychologically loaded as those of Schiele would become. The shadows cast by the light from the left are naturalistically rendered, the shape and features of her head and face in keeping with the photographs we have of her. Kandinsky has worked hard to create a likeness. I find the rendering of her upper torso and shoulders more interesting. Here, brush strokes become more loose, following the flow of fabrics across her body, and articulating the green/ blue bow. Blues and purples in the light-coloured fabric articulate shadows as they connect to the same in the empty background. Here, he allows himself to play the same sort of games that he plays in the more abstract landscapes of the time, as strokes flow and speak as much of themselves as paint on canvas and the gestures that made them, as of the shirt and body they depict. 

Two lines in particular call my attention: the one articulating the collar of the shirt, descending from her shoulder (front right) to the lower centre; and the profile line from her throat, down her left shoulder to the bottom of the painting. The first echoes the second. Of course, we could say they’re just there, articulating what he saw. But already in 1905, Kandinsky is seeing lines that speak for themselves, and to my eyes, these are beautiful lines. They are the lines that would become increasingly emancipated in later works, the very focus of the artist’s attentions, as the woman drifts into oblivion - see the lone figure in Composition V of 1911, allegedly Münter, leaving the scene of destruction and rebirth that’s depicted elsewhere in the painting, as she was to be forced to leave her relationship with Kandinsky. 

In 1905, this was a painting of devotion to two things: to a woman; and to painting. A tension sustains between the two. Jelena Hahl-Koch (Kandinsky, Thames and Hudson) is wrong when she agrees with Kandinsky, that it is a lousy painting.

 Network from Above, November 1927, Gouache, watercolour and Indian ink on paper, 32.1 x 48.3 cm. 

Some of the works done in the later years at the Bauhaus are hard to write about. Very simple in composition, they refer to nothing beyond themselves, and what they are in themselves leads to little more than statements of fact and our perceptions of the composition. For example, Two Squares of 1930, 

of which we could describe the colour of the two squares, their positions in relation to each other and the ground, the texture of the surface (all pretty factual) and then, a commentary on how we perceive them (‘the red seems to stand forward of the picture plane, while the light blue square seems to fall behind it’, and that sort of thing). The strongest connection in terms of the development of his practice is to Russian Suprematism, which (along with Constructivism) clearly influenced much of his work after he left Russia for Germany in December 1921. This work is very reminiscent of the language developed by Malevich. But then, I begin to run out of things to say. 

Not so, the work I alighted upon for today’s ramble – Network from Above of 1927. It’s still far from obvious what we might want to talk about, it lacks any recognizable motifs, no indication of narratives that sometimes persist across his works, just a purely abstract composition. The most obvious motif is the series of different size circles, mostly of similar colour, connected by white lines. Behind these (it seems), three rectangles of bands, again mostly of related colour. One chequerboard, threes semi-circles, one bright arc and some vertical and horizontal lines, to three of which are attached at right angles further bars. All on a very dark ground. 

Such is an inventory of shapes. The dominant compositional motif is constituted by the combination of circles connected by white lines, forming a structure reminiscent of ‘ball and stick’ molecular models that had first been developed in the 19th century, in which the ball represents an atom and the stick represents the chemical bond (constituted by electromagnetic force).  Kandinsky’s interest in the invisible forces that science had been uncovering – as a weapon against what he called ‘crass materialism,’ which valued only that which could be seen and measured – is apparent in his writings, as in 1911 he wrote of the doubts scientists had cast on ‘matter itself’ (Lindsay and Vergo, p. 142) and in 1913, he wrote of ‘a scientific event that removed one of the most important obstacles from my path [to abstraction]. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world.’ (L&V, p.364). The realization that at a sub-atomic level, matter could become non-particulate, that at root all could be nothing more than energy, opened the doors for Kandinsky to a new, non-naturalistic view on the world. 

But immediately, he throws a spanner in the works. Not so fast, he says. Atop the atom at the apex of the composition, appear a series of small, variously-sized rectangles. It’s no longer an atom, it’s a planet, reminiscent of the one in El Lissitzky’s study for a page of the book Of Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale in Six Constructions of 1920. 

The bonds no longer connect atoms, but planets as Kandinsky shifts us from the sub-atomic to the astronomic, and once more makes the kind of connection between the micro- and macroscopic that he made in his 1926 publication, Point and Line to Plane, where he juxtaposed a picture of a formation of nitrite and the nebula in the constellation of Hercules to demonstrate continuity. Now, the black ground of the painting becomes space, and the bright yellow arc, a waxing or waning moon. 

Such connections of continuity underscored what Kandinsky saw as the interconnectedness of all things, the most important observation throughout his oeuvre. Repeatedly, in his writings and his paintings, he set up situations in which fundamentally different entities came into conflict and even opposition, and created the circumstances in which those elements could co-exist. Not by giving up what made them different, but by seeking out the moments of connection. Thus, for example, when he spoke if the integration of the different arts in what he called the ‘monumental art’ (based on Wagner’s ideas about a Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’), he insisted that each art form has something special that’s not present to any other, but that there are shared qualities to all the arts, the element that allows them to co-exist. In fact, under the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, he came to see dissonant relations between art forms as a clear sign of their connection, and in later writings developed a distinctly Hegelian concept of ‘synthesis’ in which opposed forces (as thesis and antithesis) could, through their combination, rise up to a new level in which difference sustained but unity was none the less achieved. (I go on about this at great length in the book I wrote on Kandinsky’s theory.) 

So the subatomic and the astronomic are connected, at one moment this, then that, then both. But the forces that bond and separate the atoms/ planets are manifest elsewhere, in all relations of connection and difference. The bonds depicted become metaphors for connections, networks in all contexts. In Point and Line to Plane, he explores the movement of a point as its trace becomes a line, and it loses its identity as a point – when does this happen, and when is it both? And he asks at what point does the line, through its breadth, become a plane: ‘the question “when does the line stop being itself and give birth to a plane surface?” remains without precise answer.’ He asserts that such boundaries are ‘indistinct and mobile’ as relations disrupt the absolute sound of the element under consideration. Thus, he writes, the identity of each element is characterised by ‘instability, [...] flickering tension.’ This and that. Atom and planet. 

And abstract point 

.

In the broadest sense – and one of fundamental importance to many of us today - we see this principle at play in his attacks on narrow (especially German) nationalism, in his assertions of an internationalism that doesn’t diminish national identities. His concept of internationalism thus relates directly to his plan for the monumental art. When he writes of his ideas for the ‘first world congress for art,’ he writes of representatives of different countries and different peoples who will contribute to ‘discussions in different languages’ manifest in ‘clarity and confusion, a thundering collision of ideas.’ Apparent disunity gives rise to an underlying unity, and it becomes possible to overcome the ‘fragmentation’ - what he also calls the ‘disease of separation’ - which ‘is a chronic ailment not only of German, but up until now of the greater part of all artistic forces throughout the world.’ An internationalism that doesn’t sacrifice national identity. 

When we look at Network, we’re looking at many and all networks.

Many-Coloured Ensemble

Many-Coloured Ensemble, 1938, Mixed media on canvas, 116 x 89 cm. 

Living in Paris at the time this was painted, Kandinsky had by then explored for several years a vocabulary influenced by the Surrealists he’d met there (and whose work he’d influenced before his move to Paris in 1933/ 34), and which now contained forms derived from microscopic life forms depicted in popular scientific publications. We see both in this painting. 

Just what, if anything, the overall shape refers to is unclear, but it’s in keeping with other works done in Paris that we should consider it reminiscent of a cellular form, populated with the components of a single organic cell, or perhaps an organism composed of such cells. Contained within its membrane (more or less – it is breached at four points) is cytoplasm containing innumerable ribosomes (the tiny circles running throughout), punctuated by larger lysosomes (larger circles and the occasional quadrangle). Within this environment, certain motifs compete for the status of nucleus, and the single-cell model begins to fall apart. 

To the right, a complete organism resembling a foetus faces right, toward one of the membrane ‘exits’, and the whole form begins perhaps to resemble a womb. It’s a curious creature, with one eye clearly visible, body containing smaller ‘cells’ (strict circles) from which limbs point right, and a tail. To the left of the whole, we find a form resembling a lyre which has, integrated to its design, a bird-like shape reminiscent of those found in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Between them, occupying the central position in the structure, is a Miróesque, foot-like form (I’m reminded of his Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird, 1926: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79341), reconfigured in rectilinear and curvilinear blocks of colour. Beside the foetus’s tail, a shamanic mushroom, again reconfigured in more regular geometrical forms. Numerous other abstract forms, some purely abstract, some reminiscent of microscopic life, vie for position in this crowded, colourful space. 

The painting is a world, possibly a universe, in nascent form, waiting to evolve and create a new order of things.

After yesterday's effort, I decided to ditch the 'first work I see' approach, and instead open a catalogue randomly, search that area and then write about the first painting I see that interests me.

 

This is the problem with my cunning plan of writing about the first image I see when randomly opening a catalogue.  Variegated Signs (1928) to the left fits nicely with stuff I've written about Kandinsky's interest in developing a new language, so I could go on about it a fair while, I think. But it's rather familiar and I'd end up rehearsing the same arguments. Deepened Impulse to the centre and Dull - Clear to the right, on the other hand, leave me wondering what to say. I've seen none of these paintings in the flesh, so limited to the B&W illustrations. 

Variegated Signs is a collection of motifs he'd been working on in recent years at the Bauhaus; Deepened Impulse, a series of discs and circles contained within an amorphous, cloud-like shape that are reminiscent of celestial bodies, recalls the interest he had in astronomy at least since a young man and his understanding of the connections between the smallest details of our world and the bigger, cosmic context of which we are part; and Dull - Clear, in both its title and in the painting, recalls his ongoing exploration into relations of opposition and contrast, and the quest to bring these together in synthesis, that runs throughout his oeuvre. 

But most striking is the variety of works on these pages, all done in 1928, each quite different from the others. Rows of signs, a constellation of circles, a conflict between a soft-edged disc and a series of hard-edged lines. What strikes me is how, in spite of the significant differences between the works, they are all so clearly 'Kandinskies.' It's hard to know to what extent this is familiarity, or is an actual continuity between them. Each is an utterance or series of utterances made possible by the vocabulary that constitutes the abstract language he's been developing - drawing on various sources - at the Bauhaus, since 1922. A connecting motif is the circle, tho that's of limited importance in Variegated Signs. Similarly, compare the two arcs, centre right of Dull - Clear with the two arcs in the motif, just in from top right, in Variegated Signs. Likewise, the proliferation of rectilinear lines set at right angles to each other in both paintings. Overall, it is the geometry of forms and the relations of simultaneous difference and similarity - as well as the particular shapes they make - that marks these out as Kandinskies, I think.

Struggled with this post - perhaps next time will deal me an easier work to talk about.

Munich – Schwabing with St Ursula’s Church, 1908, oil on cardboard, 68.8 x 49 cm 

When Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896, he settled in the city’s Bohemian quarter, Schwabing. Munich was the nation’s art capital, and Schwabing must have seemed the ideal place for a budding artist to settle. 

The painting’s pretty typical of works done at the time. Scant attention is paid to naturalistic colour, and form is reduced to the most basic of shapes while still allowing the viewer to recognize essential motifs. The manner of application of paint derives from a mixture of pointillist technique modified by broader brush patches/ strokes, and the colour much influenced by the Fauves. This is a combination he made much use of after about 1906, though we see clear signs of it developing in still earlier work. 

To the foreground sit what appear to be two groups of people in a garden area, possibly next to water; beyond them, a bridge; and beyond that a townscape with industrial buildings and the church. The sunshine from the left creates shadows on the buildings, as the darkness of the high rise ones contrast the vibrant colours in the foreground and toward the skyline and on the church. The contrast is largely between the pastoral scene in the foreground and the more industrial/ urban to the rear. Nature verses culture, biomorphic form verse rectilinear form – a theme we see him develop repeatedly in the years that follow. 

The strangest thing in the painting, perhaps, is what appears to be a cloud, or smoke coming from a chimney. It seems far too solid, its edges clearly and heavily delineated. It looms like a strange presence above the scene, its form rather peculiar, I think. It hugs the contours of the buildings it touches, rather than continuing behind them. It is an abstract form of its own, perhaps predictive of the black blob to the right of the Lady in Moscow (1912, see Benjamin and Roethel, 434). Perhaps it’s the very amorphousness of smoke/ a cloud that allow Kandinsky to treat it as a new, abstract form quite different from the other motifs in the depicted scene, which – in spite of their abstracted form - resolve rather more comfortably into familiar elements of a view.

Note: When I can't think of anything else to write, I'll open an oeuvre catalogue randomly, and talk about the work it opens on. That's is how this entry was done.

 

Kandinsky, Communiqué, June 1936,Watercolour and ink on paper, 

49 x 31 cm, Private Collection, VEB 1192.

Bulletin or communication. Since at least 1909, Kandinsky wrote explicitly about the need for a new language that could articulate the hidden truths of our world. Prior to the Russian Revolution, the hidden order of things was couched very much in spiritual terms; between the wars and after, he foregrounded the role of science in his account of art. By the time he arrived in Paris (1934), he was incorporating microbiotic imagery in his paintings as part of a new vocabulary he developed to contribute to what he called in the pre-war years, the 'divine language'. 

The hieroglyphic appearance of some of the scripts he produced is undeniable, whether that's drawn from his knowledge of shamanic culture or from popular reproductions of Egyptian scripts. In Communiqué, we see two grounds for his developing language: in the foreground, two quadrangular forms (possibly tablets), and in the background (to the left) two more conventional-looking scrolls. On the quadrangles appear a combination of forms reminiscent of microscopic life forms, abstract geometric shapes and repeated horizontal lines, reminiscent of those on a written page or a musical stave. On the scrolls, many more horizontal lines and again, forms reminiscent of microscopic life forms. Radically different utterances sit side by side on each ground, coordinated only by the implicit sequencing as our eyes scan them, and by the aesthetic coherence of the whole, as the reader's task becomes deciphering them. 

Kandinsky's new, scientific-artistic language, in forms clearly referring back to ancient religious scripts.

To end the year, and second decade...

At the end of the Conclusion to The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909 - 1928: The Quest for Synthesis, I wrote:

The concepts of unity and synthesis as Kandinsky developed them were not reductive, but instead allowed for diversity and contradiction. As he develops them, they are complex, even unstable concepts. They allow the artist no easy or simple alignment with particular perspectives on the world. Theosophy appears in his writings, and its imagery appears in his paintings, but it appears and disappears, always subject to review. The same is true of ethnography, symbolism, Christianity, mathematics, psychology, and of any other perspective that has been used to open his works to understanding. They stand beside all other contexts and influences at play in Kandinsky’s work, compete for importance, battle for attention. And some are more important than others. None, though, is the ‘key’ to understanding his work. To think such a thought is to be completely at odds with Kandinsky’s world-view, in which (again): ‘there exist no “specialized” questions, to be identified or solved in isolation, since in the end, everything is interconnected, interdependent.’  At the beginning of the 21st century, following a century of exploitation and destruction, I believe people are once again beginning to realize the truth of this world-view.

There's no doubt that we need to recognise the interconnectedness of all things. But since I wrote that (2010) we've seen a rise in shallow nationalisms through major economies of the world. Inward-looking, protective, uncooperative relations between 'leading' nations. 

While some people are calling attention to the role of the climate and our relationship to nature in the current and looming disasters around the globe, still our governments seem reluctant to do anything but the minimum - or less - to redress the situation. The economy, production of useless commodities, submersion of people in a shallow, materialist mindset, proliferation of misinformation, propaganda and lies. Doesn't look good, does it? 

Each action we take is like the beat of a butterfly's wings. It can create a hurricane, or it might just bring peace and calm. 

Written about New Year, 2021.

The limits of Kandinsky's 'Urbild'

Lying in bed this morning, I got to worrying about this image/ drawing/ illustration. It’s from Point and Line to Plane (1926), and is what Kandinsky calls the Urbild, or primordial picture. He asked ‘whether one point is sufficient to create a work of art’ (Lindsay and Vergo, p551). He describes the image as a ‘point in the middle of the surface, which is a square’. He goes on to identify two ‘sounds’, the point and the plane.

His description is as intended, I think, but the image isn’t so clear. Using a similarly imprecise trace (in that the ink on the page bleeds and wobbles onto the texture of the paper, and using a line that matches the quality of the point), the square is ambiguous. At one moment, it’s the theoretical edge of the plane, a non-entity in terms of the intended graphic content of the image; on the other, it becomes a third element, a square drawn onto the paper that also plays against the point and the plane.

As such, the square signifies twice – once as a depiction of the edge of the canvas, board or paper, and for Kandinsky’s purpose a non-entity; and again as another abstract element that is equal to the point and the plane in significance. Kandinsky toys with the reader/ viewer and once again, the border between one thing and another is no simple affair.

Fragment originally written in 2016.

Unity

I’m currently working on a paper that tries to make sense of Kandinsky’s work from the years he spent in Paris, before his death. Re-reading his writings from those years, I was struck by the following.

In the essay ‘Empty Canvas, etc.’, published in Cahiers d’Art in 1935, he writes of ‘Inner cohesion achieved by external divergence, unity by disintegration and destruction.’ (Lindsay and Vergo, p.782.)

The idea that inner unity may be constituted by apparent external disunity is not by any means new to Kandinsky’s writing – it’s clearly articulated in his early publications. Nor is a unity that is of disintegration and destruction. But the extraordinary tension generated by the equation of unity and disintegration/ destruction in this sentence is striking. Any thoughts that Kandinsky’s quest for the unity of all things is a straight forward holism are fundamentally challenged as we struggle to imagine a ‘whole’ that is complete yet radically at odds with itself.

Fragment originally written in 2016.

Kandinsky/ Stravinsky

 

Panel for Edwin R. Campbell, No.1, 1914. This panel has also been known as Spring.

Kandinsky begins the 1916 essay ‘On the Artist’ (Om Konstnären, Stockholm) as follows:

On the dazzling white a black dot unexpectedly burns. It becomes larger, still larger, unceasingly larger.
Suddenly, an archipelagic scatter of black spots, which continually increase in number and size, is sifted out over the intense-white, as through a fine sieve.
Over the fields rises the sound of invisibly flowing waters, at first hardly audible, then louder and louder. Many voices, each singing a different song, uniting, interweaving – a multi-voiced choir.
And the light becomes dark; the dark, light.
In the rose-coloured sky the yellow sun rolls, surrounded by a violet wreath of rays, Strident yellow and pale-blue rays string the lilac-coloured ground, piercing it, luring forth thousands of voices – the air vibrates with soughing.
Gray clouds veil the yellow sun and turn black. Long, straight, unpliable silver threads streak the introverting space.
Suddenly, everything becomes silent.
In rapid succession, burning zig-zag rays split the air. The skies burst. The ground cleaves. And rumbling thunderclaps break the silence.
The lilac-coloured earth has turned gray. The gray sweeps violently, irresistibly, along the hills. Gaudy colours filter through the mesh of the sieve.
Space trembles from thousands of voices. The world screams.
It is an old picture of the new spring.

Translated in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky, Complete Writings, p. 409.

The  image conjured by the words is surely quite amazing, begging for visualisation as much as any passage from any of Kandinsky’s stage plays. But the main observation I want to make here is the relationship of the text to a piece of musical composition and dance. It’s now just over a century since Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was first performed in Paris, composed for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company (Diaghilev is named later in Kandinsky’s essay) with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. Stravinsky, apparently, described the work as ‘a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia … unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring’ (compare to Kandinsky’s ‘old picture of the new spring’). Such a description would have appealed to Kandinsky, but I think the real connection between his text and Stravinsky’s composition/ ballet is the progressive development from a quiet, if troubling beginning through to a climactic end that suggests the awakening of powerful, potentially violent and destructive creative forces that characterises each account of spring.

Further, the exhibition for which the essay was published included the four panels Kandinsky had painted for Edwin R. Campbell prior to their being sent to New York. Kenneth Lindsay has suggested that the four panels represent the four seasons, which might suggest a connection of the passage that opens the essay cited above to Panel for Edwin R. Campbell, No. 1, which has been known commonly as Spring. (See Roethel and Benjamin, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, p. 493.)

I don’t know of any further evidence that supports the connection of Kandinsky’s text to the Rite of Spring, but I think it's there.

Fragment written in 2013.