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?’
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