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.
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