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.