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.