kandinsky - tate

KANDINSKYTHE PATH TO ABSTRACTION

22 JUNE – 1 OCTOBER 2006

Information and activity packfor teachers

Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (detail) 1910–11 Tate © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

For moreinformation

This teachers’ pack accompanies Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction1908–1922 at Tate Modern. It focuses on three key works by Kandinsky,providing information, discussion points and classroom activities about eachone. A theoretical and historical context for Kandinsky’s abstraction isillustrated with 4 further works. The pack has been designed to both supporta visit to the exhibition and to link with work you are doing in the classroom.

Becks-Malorny, Ulrike (2003) Wassily Kandinsky 1866–1944 The Journey toAbstraction, Taschen

Behr, Shulamith (1999) Movements in Modern Art: Expressionism, Tate Gallery Publishing

Dube, Wolf-Dieter (1998) The Expressionists, Thames and Hudson

Harrison, Charles and Frascina, and Perry, Gill (eds.) (1993) Modern ArtPractices and Debates: Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, Yale UniversityPress in association with The Open University Press

Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (eds.) (1995) Art Theory – 1900–1990 – AnAnthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing (for excerpts from WassilyKandinsky’s Concerning The Spiritual in Art)

Lankheit, Klaus (2006) Documentary Edition of The Blaue Reiter Almanac, Tate Publishing

Robinson, Michael (2006) Kandinsky, Flame Tree Publishing

www.tate.org.uk/collection (This pack links to work by Luc Tuymans, DanFlavin and Tomoko Takahashi. Further information about their work, anddetails of its location on display at Tate Modern, can be found on the Tatewebsite.)

ViewpointsA sense of placeShared viewObjects and viewpointsLife eventsPersonal places, public spaces

Introduction

Designed by Martin Parker at

www.silbercow.co.uk

@ Tate 2006. All rights reserved

www.tate.org.uk

Written by Dr Jackie Steven

QCAschemes of work

‘Our starting-point is the belief that the artist is constantlyengaged in collecting experiences in an inner world, inaddition to the impressions he receives from the externalworld, from nature. The search for artistic forms in which toexpress the mutual interpenetration of these two kinds ofexperience, for forms which must be free of every kind ofirrelevancy in order to express nothing but the essentials...this seems to us to be a watchword which is uniting moreand more artists at this present time.’ KANDINSKY,Statement as president of The New Artists Association ofMunich

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866, and he trained in law,economics and ethnography. However, by the age of 30, he had abandonedlaw and was working as the director of a print shop, making reproductionsof artworks. In 1896 he turned down a university teaching post and decidedto give more serious attention to his love of painting. He moved to Munich,with is wife Anya, to pursue a career as an artist.

Munich was a magnet for artists at the time. The visual arts had featuredprominently in the cultural life of the city for many years, a result of thepatronage of the Catholic Church and the Bavarian monarchy, whosponsored the first public museums in Germany. There were also highlyrated teaching institutions, workshops for painters and spaces for exhibition.The Glaspalast (built to emulate London’s Crystal Palace) was a venue forpopular quadrennial salons that exhibited international art.

By the time Kandinsky arrived in Munich, the Munich Secession had beenfounded, exhibiting a wide range of progressive art such as Impressionismand Symbolism. The Secession group played a central role in thedevelopment of Jugendstil, which was a German equivalent to Art Nouveau.The fluid lines and highly decorative embellishments of Jugendstil were asignificant departure from the naturalistic detail of nineteenth-centuryrealism.

As a student in the painting classes of Franz von Stuck, who had co-founded the Munich Secession, Kandinsky made contact with artists andperformers, founding and then becoming leader of the Phalanx group, in1901, through which he organised exhibitions, exhibited his own work andbegan teaching. His poster design for the first Phalanx exhibition is in theJugendstil style, and it depicts ornamental soldiers as an advancing (or‘avant-garde’) force, lances raised against traditional art. With this poster,Kandinsky entered the avant-garde of the Munich art world. His contributionto the European avant-garde, through exhibitions, publications and as an

Theory and History: Inner Necessity

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organiser, would prove immense. The key concept explored through Kandindky’s commitment to the avant-

garde was that art should grow out of ‘inner necessity’ and not depend onexternal impressions for guidance. Rather, the ‘inner voice’ of the artistwould provide the authority in deciding upon ‘essentials’ in art. Kandinsky’sreason for believing in the importance of this reorganisation of priorities fromnaturalism to what was ultimately to from the first abstract art, was hisbelief that art served a spiritual role. On The Spiritual In Art, his mostimportant and influential essay, describes not only the artistic means toserve this purpose, but the purpose itself, observing that culture hadbecome dominated by materialistic thinking, and that humankind’s spiritualpotential was under threat.

On The Spiritual In Art was first published in 1911, and together with FranzMarc, Kandinsky made plans for the compilation of an almanac of articles bypainters and musicians to be printed along side reproductions of folk art, artfrom Asia and Africa, art by children, ethnographic artefacts and illustrationsof artwork by painters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne and Rousseau. This wasultimately published as the Blue Rider Almanac, an attempt to push theexisting limits of artistic expression by juxtaposing diverse cultural sources,and through a new spiritual language in art. As editors of the Blue RiderAlmanac, Kandinsky and Marc also organised exhibitions, becoming thenucleus of the avant-garde art group called the Blue Rider.

Kandinsky later gave an account of how the title came about for the BlueRider Almanac, stating that it was simply because both he and Marc lovedblue, and that Marc loved horses, and he riders. But there was more thanthis to the motif of a blue rider. The rider often appears in Kandinsky’swoodcuts and paintings in various guises, such as a romantic fairytale figure,mediaeval knight, messenger or herald. Lyrically (1911) features a horse and

Lyrically 1911Museum BoijmansVan Beuningen,Rotterdam© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

Sketch forComposition II 1910Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum,New York© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

rider, and the free, dynamic treatment of the subject shows his familiaritywith the calligraphic style of Asian art and his skill with the medium. Thefluidity of this print, gives the image an appropriate dynamism as the riderrushes forward. It is a symbol of change, of conflict, and of engagement.Sketch for Composition II (1910) shows the motif of the rider on a white horseleaping from left to right. Just below and to the right, a white rider rears upon a purple/blue horse, amid what is ostensibly a landscape. Therecognisable elements of this painting, such as the scene and the figures, nolonger serve illustrative purposes, but have sprung from the inner necessityof Kandinsky’s imagination. Kandinsky made many preparatory sketches forthe cover of the Blue Rider Almanac, and finally chose to produce a printreferring to St George, the dragon-vanquishing Patron Saint of Russia. In OnThe Spiritual In Art Kandinsky described blue as a spiritual colour, and theBlue Rider Almanac is a symbol of the avant-garde’s battle with thetraditional limits of artistic expression, while it also represents the battlebetween spiritual values and the materialism of contemporary life.

Sociology was developing as a new discipline at the time, with theoristssuch as Georg Simmel analysing Germany’s recent transition from a rural toan urban society. Urban centres appeared to be entirely governed byindustrial production and material consumption. Germany’s first departmentstore was built in 1896, but slums emerged at the same time. The rate ofchange was startling. Mystical philosophies and religions, which questionedthe validity of the ‘outer world’ and promoted a search for hidden truths,were fashionable. Kandinsky’s conviction that abstract art had a role to playin developing humankind’s capacity for spiritual experience was buoyed bythe sociological and mystical issues of his time. 5

Com

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I1913State H

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‘In general, colour is a means of exerting a direct influenceupon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is thehammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings. Theartist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating bymeans of this or that key.’ KANDINSKY

While still living in Russia, Kandinsky found an important connection betweencolour and music. Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthia, a conditionthat makes people perceive colour not only as a visual property of objects,but with sounds of different qualities and intensities. As he looked out overthe rooftops of Moscow, he felt that what was profound about the scenebefore him could not be represented in graphic and realistic detail althoughhe had a desire to capture the scene on canvas. In Kandinsky’s words: ‘Thesun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wildtuba, set all of one’s soul vibrating... To paint this hour, I thought, must be foran artist the most impossible, the greatest joy.’ It was sometime later, at amusical performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin, that Kandinsky believed hissunset hour had been realised in art, in all of its emotional intensity.

In his book On The Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky associated properties ofshape and colour with certain emotional effects. Kandinsky furthersuggested that the artist should not seek a strictly harmonious abstract art,but that the current social and spiritual conditions demanded ‘opposition’and ‘contradiction’.

These effects can be seen in Composition VI. The surface of this largecanvas is teeming with energy, and even though the individual elements arebalanced, the composition is very complex, and does not have a centralpoint of focus. Kandinsky described this painting as having two centres. One,to the left, comprised delicate, indefinite lines over a rosy and blurred centre,and a second focal point is to the right, and is a ‘crude, red-blue, ratherdiscordant area’ with strong and precise lines. Less obvious is a third focalpoint, seething with red and white, closer to the centre of the canvas.Kandinsky’s initial idea for this composition developed from an earlier workon the theme of the Deluge and Composition VI retains an effect ofimmersion. Kandinsky compared the indefinite effects of this canvas to beingin a Russian steam bath.

Composition VI 1913

Improvisation 30(Cannons) 1913The Art Institute ofChicago, ArthurJerome Eddy MemorialCollection© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

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Kandinsky had started referring to musical protocols, in 1909, henceforthtitling some of his works Impressions, Improvisations or Compositions,depending on his method of working and his inspiration. Compositions werethe most complex and researched works, which is true of Composition VI,where Kandinsky had made numerous studies and sketches before he couldbegin the final canvas. An Impression, as the title indicates, was the result ofan engagement with an external source of inspiration, while anImprovisation was drawn more from internal nature, and was morespontaneous. Improvisation 30 (Cannons) painted during the same year asComposition VI, is certainly less complex, and is also smaller in scale andfreer in handling. There are more recognisable elements, such as the groupof figures in the bottom left corner, and mountains with dome-toppedcastles. For the most part, the linear elements float freely within the pictureand colour does not serve a descriptive function. However, the cannons ofthe title have a solid physical appearance, with shading on the barrels andthey seem to be affected by gravity. Yet Kandinsky explained to his dealer ina letter that his subtitles were mostly for his own use and not intended as aguide to the ‘content’ of his work. He acknowledged that he could notremove objects from his paintings until 1914. The cannons, Kandinskyexplained, may have arisen unconsciously as a result of the imminent war.

Links withother worksin exhibition

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Significant Experiences• Discussion – Do any of your students identify with Kandinsky’s experience of

Moscow at sunset? Discuss their own significant experiences (what emotionswere involved?) Would they be willing to put their personal experiences intoart? Is this what art is for?

• Activity – Compare the experiences discussed. Divide students into groupsof similar experience. What art forms might best capture their experiences?Consider ways to combine art forms into one artwork per group. Wagner’sidea of a gestamtkunstwerk, being a total work of art for the stage (music,backdrops etc.) was influential for Kandinsky as a way to enhance theemotional effect of art.

Music• Discussion – What music do your students listen to? Why – what effect does

it have? What other kinds of music are they familiar with? Is music abstract,or does it involve imitation, representation, or the inclusion of actual sounds?

• Activity – Ask your students to bring music into the classroom (an exampleof abstraction in music, and a counter example) or (music to match/create aparticular mood.) Some members of Kandinsky’s Phalanx art group werecabaret performers. He was fascinated by their performance of ‘musicaldrawings’ where a drawing was made in the rhythm of music being played.Try it.

Abstract language of form and colour• Discussion – Do your students associate meanings with any colours or

shapes? Black, red, green? Circle, zigzag? Do they all agree? Where do thesemeanings come from?

• Activity – Compile, and then use, a colour/form vocabulary with yourstudents. Is there a vocabulary like this at use in a wider context, such asadvertising? In small groups, look at or discuss an advert, and try to isolate aformal vocabulary at work. In what way do adverts ‘convince’ us to buy?

Dan Flavin’s sculptural materials were familiar fluorescent light tubes ofvarying lengths and colours. The colours, and colour combinations he usedcreated intense and emotional installations. Monument 4 for those whohave been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) wasmade in response to the Vietnam War, and consisted simply of an otherwisedarkened room, with a small pile of intense blood red fluorescent light tubesarranged on the floor jutting out from a wall.

Links toother works

Discussionand furtherdevelopmentin theclassroom

Cossacks

1910–1911 Tate. Presented by M

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Cossacks 1910–1911

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‘It took a long time before this question “What shouldreplace the object?” received a proper answer from withinme.’ KANDINSKY

While still a law student in Moscow, Kandinsky encountered abstraction inpainting. He saw a work from Monet’s Haystacks series, but failed torecognise the subject. After reading in the catalogue that this was ahaystack, Kandinsky could still not perceive the subject, and later wrote thathe had ‘the dull sensation that the picture’s subject was missing. And I wasamazed and confused to realise that the picture did not merely fascinate butimpressed itself indelibly on my memory and constantly floated before myeyes, quite unexpectedly, complete in every detail.’ He had a similarexperience with one of his own paintings some years later when, onreturning home to his studio, he was surprised to find a beautiful canvaswith no recognisable subject. It was, in fact, his own work that was on itsside. Undoubtedly, these experiences were instructive for Kandinsky, but hedid not discover abstraction accidentally. Although these experiencesillustrated that colour could impress itself on the viewer with considerablepower, and that a painting with no reference to recognisable forms could bebeautiful, this would not help Kandinsky determine the forms he would usein his own paintings.

While Kandinsky prioritised inner necessity, his move towards paintingthat made no reference to the objects of the world was far from impulsive ordogmatic. Kandinsky recognised the authority of the inner voice aboveexternal impressions, but this emphasis on spirituality did not initiallynecessitate a complete rejection of recognisable motifs. Prior to, andfollowing his breakthrough to painting free of external references, objectsare to be found in his paintings, often dissolving into the composition, andbarely recognisable. They have not been drawn from nature but have welledup from his emotional imagination, and Kandinsky maintained that theytherefore had a spiritual resonance. Motifs are also dissolved into hispaintings to varying degrees so that the viewer would uncover by stages,what references he was making in his work – so that the emotionalovertones would be experienced gradually.

Many of the motifs in Kandinsky’s paintings are of Russian origin, andtheir spiritual resonance is bound up with Kandinsky’s own emotionalmythology. In his painting Cossacks, the landscape and figurative elementshave been abstracted into familiar but cryptic motifs that can be easier torecognise for a viewer with access to other works by Kandinsky. Cossacksdepicts a mountainous landscape with zigzag birds, and to the right, afortress, where three Cossacks are to be found, with red hats and lances,while two more riders clash on horseback waving sabres, above a central

Song 1906 Centre Pompidou,Paris. Musée nationald’art moderne/centrede créationindustrielle. Bequest ofNina Kandinsky, 1981© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

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rainbow. Cossacks were a romantic motif, legendary soldiers with free reignto exercise military power throughout Imperial Russia. They had helpedthwart Napoleon’s advance on Russia at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury.

Much of Kandinsky’s early work shows nostalgia for Russia, a qualityemphasised by being painted in tempera on board, and varnished to givethe paintings a mosaic-like quality. Song is an example of this kind ofpainting, and it is similar to other works with Russian themes, with subjectsthat have a fairytale quality. The title refers to a Volga River boatmen’s song,which they sang to help them endure backbreaking work, pulling bargesagainst the tide. Russian artists such as Ilya Repin, whose work Kandinskyhad seen exhibited while still living in Russia, depicted this theme withmeticulous realism to highlight the harsh conditions of the boatmen’s life. AsKandinsky has painted this scene, it is closer to his memory of Moscowdissolved by sunlight, and its emotional resonance for him may well havebeen as a generalised signifier of Russia as his spiritual homeland.

Links withother worksin exhibition


Abstraction• Discussion – What are your students’ opinions about abstraction? What

makes a painting abstract? Is abstract art only found in galleries? Is graffitiabstract?

• Activity – the art historian Charles Harrison distinguished between ‘weak’abstraction and ‘strong’ abstraction. ‘Weak’ abstraction applies to paintingswhere the subject is simply difficult to see, and ‘strong’ applies to paintingsthat are presented simply as a composition, and are not the result of aprocess of distortion. Ask your students to collect examples of abstractimages – postcards, magazine images, images from the Internet – anddetermine whether or not they are ‘weak’ or ‘strong.’

Personal Subjects• Discussion – Do your students have favourite subjects to see or to create in

paintings/drawings/sculpture? What subjects do they consider important?Does it matter if a painting has a subject, which the viewer doesn’trecognise?

• Activity – Individually, ask your students to develop a set of motifs (such asKandinsky’s memories and myths of Russia) that have personal meaning.Begin with a scrapbook of images and work towards a set of simplifiedcryptic line drawings to use in larger compositions.

Accident in art• Discussion – Have any of your students had a similar experience to

Kandinsky, and accidentally seen abstraction because they did not recognisethe subject of a painting? Has any artwork they were making ever beenimproved by an accident?

• Activity – Ask your students to work on a large-scale drawing/painting, insmall groups. Think of ways to introduce chance into the group artwork –such as with eyes closed, working from all sides at once etc. Introduce asubject to the group drawing half way through (a theme or a currentnewspaper image.) How does this alter your students’ experience ofpainting/drawing?

Luc Tuymans paints profound historical events, such the Holocaust, but ratherthan selecting recognisable scenes, he uses banal details and he paints in analmost abstract style, making the content of his paintings difficult to see. Hismotifs are all the more striking for being obscurely painted. His triptychInvestigations appears to depict ordinary objects (a lampshade, a tooth, awindow) painted in thin washes with little attention to naturalistic detail, butthey are all objects from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald museums.13

Links toother works

‘I had little thought for houses and trees, drawing colouredlines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife,making them sing just as powerfully as I knew how.’KANDINSKY

While teaching at the Phalanx art School in 1903, Kandinsky formed arelationship with one of his students, Gabriele Münter, and she became hisintimate companion during his years in Munich. Having separated from hiswife Anya, he embarked on frequent extensive trips abroad, oftenaccompanied by Münter, before they settled together in Munich in 1908.

They travelled regularly to the Staffel Lake near Murnau in the BavarianAlps. Murnau was a popular tourist destination, easily accessible by train,but it had represented an entirely different way of life. A small market townwith a predominantly agrarian, Catholic population, Murnau captured thegroup’s imagination as an example of untainted rustic piety. Münter boughta property there in 1909, which became known as the Russian House, andwhich they decorated in the style of local folk art. Kandinsky designed astencil of stylised flowers and riders for the banisters. He even woretraditional Bavarian costume. After several unsettled and often distressingyears of travelling, Kandinsky was very happy in Murnau. He became a keengardener, and even though trains thundered past the Murnau garden, theapparent authenticity and ‘spiritual values’ of the pre-industrialised Murnauvillage remained compelling.

The dramatic landscape round Murnau, combined with the creativeenergy of his fellow artists, including the Russians Werefkin and Jawlensky,would prove a very fertile environment for Kandinsky. His painting underwenta profound transformation during his long summers away from Munich.

Kandinsky’s use of colour in his Murnau landscapes is gradually releasedfrom its descriptive role and develops a rich intensity, while the shapes ofdiscernible landscape features such as mountains, trees, and buildings, aresubordinated to the picture as a whole, eventually informing the landscapesymbols of his later work.

While Kandinsky found a welcome spirituality in the rural environment,the theme of landscape provided a pretext for modernist experimentation.His landscape paintings, such as Murnau – Staffelsee I, show an intenselyemotional response to the beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Clouds mergeinto the general looseness of the scene. Kandinsky’s inner voice dominateshis sensual impressions of a landscape.

He admired Matisse, Picasso and the work of the Fauves, who hadexhibited in Paris as group for the first time in the Salon d’ Automne in 1905,along with Kandinsky and Jawlenksy. Jawlenksy was active as part of theFrench art scene, and would have made Kandinsky aware of European

Murnau – Staffelsee I 1908

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theories of abstraction. He also suggested to Kandinsky that he paint with ashort-haired brush rather than a palette knife, which contributed to thefurther loosening of forms in Kandinsky’s painting.

The Russian House proved a productive environment for Kandinsky’sdevelopment of abstract painting, and experiments with abstraction in otherforms, such as theatre and text. He began writing poems, published withthe title Sounds, and illustrated with woodcuts, using a method, common tochildhood, where through constant repetition, a word is emptied of allmeaning and becomes ‘pure sound’ to ‘set the soul vibrating’ in the sameway that he believed painting freed from recognizable objects, would bringhim closer to ‘the spiritual in art.’

Alongside the influences of progressive French art, Kandinsky was alsoinfluenced by the forms and graphic style of Bavarian folk art, which in spiteof the growing tourist trade in folk objects, appeared to Kandinsky andMunter to be authentically unaffected by the economic values ofmodernisation. It was Jawlensky who first drew their attention to Bavarianhinterglasmalerei (glass painting) which had been developed during themedieval period, but which was used during the nineteenth century fordecorative panels. The local brewer in Murnau had a collection, and bothMunter and Kandinsky learned the technique from a Murnau glass painter.He returned to glass painting periodically, but the influence of these Bavarianfolk images had a more subtle resonance in his paintings, particularly theuse of simplified forms, flat patchwork areas and prominent black outlines.

Two Girls 1917Private Collection,London© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

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Link toanotherwork in theexhibition


Sharing Ideas• Discussion – Throughout his life, Kandinsky was actively involved with several

art groups and benefited from sharing ideas with other artists. Does thiscome as a surprise to your students? Who/where do they get ideas from?How do they exchange ideas?

• Activity – Divide your students into small groups, and using a newspaper,select a topic/issue for each group to investigate collectively to produce agroup sketchbook representing their responses to the issue. In the style ofthe Blue Rider Almanac, the sketchbook could contain opinions, pooledknowledge, images and cuttings, and ideas for art projects addressing theregiven topic/issue.

A better way of life• Discussion – Murnau represented a better, more spiritual way of life, to

Kandinsky and his friends. What do your students think/know about urbanlife now, and rural life now? What makes one place or way of life better thananother? What are the good things in your students’ local area?

• Activity – Kandinsky chose to paint the landscape around Murnau as moreand more abstract during his time there, which to him, was a way to focuson its spiritual qualities. How would your students represent the best in theirlocal environment? Through collage or assemblage, create work thatemphasises the good in their environment (people, places, values.) Is there alocal/environmental project that your students could get involved with?

Inspiration from folk art • Discussion – What do your students think of as ‘folk art’? What contemporary

forms of expression exist outside of art galleries? How is their everydayenvironment decorated or made more interesting? Could this be aninspiration for a work of art in the same way that Bavarian Glass paintingwas inspirational for Kandinsky?

• Activity – Individually, ask your students to find examples of objects, images,hobbies that make the texture of life interesting. Use these as a basis forindividual art projects. It could be sweet wrappers, knitting, comics, films, etc.

Tomoko Takahashi creates installations from ordinary objects. Her installationMy Playstation at the Serpentine Gallery was an arrangement of 6000 piecesof ‘stuff’ that viewers wandered through like an enchanted maze. Her affectionfor life’s ephemera goes hand-in-hand with an environmental conscience andcasts a critical eye over consumption in contemporary culture.

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Links toother works

‘So this is it! Isn’t it terrible? I’ve been roused out of adream. I’ve been living in an inner world where things arecompletely impossible. I have been stripped of my illusions.Mountains of corpses, dreadful suffering of all kinds, innerculture put on hold for an indefinite period...’ KANDINSKY

In 1914, Kandinsky was unprepared for the outbreak of War. As a Russian, hewas now classified as an alien in Germany, and two days after war wasdeclared, he and Münter left Germany for Switzerland, where they spent 3months in the hope of an end to hostilities. Ultimately, their relationshipended as, accepting that the end to conflict was not in sight, Kandinskyretuned to Russia and Münter returned to Munich. During 1915 Kandinskypainted nothing, and between 1916 and 1921, although his mood was muchimproved by meeting Nina Andreevsky, who he was to marry in 1917 tobecome his intimate companion for the rest of his life, he only produced 41oil paintings. Even considered in combination with various etchings, glasspaintings and watercolours, this does not compare to his productiveexperimentation during his years travelling between Munich and Murnau.

Although Kandinsky had been aware of the formal experiments of theParisian avant-garde, the majority of avant-garde developments towardsabstraction took place in Germany, Austria, Holland and Russia where thetheoretical basis for a pure non-objective art was given a distinctformulation. By 1915, Mondrian was composing paintings entirely from shortstraight black lines set at either the horizontal or vertical Axis, and Malevichhad painted Black Square, which consists of a black square on a whiteground. Kandinsky’s paintings and publications were already well known inRussia when he arrived there, and he had maintained an involvement withthe developments of the Russian avant-garde, some of whom were in turninvolved with Blue Rider exhibitions and publications. On The Spiritual In Arthad been published in Russia in 1914 and Kandinsky’s proposal of abstractionas the elimination of representational andassociative forms in favour of inneremotional content had been interpretedby Malevich in particular in a rigorouslygeometric style, which he calledSuprematism – the supremacy of purefeeling.

Kandinsky’s painting of this Russianperiod is varied, but the pictoriallanguage of his abstraction is clearlyinfluenced by such developments.Malevich used the diagonal as a

Theory and Politics: Politics and Abstraction

Black Spot 1921 Kunsthaus Zürich© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

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Circles on Black 1921 Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum,New York© ADAGP, Paris andDACS, London 2006

compositional device, with simple identifiable geometric forms movingacross a plain background. In Black Spot of 1921, there are far fewer marksthan his earlier Munich abstractions, arranged into a more readilyidentifiable diagonal composition. The forms of his earlier work, some ofwhich can be traced back to stylised ciphers for mountains and figures, (suchas the wavy lines and arc which had once described landscape and sabresamong other things) have begun to develop a life of their own and havesettled into a pictorial vocabulary that Kandinsky is using more sparingly atthis time, and in simpler compositions.

Circles on Black, of the sameyear, shows the impact of geometryon his work. The ambiguouspainterly quality of his Munichabstraction has all but gone, andidentifiable geometric shapes, suchas rectangles, spots and points,combine with his own repertoire ofshapes. This new geometry wouldcontinue to play a significant role hiswork form this time onwards andhe was later to accord the circle inparticular the status which the ridermotif had held during his time inMunich, explaining that the circle isa ‘synthesis of the greatest oppositions’, bringing together eccentric andconcentric forces into equilibrium. However, Kandinsky’s abstractionremained distinct from Suprematism as he was wary that geometry in hiswork would result in rigid schematic compositions. He retained anexpressive freedom in the combination of elements in his work. Thesedifferences were to prove artistically and politically significant.

Kandinsky had been independently wealthy, the son of a rich teamerchant, but as a consequence of revolution in Russia, where Tsarist rulewas replaced by a Communist system, he lost his property during aredistribution of land. Consequently his plans to build a large studio had totake second place to financial concerns such as selling work and findingemployment. Having remained distant from politics prior to this time in hislife, he was to find himself involved with the formulation of cultural policy inthe newly reorganised Russia. Alongside various academic appointments, ashead of the state commission for acquisitions he was also responsible foropening new museums across Russia. In 1919 he founded the MoscowInstitute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK.)

Kandinsky’s particular interpretation of abstraction brought him intoconflict with faculty members at INKhUK. They insisted on the rigorous19

rejection of subjective and atmospheric elements in painting, complaining ofKandinsky’s work as ‘harmonious’, ‘painterly’ and based on ‘spiritualisticmalformations.’ Abstraction and the forms it should take had acquiredideological significance, as artists had sought to engage with the samestruggles as the rest of the Russian people, and to use a utilitarian andaccessible vocabulary that was appropriate to this end – which unfortunatelyfor Kandinsky involved the rejection of individualism.

However, the political situation in Russia was about to place suchtheoretical considerations in the hands of the state rather than the avant-garde, and in 1921 the Communist Party’s new economic policy required thatart, literature and film were to be employed for propaganda purposes, whichwould result in social realism. Abstraction was considered damaging andsubversive.

Fortunately for Kandinsky, he was offered a teaching post at the Bauhausin Berlin, and he left Moscow, taking 12 of his paintings from the period 1919to 1921 with him. Before taking up his post in the Bauhaus mural workshop,Kandinsky exhibited these 12 paintings, plus two more. The critical responseto his new developments in abstraction was nostalgia for the colour andexuberance of his Murnau work, in preference to the cool and intellectualquality that these later works display. Kandinsky’s response was that ‘Peopleonly want what they know.’

In 1933 the Bauhaus came under pressure from the Nazi party inGermany and the faculty agreed to dissolve the institution, from whichKandinsky had been recently dismissed by orders of the Gestapo. He oncemore became an exile, this time in Paris where he continued to work as anartist, although the conditions were not originally favourable. Cubism andSurrealism were fashionable in Paris, but Kandinsky continued to paintabstractions and to contribute defences of abstraction to journals. Amongother smaller works, he painted two more large Compositions (IX and X) thatshow the geometric influences of his Russian work, and the marks of hisMurnau period, but inflected now with some of the whimsical elements ofSurrealism. The first of these Compositions was purchased by the Jeu dePaume museum, and became the first large abstract painting to enter thecollection of a French Museum in 1939.

In 1937 several of his earlier works had also been included in theDegenerate Art exhibition in Germany, along side other works of modern artto have been removed from German museums by Nazis. The confiscatedwork was installed with defamatory slogans in order to present it asevidence of ‘cultural decline’. One such curatorial intervention incorporated acopy of Kandinsky’s Black Spot crudely painted onto the display wallincorporating graffiti style slogans and exclamations.

Kandinsky died in Paris, aged 78, in 1944.

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