Wassily Kandinsky studied to be a lawyer, but instead became an artist. The biggest break in his life came when he understood that even when art does not mimic objects, it remains saturated with spirituality.
Kandinsky’s coffin went on display in the artist’s atelier. Nina, his widow, fulfilled the Orthodox rite. By the coffin, instead of an icon, she placed her husband’s final great composition – the painting Reciprocal Accords. It was created two years earlier, in 1942, amid the turmoil of war, and features biomorphic shapes and cool colours, enamel-like smoothness and lustre. Nothing on this canvas indicates unrest or a state of emergency. Following years of painting dramatic scenes, conflict and struggle, often conveyed by the contracting of light and shade, strong colours and directional tensions, Kandinsky’s art softened, as he apparently reached a state of inner peace and harmony. After all, he always claimed that a painting is a reflection of one’s soul and a gateway to transcendence. “Whatever I might say about myself or my pictures can touch the pure artistic meaning only superficially. The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.”
The birth of an artist
The father of abstract art forged the new path in painting slowly, with difficulty and caution. He combined painterly ardour with the frostiness of an art theorist. He believed that art was directly subordinate to cosmic forces. Following the Russian theologian and poet Vladimir Solovyov , Kandinsky criticized the superficiality and vanity of art for art’s sake. He also believed that artistic work should have a deep impact on the real world and express the truth.
“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” Comparisons to music often feature in Kandinsky’s proclamations. He was musical, played the piano and cello, and even experienced synaesthesia. Although he never attempted to paint what he was hearing, many of his works were inspired by music – the work of Arnold Schoenberg, a pioneer of dodecaphonic music and atonality, was a significant discovery.
In 1896, at an exhibition of the French Impressionists, Kandinsky realized that painting does not have to realistically depict objects. The young graduate of Moscow State University spent a while in front of Claude Monet’s canvases showing haystacks in the sun. “At that moment, I realized,” he recalled, “that painting itself had come to the fore and asked myself whether I would be able to follow that path. Ever since then I saw Russian icon painting in a different light, that is, I was ‘given eyes’ to see the abstract in painting.” The theatre of colour, light, and shadow rendering the object unrealistic left such an impression on Kandinsky that in the same year, at the age of 30, he gave up his profession and promising academic career and went to study painting in Munich.
Of course, this was not the first time he had picked up a pencil or brush. He had been drawing and painting since childhood. In the autobiographical essay “Retrospects”, published in 1913 by Der Sturm, he recalled:
“My father at an early age discovered my love for drawing and allowed me to take drawing lessons, when I was still in high school. […] As a very small child I used wafer color for a piebald horse; everything was finished, except the hoofs. My aunt, who helped me paint had to leave, and suggested, that I wait with the hoofs until she returned. I remained alone in front of the unfinished picture and tormented myself with the impossibility of putting the last bits of color on the paper. This last piece of work seemed so simple to me. I thought, that if I would make the hoofs real black, they would surely be absolutely true to nature. I put as much black on the brush as I could. One moment – and I saw four black, disgusting, ugly spots, utterly foreign to the paper, on the horse’s feet. I felt desperate and horribly punished! Later I well understood the Impressionists’ fear of black and still later it cost me actual spiritual fear to put pure black on a canvas. Such a child’s misfortune casts a long, long shadow on many years of its later life.”
A love of fine arts played an important role in the daily life of the bourgeois Kandinsky family. The key figure was the aforementioned, beloved aunt Elizaveta, his mother’s sister, a writer whose sensitivity and way of seeing the world strongly influenced the mind of the maturing boy. “Her luminous soul will never be forgotten by those who encountered her in her deeply altruistic life,” he recalled. “It is to her I owe the origins of my love of music, of fairy tales, later of Russian literature, and of the profound nature of the Russian people.”
Kandinsky grew up away from his birthplace, Moscow. His father’s health required long stays in milder climates, so the family lived in Italy and Odessa. Kandinsky never publicly admitted the dreadful experience of his mother’s departure. Having obtained a divorce, she started a new family. The sadness and trauma of an abandoned child were reflected only in his painting. The Ship from 1918 depicts a little boy, lost and lonely next to a rocking horse, as a beautiful lady waves him goodbye. Looming in the background is the eponymous ship – symbolizing the port city of Odessa – and a view of Moscow, where father and son eventually returned. Years later, Kandinsky wrote about his loneliness while attending gymnasium: “None of my friends had ever been able to enter the intimate inner-world of my soul.”
Apparently Anna Chimyakina – Kandinsky’s cousin whom he married while at university – did not enter this intimate world either, or was not allowed to enter. Soon, the young husband indicated that their love would not reach the ideal he desired. The realm of the soul and a belief in the power of love occupied a lot of room in Kandinsky’s thoughts. He quickly moved away from scientific rationalism and became fascinated with mysticism. Dostoyevsky’s writing, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel of manners Without Dogma, and the poetry of Alexander Blok and Vyacheslav Ivanov played an important part in this, as did the available research in the field of ethnography and anthropology.
Folklore and mysticism
While studying at the Law Faculty of Moscow University, Kandinsky became interested in the customary law of Russian peasants. He began to explore their language, customs, social structure and beliefs, and became seriously involved in the activities of the Imperial Society of Friends of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography. In 1889, he initiated a six-week expedition to the Vologda region, the home of the Finno-Ugric Komi people (formerly known as the Zyrians) in western Siberia. He filled notebooks with drawings and travel impressions. The themes of folklore penetrated his imagination, and in the following years, his art.
“I shall never forget the large houses, covered with wood cuts,” Kandinsky wrote in the essay “Reminiscences”. “In these wonder houses I experienced something that has not repeated itself since. It taught me to move into the picture, to live in the picture. I still remember how I stepped into the room the first time and instantly stopped, overcome by the unexpected picture. The table, the benches, the large oven, so important in a Russian peasant house, the closets and every article were painted with colored, large ornaments. Folk art on all the walls; a hero, representing a symbol, a battle, a painted folk song. The ‘red’ corner (‘red’ is ancient Russian and means the same as ‘beautiful’) completely and closely covered with painted and printed pictures of saints; in front of this, a small red hanging lamp, which burned and flourished like a knowing, discreetly low talking, modest, for and in itself living proud star. When finally I entered the room, I felt myself surrounded on all sides by the painting, into which I had thus penetrated. The same feeling was dormant in me up to that time, unconsciously, when I was in the churches in Moscow, and particularly in the main dome of the Kreml. During my next visit to these churches, after my return from this trip, the same feeling within me became fully clear and alive. Later I often had the same experience in the Bavarian and Tyrolean Chapels.” Vivid colours, rich details, figures of saints and riders, heroes and princesses, as well as the mystery of the icon – all this would feature in Kandinsky’s work.
In search of form
The artist was not keen on authority; he was a born leader. In Munich, he studied for two years in the atelier of the Slovenian painter Anton Ažbe, where he became friends with fellow Russians: Aleksiej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Later, he studied with the symbolist Franz von Stuck. Soon, Kandinsky and his friends founded the artistic group Die Phalanx and later Neue Künstlervereinigung, as well as an art school that also welcomed – interestingly – women, who at the time were not allowed to study at the academy.
Among the young students was the gifted and emancipated Gabriele Münter. Together with Kandinsky, they packed their easels and paints on their bicycles and cycled into the open air. They became lovers and eventually – until the outbreak of the Great War – partners in art and in life. They travelled around Europe and lived in Paris for two years. Gabriele was never without the Kodak camera that she had brought from the United States. Her photo albums are an invaluable accompaniment to the history of the German avant-garde. The couple often portrayed each other, their post-impressionist landscapes from this period are very similar.
Kandinsky was happy in love, but experienced an artistic crisis and was still searching for his own way of expression in painting. Finally, in 1908, it emerged:
“It was the hour of approaching dusk. I came home with my paintbox after making a study, still dreaming and wrapped up in the work I had completed, when suddenly I saw an indescribably beautiful picture drenched with an inner glow. At first I hesitated, then I rushed toward this mysterious picture, of which I saw nothing but forms and colors, and whose content was incomprehensible. Immediately I found the key to the puzzle: it was a picture I had painted, leaning against the wall, standing on its side.
The next day I attempted to get the same effect by daylight. I was only half-successful: even on its side I always recognized the objects, and the fine finish of dusk was missing. Now I knew for certain that the object harmed my paintings. A frightening depth of questions, weighted with responsibility, confronted me. And the most important: what should replace the missing object?”
In 1909, the couple moved to the Bavarian town of Murnau, where Gabriele bought a villa. They both decorated it with zeal; they painted every surface, and Kandinsky even took up carpentry, made furniture, boxes, etc. He found his “happy island”. A year later, Kandinsky painted a watercolour with a dynamic composition of lines and spots, considered the first abstract work. At the same time, he also completed the theoretical work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
According to Münter, Kandinsky would theorize endlessly on any given subject and intellectualized his creative process. New ideas were springing up like mushrooms: in 1911, the couple left the Neue Künstlervereinigung and together with Franz Marc and Alfred Kubin founded the group Der Blaue Reiter. “We invented the name ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ at the coffee table in the gazebo in Sindelsdorf. We both loved blue, Marc liked horses and I riders. So the name came by itself,” he recalled years later. The motif of a horse rider would often recur in his works.
Kandinsky’s expressionist landscapes and abstract compositions from this period are characterized by a great emotional charge. In an interview from 1921, the artist said: “Ever since 1900, my idea of perfection was to produce an exceptionally dramatic painting, a ‘tragic’ painting. I produced this kind of work en masse. Later on, I painted in an entirely different way. I felt a great inner peace and instead of drama, something peaceful and ordered.”
The change in imagery began in post-revolutionary Russia (following the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky took refuge in Switzerland and later returned to his homeland), reigned by Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism proposing a complete detachment of art from reality. Kandinsky did not share Malevich’s views, but was rather impressed by geometric painting.
Busy years
In 1917, the artist married Nina Andrejewska, the daughter of a Russian general, and lost his family property as a result of the revolution. This included a plot of land in the centre of Moscow, where he had intended to build a house with a studio. He became involved in the cultural life of the country: he held an important position in the People’s Commisariat for Culture, worked on establishing 22 museums, and ran the Museum of Painterly Culture. He exhibited together with Malevich, Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky. He lectured at Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios) from 1918. In 1921, he was one of the founders of GAKhN (State Academy for the Scientific Study of Art) and elected its chairman. However, the same year he accepted the invitation of Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus, and a few months later he left with his wife for Germany.
As it soon turned out, it was the right moment to escape. Kandinsky witnessed how in late 1921 a group of 25 artists, representatives of Levy Front Iskusstv, “under the pressure of the revolutionary present day” renounced the making of “pure art forms”, pronounced painting a pointless relic, and declared “absolutism of utilitarian art and Constructivism as the only acceptable form of expression.” As a consequence, within four years the representatives of the Russian avant-garde lost their jobs, and socialist realism prevailed. The Kandinsky’s never returned to their home country. They left behind their son’s grave – Volodya was born in 1917, but he did not survive the harsh conditions of revolutionary reality.
At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky taught mural painting. As a mystic who believed that “art can only be great if it maintains a direct link and is governed by the laws of the universe,” he did not feel at home there. He continued to explore the subject of abstraction and prepared another publication: Point and Line to Plane. He claimed: “In painting today, a point often conveys more than a human figure. A vertical and a horizontal line, combined, acquire an almost dramatic connotation. The impact of the acute angle of a triangle on a circle is actually as overwhelming in effect as the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” His paintings grew peaceful and disciplined. The rigour was followed by a liberation of the imagination; Kandinsky created entirely unrealistic figures.
The painter was granted German citizenship, but left Germany in 1933, when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and denounced its art as degenerate, to live in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. In 1939, he obtained French citizenship. The pope of modernity, Marcel Duchamp, recommended an apartment in a huge, six-storey tenement house to Kandinsky. “Paris with its wonderful (intense and soft) light had relaxed my palette,” the Russian painter said. “There were other colors, other entirely new forms, and some that I had used years earlier. Naturally I did all this unconsciously. A new way of ‘operating’ the brush, and finally, a new technique emerged.”
In the final decade of his life (he died of a stroke on 13th December 1944), Kandinsky painted nearly 150 oil paintings, as well as hundreds of gouaches and drawings. In art, he always sought proof of divine intervention and saw himself as a theurgist with a special mission to fulfil.
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Figiel
Read similar:
