I would like to propose that Expressionism enjoys a special relationship with apocalypse. This is not a new idea. The Expressionists themselves came up with it. Nor, I must admit, does this notion permit us to draw very clear lines. What modernist style has not served as a more or less sensitive seismograph of our century's millennial tremors? High modernism aside, every plateau of the culture offers a platform from which to broadcast the jitters endured awaiting the final demise of everything—or of everything deemed significant. "End of Consumer Culture?" asks an editorial in ZG, a London-based art magazine with an earnestly street-level view of our situation.

That end, foreshadowed for ZG in the work of Jack Goldstein and David Salle, would be liberation as well as cataclysm. Apocalypses always damn those who deserve it while preserving the elect, those who signal their state of grace with an ability to see doom far off, across the mirage-filled wasteland where the damned muddle through obliviously. Thus "the death-knell of a dying consumer culture" may well have the lilt of glad tidings, for "perhaps it heralds the beginnings of a new age of art" (ZG, issue 81/3). What we thought was art was only the image of art. Now the actuality will replace the image. The Futurists had similar thoughts about the contents of Italian museums. In fact, just about everyone who has given serious thought to art in our century has given in, now and then, to such expectations.

I believe nonetheless that the Expressionist version of apocalypse has particular importance. Among Expressionists, Wassily Kandinsky is St. John the Divine. His short book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911, serves the movement as its Book of Revelation. It serves all of us that way. Nowhere in the writing that surrounds modern art is there a clearer set of hints of what apocalypse is to the radical imagination, and how it differs from the Scriptural variety. I should point out here that biblical apocalypse is still very much with us, in the imaginations of those who sustain their faith in the New Testament. The biblical interpretations of believers may be metaphorical, literary; or they may be astonishingly literal, as in the fundamentalist exegeses that take the appearance of the numerals 666 in commercial packaging codes as the Mark of the Beast (Rev., 13, xviii), a sign that the machinery of the Last Judgment is already in gear. Radical art and literature substitute the self for God, Coleridge's "creative imagination" for the divinity of Genesis, so the primary difference between Kandinsky's writing and St. John the Divine's is in the use of the word "I."

Neither uses it very much, so the word has plenty of context in both books—a detailed backdrop against which to make the outlines of ego clear. That backdrop, the text itself, appears in each instance as a privileged emanation from the writer's "I." St. John is the conduit through which radiant images flood for the benefit of all those, including himself, who will be saved, absorbed into the godhead at the source of the vision. Scriptural apocalypse destroys the world from all individual points of view, recreating every atom as those granted grace are reborn into a state beyond selfhood. By contrast—a contrast that could not, so far as I can see, be any greater—Kandinsky's vision of the future, the time for building "the spiritual pyramid which will some day reach to heaven," is the product of his own "inner life." Further, the redeemed and redemptive artist never asks himself to give over his individuality. (For the "pyramid," see M.T.H. Sandler's 1914 translation of Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Dover Publications. All further unattributed page citations refer to this text.) Still further, and this is what makes Kandinsky a modern artist instead of an occultist mystagogue like Mme. Blavatsky and others he so much admired, his inner life begets the forms of his paintings and drawings.

Kandinsky intended to create, not merely record, a vision of ultimate destinies—his own, first of all. This is clearest in his "Improvisations," a group of 31 paintings with variants that served as the subject of an exhibition in the spring and summer of 1981 at the National Gallery in Washington, D. C. E. A. Carmean, Jr. organized the show. He found it possible to assemble only about half of the entire series. Some of the "Improvisations" exist now only as studies. Others are in inaccessible collections. However, Carmean was able to hang a number of them sideby-side with their studies, and to show how motifs from the Improvisations migrated to the woodcuts for Kandinsky's book of poems, Klänge (Sounds, 1913). It was a small show with a dense texture.

His reading of the entire series, as set forth in the brochure accompanying the exhibition, is aggressively narrative. In Improvisation 7 (1910), Carmean sees schematic waves threatening all other forms with a final inundation. Extrapolating from slightly earlier quasi-figurative images of the Blue Rider, Carmean interprets the elegantly squiggling lines of Number 20 (1911) as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In Number 27 and a study for Number 25 (both 1912), rather larval forms signify lovers in the paradise that appears in the wake of apocalypse. A bit later in the series, paradise disappears. Number 28a (1912) shows tubes spouting loops—cannons belching smoke. Destruction continues. Or perhaps Kandinsky's disjunctive narrative suggests that ordinary time unravels under the pressures of prophecy fulfilled. Carmean carefully ties the artist's vision to the Book of Revelation, his main point being that Kandinsky's own comments make such interpretations possible, despite the long-nurtured supposition that the "Improvisations" from 1910 on show non-figurative art coming into being before one's eyes.

When Kandinsky talks of "the internal truth only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone" (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), one might insist on hearing a proclamation of autonomous—i.e., abstract—form. And when he discusses his rejection of academic modeling, a tactic designed to hasten art's exit from "the material realm," he uses the word "abstract" (at least in Sandler's translation). Yet Carmean convincingly insists that the "Improvisations" must be "decoded," and that the message thus revealed has a story line. After working one's way through Carmean's exhibition notes, it's hard to remember that these paintings ever counted as abstract. They crawl with emblematic presences.

Carmean has officially pulled the rug out from under those who rushed to judge the "Improvisations" nonfigurative. And his presentation of studies and variants, all very close to the primary images, gives a disconcerting jolt to those who took the term "improvisation" literally and claimed Kandinsky as an ancestor figure for the Action Painters. For Kandinsky the issue was not facture but the nature of experience: his "Impressions" are "direct impression[s] of outward nature," while an "Improvisation" is a "largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character" (Concerning. . . )—and thus easily reinscribed, once made manifest on paper or canvas. In other words, though dominant motifs of the "Improvisations" originate in unpremeditated gestures of the hand, they froze into reusable pictograms the moment they appeared.

Shuffled and reshuffled, these pictograms give the "Improvisations" a lively formal appeal. But if we find ourselves admiring only the formal qualities of the series, we overlook Kandinsky's purpose for what he called, in a disapproving echo of Walter Pater, "'art for art's sake'" (Concerning . . . ). On the road to Kandinsky's apocalypse, the esthetic and the spiritual were to join as one prophetic power. That was his intention, and we shouldn't ignore it, because he means the forms of his art as forms of his "inner life." He put his will to redemption on such intimate terms with his imagination that he leaves the two indistinguishable. His is an art for prophecy's sake.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art describes the relationship of the artist and his times as a dialectic whose giddy ascension turns subjectivity objective. In this text, thanks to Kandinsky's lack of focus, one doesn't really know what he means by subjective and objective. This is not a problem, at least not for him. As he says, "It is impossible to theorize about this ideal of art" (Concerning . . . ), but he makes his key point radiantly clear: in his universe, he is the creator. Perhaps he is only a demiurge in the period of the "Improvisations," but an apocalypse approaches that will raise him to the stature of a stand-in for Jehovah. Kandinsky quotes with horror the catch-phrase "God is dead," cliché already in 1911, then goes on to offer himself as a substitute, or at least one of those prophets, those "divine martyrs" (Concerning . . . ), who prefigure God's resurrection as an artist. So the forms of his art are no less than the contents of a respiritualized world.

God was "dead" for Nietzsche because the self-created individual had replaced him as prime mover. Or it has become possible to imagine that had happened. God's death may have been in the works from the time of the High Renaissance, but only the Romantics dared offer the artist as a substitute. So it's interesting to look back from J.M.W. Turner's apocalyptic imagery to that of the academic Benjamin West, who dutifully worked his way through six of the two dozen themes from Revelation that artists had taken up before him. The most fully finished of these works (several remained quick chalk drawings) show the frenzies of the sublime ruffling the feathers of Neoclassical decorum, as this is precisely what West's British classicizing required—see especially his Death on a Pale Horse (1817), at the Pennsylvania Academy. Disturbing no deeper niceties, the artist keeps his place in a scheme of things long-ordained by history, divine and secular. He touches Holy Scripture only to illustrate it. Turner is more audacious. Like his Parliaments burning or upland pastures strewn with, edelweiss, his themes from Revelation—Angel Standing in the Sun (1846), Death on a Pale Horse (ca. 1825-30)—give him occasion to assert the primacy of his own vision. We have shifted from the subject of apocalypse to the enactment of it, as the artist transforms agreed-upon appearances into colors and textures to be seen only in his art.

Many artists before Kandinsky enacted this drama, as did many after him. Few went about it as calmly as he. The script requires the leading (and, in a way, the only) actor in the scene to point forcibly at his own consciousness—the source, if not of a new heaven and earth, then of utterly original meanings for these things. This millennial gesture is so grand as to be laughable—or pathetic. To make it is to risk complete failure, and only a very partial success is possible in any case: the cultural margin on which even the most powerful intention can hold complete sway is very, very narrow. So artists in general try to avoid facing up to this inevitable failure. Irony is helpful here—that atmosphere of unmeaning, of desperate, ruinous play, that hangs over so many major revisions of self and world, from the late works of Byron to those of Robert Smithson. Kandinsky, by contrast, is appallingly sincere.

There is something archaic, half-conscious, about the confidence with which he spins out his revelations. The radical imagination, as Blake saw, is Luciferian, with origins in a gesture of disobedience to spiritual law and worldly usage. The artist recognizes no authority but that of his creative power, the generative energy whose proper work is to reveal itself as the source of all true meaning. When such ambitions make contact with mundane fact, the result is often a dismal spectacle—see Byron expiring of fever in Greece, having hoped to transfer his sense of poetic liberation to the political situation in the Ottoman Empire. He died, one might say, of the attempt to literalize the workings of his imagination. Most radical artists, no matter how ambitious, did not (and in our period, do not) make that mistake. The greater the claim an artist makes for his vision, the greater his need to protect it from the brutal unrolling of ordinary events. For all their distrust of traditional allegory, the Romantics became allegorists of a new (perhaps unconscious) kind: they taught themselves to read the banal texture of life for signs that the radical imagination was changing for the better the very nature of existence. Hence Shelley's claim, simply silly from a certain point of view, that poets are the world's "secret legislators."

By 1825 or so, Shelleyan optimism was impossible. Yet ambitious painters and poets continued to make claims for the absolute powers of their creativity. As the 19th century ground on, writers began to say that such power could only make itself fully manifest in zones of mystical correspondence (Symbolism) or of "autonomous" formal development (Whistler). Among a hyper-conscious few—Baudelaire, Manet, Degas—the worldly limits on creative ambition produced bitterness, an anguish to be borne only in the dandy's detached condition. Yet such figures were no less Luciferian in their ambition than Shelley or Turner (himself a prey to Saturnine fits of spleen in his later years). Though artists began to hide away from the ordinary world in labyrinthine ironies, they still offered themselves as central to the universe of genuine meaning, and they still assumed that position with gestures of total disobedience to all external authority. They continued, in other words, to construct apocalyptic self-images, individualities which premise their mythic vitality on the death of God and the absence of all the claims made on ordinary people by ordinary life.

The radicality of most ambitious art is covert, so only initiated spirits sense the full force of its violence. As Barbey d'Aurevilley said, the dandy's joke is to behave so properly that his behavior becomes a critique of propriety. But even at its most slyly secretive, Romantic and modernist art is haunted by the ghosts of all the meanings, values and ordinary affections it must kill off in order to live. This encrusts our most serious imagery with the esthetic equivalent of blood-guilt.

Kandinsky takes no note of this. He moves with trance-like sureness toward the epiphany of his esthetic godhead, as if a numbness pervades his spirit as he nears the brink of apocalypse. He claims ultimate meanings for his art, yet remains innocent of the implications—all the deep changes in personal, social and political life that would occur if his vision were somehow to make its energies felt in the larger world. And he remains innocent of the knowledge that such success is doubtful. Kandinsky is a visionary in blinkers. His intimacy with apocalypse is intense but half-conscious. And this is remarkable, for the apocalypse in question is that of consciousness itself rendered nearly God-like in its reach and clarity.

Every artist in the Romantic-modernist tradition wears Kandinsky's blinkers on occasion. Finding that irony is of limited use in dealing with the ambiguities and absurdities—the failures—of radical art, artists must sometimes resort to the expedient of refusing to see. Expressionist blindness is thus emblematic, not a quirk of that style but an extreme instance of a trait seen in ambitious artists of all sorts. Yet Kandinsky seems permanently blinkered, eternally entranced, and this is what gives him his special relationship to apocalypse. He hovers on its brink for decades, incessantly purifying his vision, feeling neither doubt nor the need for those ironies with which other modernists deflect their sense of failure. We consider ourselves more sophisticated than he, more inveterately ironic, yet all of us are conscious, now and then, of blank spots in consciousness—vacuums created by those acts of censorship by which we suppress our questions about the futility of radical esthetics.

Kandinsky has the look of a heroic, unwanted döppleganger of us all, with his inability to see that he was overlooking something important: the procreative hubris that, once noted by Marcel Duchamp, for instance, drove him into the ironic labyrinth of his middle years. This hall of mirrors was the world perceived as the unconscious of radical esthetics, not the emanation of prophetic vision but a quirky, self-piloting urban landscape-machine around whose odd corners works of art popped up readymade. Duchamp was willing to tinker with a puzzle of form and meaning so long as its intricacies reassured the spectator that no millennial answers would be forthcoming, even if the puzzle let itself be solved. This citified, petit-bourgeois fastidiousness takes us a long way from Kandinsky's pastoral of primordial form.

I should point out that not all Expressionists were such Titans of serene unseeing as Kandinsky. Max Beckmann and George Grosz, for a major and a minor example, were as ironic as any Parisian (and far more sardonic). As for the Brücke and Blue Rider groups, nearly everyone on their rosters suffered an incessant, dithering anxiety. God the father is not all that easy to replace. Even estheticized, blood-guilt is a dreadful burden. Revved up to panic levels, Expressionist anxiety projected itself outward. Apocalyptic consciousness could carry on if the immanent crisis were imagined to be external, borne into view on the terrifying side of current events. And current events obliged in the early years of this century with rural dislocation, restive cities, the prospect of war. Frederick S. Levine quotes a prospectus Franz Marc wrote in 1912 for The Blue Rider Almanac: "Art today proceeds along paths which our fathers never imagined possible: one stands before the new work as in a dream and hears the apocalyptic riders in the air . . ." (The Apocalyptic Vision, 1975). The artist struggled to believe that politics, economics, the coming war—all the frightful portents and happenings outside himself—were the cause of his dread. Thus he avoided facing up to the immense (perhaps unfulfillable) responsibilities brought down on him by the project of pushing individuality to the edge of apocalypse, and over.

At present there are young artists who try to outsmart the pressures of their ambition by putting their imagery to work in the protest against nuclear war, as if that were the sole cause of their terror. Or they comment on social and political pathologies in a more or less Expressionist manner. This is to evade the burden of radical art while asking credit for struggling against the imperfections of life, much as the original Expressionists did. Like Franz Marc or Ludwig Kirchner, these artists of the present day flee from a consciousness of the nature of modernist consciousness, its presumptuousness and guilt, its failures and consequent addiction to irony. Marc tried to remain primitive while attaining to radical sophistication, an impossible dream familiar in New York since the time of the studiously inarticulate Action Painter. In 1915 Marc wrote, from the front, of his "feeling for the animalistic, for the 'pure animals' . . ." (Levine). Kandinsky enjoyed without effort the innocence of the art-making animal, so he never felt the anxieties that might have driven him to claim that the cannons of his "Improvisations" were those of World War I. A collector asked him in 1914 if his images of apocalypse referred to the current conflict. Carmean's exhibition brochure quotes Kandinsky's answer: "'No, not this war,' the artist replied . . . the pictorial image recorded 'that a terrible struggle was going on in the spiritual sphere'"—the sphere delimited by the reach of Kandinsky's own creative powers, as they battled toward glory through "the soulless life of the present" (Concerning . . . ).

Season after season throughout his life, Kandinsky's "inner need" returned him to that battlefield. One of his few concessions to the world and to others was to try to give universal import to the apocalyptic rebirth of his spirit. Thus he stuck it out at the Bauhaus until his esthetic, with its unshakable focus on himself, came into unbearable conflict with Hannes Meyer, the director of the Dessau Bauhaus, a leftist with no use for Kandinsky's "bourgeois" individuality. Earlier, in the days of the "Improvisations," Kandinsky had labored to invigorate a fast succession of artists' groups, of which the Blue Rider is the best known. This was Kandinsky's Munich period, the subject of an exhibition put on in early '82 at the Guggenheim Museum.

I have no hope of doing justice to this startling assemblage of paintings, illustrated books, stained glass windows, toys, clothes and much, much more. The show's curator, Peg Weiss, seemed to have tumbled the attic of Kandinsky's Munich out along the ramps of the Guggenheim. The Munich Academy and the Munich Secession, the Neue Kunstlervereiningung München, the Blue Rider and a group called Phalanx were all represented by work from dozens of hands. Marc, Auguste Macke, Paul Klee and Gabriele Münter are familiar figures, the Symbolist-academic Franz von Stuck and the Finnish artist-craftsman Akselli Gallen-Kallela far less so. There was a cluster of watercolors and studies Kandinsky did around the time of the "Improvisations," though Weiss included only one of the latter—Number 6 (1909), whose motifs range from the funeral march to arisen souls and on to the waves of the deluge that destroys so that some may be reborn.

For the most part, woodcuts from 1903-07 represented Kandinsky here. Symbolist evocations of Russian folklore and fairy tale, they shimmer with the dark, remembered light of childhood, a fog of nostalgia that, lifting, leaves a modernist sensibility stranded in the harsh light of its yen for an apocalyptic tomorrow. The Guggenheim exhibition included some of Kandinsky's most cloying images, yet his Symbolist sentimentality never bogged down his inventiveness—his was clearly the motor that kept running when others' sputtered and stalled. One felt the artist's "inner need" pervading this assembly of works, yet the sheer weight of his colleagues' lesser art overpowered Kandinsky's, dragging his apocalypse down to well-kept regions where a genteel, dutifully liberal application of radical styles to everyday objects counted as radicality itself.

This is not Expressionism's worst fate. On the right, the style's decorative gentility gives way to violence. Emil Nolde, for a prime example, is always aggressive, never more than half-conscious. He acknowledges the bloodguilts of the radical self, but not for what they are. In his Expressionism, the apocalyptic self offers its aggression as a natural force, an instinctual hence innocent upwelling of primal energies. That way lies fascism, and Nolde tried to take it. The Nazis only let him go so far along that path, which leads to the Romantic artist-asführer—or führer-as-Romantic-artist. Preserving his own ambitions in a form too grandiose, Nolde could not be directly useful to Hitler's regime, which expected its official art to send a haze of "classical" propriety through public spaces. They saved Expressionism for political rallies and wall posters.

In Kandinsky's Munich, painting is a decorative art unfortunately deprived of embroidery's tactile appeal. No wonder Kandinsky went back to Russia at the time of the Revolution. There, events proceeded at the scale of his own self-image. And there, for a time, he found it possible to mesh the workings of his personal epiphanies with those of Bolshevik politics. What happened later on the plane of Bauhaus ideology happened on the littered ground of Revolutionary fact: Kandinsky found that Marxism had no room for the singularity of his imagination, no tolerance for the imperatives of his "inner need." So he moved back to Germany, and then—after leaving the Bauhaus—to Paris, where he lived out his days in the revered isolation to which his esthetic had been trying to condemn him for three decades. The Bauhaus and Paris periods of Kandinsky's career are the subjects of exhibitions to come at the Guggenheim.

The color and line set forth with such clarity in St. John's Book of Revelation are, to my inward eye, far more splendid than Kandinsky's. The angels and beasts of Revelation, the tales of fire and frogs leaping from mouths, the city of "pure gold, like unto clear glass," form a spectacle surpassing anything in 20th-century art. Yet that spectacle appears across a vast, unbridgeable distance, and it is necessary to say why. St. John asks us to let ourselves be absorbed by the imagery of his vision. We who sustain, however ironically, the radical traditions in the art of the two last centuries will not do this. We refuse to be absorbed, defining ourselves by this refusal. In one of his prophetic books, Jerusalem (1804-20), Blake says, "I must create a system or be enslav'd by another man's" (plate 10, line 20). This is sheer imperative, the inner need felt by a kind of self that was new in those days. The imperative, like the self, is irrational, if you like: "I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create" (plate 10, line 21).

Beginning with Romanticism, even critics claim to be creators, and apocalyptic too: in the moment of critical vision, a work of art attains a redeeming radiance. Or that is the ambition. Irony usually tempers it. At any rate, art and criticism in radical traditions cannot serve apocalypse. They must be apocalyptic, at least in intent, or admit utter defeat. In Revelation, 10, x, St. John eats the angel's book. Painters usually show him kneeling and receiving the book into his hands, though Dürer has him tucking in at one corner of the object—ingesting imagery so that he may in turn be ingested by it. The play of color, shape and light in Revelation emanates from a god with the power to absorb the ineffabilities of the individual self. In Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art those ineffabilities of the self are the emanations of power, made manifest as the artist fulfills the need of color and form to reveal its "inner meaning" (1911). By this exceedingly vague process, art guides the world out of its materialist nightmare (Concerning . . . ). Kandinsky looked forward to seeing all of existence newly spiritualized—redeemed through the medium of the artist's own being. "The artist," says Kandinsky, "must be blind to . . . conventions of form, deaf to the . . . demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and harken to its words alone" (Concerning. . . ). He must, in other words, treat his own imagination as the regenerative center of the universe; further, he must remain deaf and blind to evidence that no one's imagination has the power to play this role.

This blindness and deafness appear in most of the artists we call Expressionist—in a form absolute in Kandinsky, wrenched by panic in Marc, by fascist ambition in Nolde. Even in the politically liberal images of Kandinsky's Munich circle, this handicap persists as a fixation on the nuances of individual consciousness. Reflexive focus is so steady in Romantic and modernist art as to count after all as a sort of unconsciousness: the artist dazzled into unseeing by reflections of himself, those idealized dreams of his own being from which he makes his art.

When world and self begin to feel interchangeable, it is doubt—not prophetic fervor—that redeems. Major art in our period courts those failures that force the imagination into contact with zones, comprising the vastly greater portion of the world, that resist its creative powers. Consciousness approaches completeness when it begins to see its limits, its necessary fragmentedness. But even with the benefit of this (seeming) paradox, radical sensibilities show some of the willful deafness and blindness of Kandinsky and his Expressionist crowd. We all share in some part their apocalyptic hubris. This doesn't make us tragic. It only ensures that Expressionism will always have for us the emblematic value of figuring forth the primitive desires and dangers at the heart of our sophistication.