SOURCE: "The Lucid Order of Wassily Kandinsky," in Art and Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society, Horizon Press, 1967, pp. 138-50.

As a painter Kandinsky's achievement was coherent in development, original in style, and accumulative in force; but the painting was the direct expression of a slowly matured philosophy of art. It is possible that this philosophy of art has as much significance for the future as the paintings that were its outcome, but in this essay I shall try to show how the philosophy and the painting evolved, step by step in dialectical correspondence.

Wassily Kandinsky was born on 4 December 1866, in the city of Moscow. His father belonged to a family that had for many years lived as exiles in East Siberia, near the Mongolian frontier. There seems to have been some mingling of blood in the family history: one of Kandinsky's great grandmothers is said to have been a Mongolian princess, and there was a distinct Mongolian cast on Kandinsky's own features. His mother, however, was a true Moscovite, and the son was always sentimentally attached to the city of his birth. His maternal grandmother was German, and German was a language he spoke in his infancy; he was fascinated by German fairy-tales. The Kandinskys seem to have been fairly well-to-do; when Wassily was only three he travelled with his parents in Italy. Then in 1871 they all moved to Odessa, where Kandinsky began to learn music and where from 1876-85 he went to school. At the end of this period it was decided that he should study law, which meant a return to Moscow. These legal studies lasted until 1892, but during this period he paid his first visit to Paris (1889), an experience he repeated as soon as he had passed his final examinations (1892). These visits to Paris seem to have been for recreation only—Kandinsky does not record any artistic experiences at this time. More significant, from this point of view, was an exhibition of the French Impressionists which he saw in Moscow in 1895. A painting by Monet was a revelation to him, and made him aware of a nascent longing to paint. In 1896 he declined an offer of a post in the University of Dorpat and went instead to Munich, determined to test his now fully awakened desire to be an artist. In 1897 he became a pupil of Anton Azbé, but did not make much progress in the academic methods of his school. There, however, he met a fellow Russian student, two years older, Alexei von Jawlensky, from whom he first heard about Van Gogh and Cézanne. In 1900 he joined the Munich Academy where Franz von Stuck had been the master of painting since 1895, and had gained considerable fame as a teacher. Von Stuck was a romantic landscape painter of the school of Böcklin, but his influence on Kandinsky was not profound. Of more significance, probably, was the movement which, originating in England, Scotland and Belgium, swept over Europe in the last decade of the nineteenth century and was variously known as the Modern Movement, Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. In Germany, Munich became the centre of this movement, and Jugend and Simplicissimus, two illustrated magazines founded in 1896, represented its spirit and style. In painting the style was represented by Munch, Hodler and Klimt, and this is the style adopted by Kandinsky in his apprentice years.

Will Grohmann, in his monograph on the artist,¹ illustrates a poster which Kandinsky designed for the first exhibition of the Phalanx, a group he himself had founded in 1901. It is in the new style, and apart from the typography typical of the movement, represents two knights with shields and lances attacking an encampment in front of a castle. The stylization is already extreme, and from this design onwards we can trace a gradual evolution of form which ends in the first completely abstract paintings of nine years later. Other influences were to be superimposed, particularly that of the French Fauves; but the argument I shall put forward in this essay is that the continuity of Kandinsky's stylistic development is unbroken from this early Jugendstil phase until the end of his life. One must therefore begin with a consideration of the formal qualities of Jugendstil or Art Nouveau.

The formal characteristics of distinct periods in the history of art have often been described, especially since Wölfflin's invention of a useful terminology; but the psychological motives that determine these morphological peculiarities are still very obscure. Following Wölfflin we can speak of linear as opposed to painterly composition, and such a linear emphasis became apparent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We find it manifested not only as a renewed interest in drawing as such, and in the popularity of etching and engraving among amateurs of art, but as a quality in decorative motifs of every kind—in wrought ironwork and silverware, in furniture and above all in typography. Book design, including magazines and catalogues, provides a very good index to the whole development, and in this medium one can follow the gradual transition from the naturalistic fantasies of a Beardsley or a Crane to the linear abstractions of a Van Doesburg or a Mondrian. Kandinsky's designs for catalogues and posters, for the decoration of the two books he produced at this time (Über das Geistige in der Kunst and Klänge) illustrate this same gradual transition from naturalism to linear abstraction. Nevertheless, gradual as the transition was, there came a point when abstraction as such was deducible from the extremes of Jugendstil, and the discovery was Kandinsky's.

It is sometimes claimed that a painter in Lithuania (Ciurlionis) or Russia (Larionov or Malevich) was the first abstract painter; in Paris they would say Picabia or Delaunay. No doubt it has many times in the past occurred to a painter that his colours might be composed like sounds in music, and many such harmonic elements exist even in classical painting. These questions of priority belong to the childish aspects of historiography; what is of serious interest is the conviction that carries a discovery through to a coherent style. Kandinsky himself was quite firm on the question of his 'priority'. In a letter to me dated 9 May 1938, describing the early days of his experiments in Munich, he wrote: 'C'était un temps vraiment héroique! Mon Dieu, que c'était difficile et beau en même temps. On me tenait alors pour un "fou", des fois pour un "anarchiste russe qui pense que tout est permis", avec un mot pour un "cas très dangereux pour la jeunesse et pour la grande culture en général," etc., etc. J'ai pensé alors que j'étais le seul et le premier artiste qui avait le "courage" de rejeter non seulement le "sujet", mais même chaque "objet" dehors de la peinture. Et je crois vraiment que j'avais complètement raison—j'ai été le premier. Sans doute la question "qui était le premier tailleur" (comme disent les Allemands) n'est pas d'une importance extraordinaire. Mais le "fait historique" n'est pas à changer.'

One might say that once Jugendstil had reached its limit of development, the further step to abstraction was inevitable, and that no particular artist deserves the credit for a crystallization that was the impersonal outcome of the situation that existed in the first decade of the twentieth century. Kandinsky always believed that he had made an independent discovery, and he has related the circumstances. Coming home to his studio one day in 1908 he saw a painting on his easel and was thrilled by an unexpected beauty. Coming closer he saw that the painting was one he had left upside-down, and that its adventitious-beauty was due to the non-representational function of the forms and colours in that position. He was already experimenting at the extreme limits of Fauvism, but he now suddenly realized that far more direct and powerful possibilities of communication were latent in form and in colour used symbolically, without any representational intention. He set about to explore these possibilities, working cautiously and testing his methods at every step. At the same time he began to elaborate a theory to justify his experiments, and this theory he set out in a thesis to which, when it was published in 1912, he gave the title Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art). A close study of this book is essential to any complete understanding of Kandinsky's art.

It is often objected that art needs no theoretical justification—that it is a sign of weakness in an artist to attempt any verbal exposition of his activity. If so it is a weakness many artists have felt, from Leonardo to Reynolds and Delacroix. Several modern artists, though not venturing to compose a formal treatise, have written statements or letters that give us necessary guidance as to their intentions—Van Gogh and Cézanne are examples. One of the greatest artists of our time, whom no one would accuse of intellectualism, has left us with perhaps the profoundest writings on art of all time—Paul Klee. Kandinsky did not have Klee's intensely introspective vision; nevertheless, Concerning the Spiritual in Art is a bold and original essay in aesthetics, written on the basis of general experience, and establishing for the first time a programme for an advance into what Kandinsky called 'an age of conscious creation'. We shall see in a moment what he meant by this phrase, but one should note that he makes very little use of the word 'abstraction', though he was familiar with Wilhelm Worringèr's Abstraction and Empathy,² published by his own publisher two years before he began to write Concerning the Spiritual in Art Worringer had shown that a tendency towards abstraction was one of the recurrent phenomena of the history of Northern art. Kandinsky realized that the spiritual condition of Europe was calling for another of these recurrent phases of abstraction, and more consciously, more deliberately than any other artist of the time, he decided to lead European art in this required direction.

The theory put forward by Kandinsky in his book may be summarized as follows: Art begins where nature leaves off (Oscar Wilde had said this). Art springs from an internal necessity, a need to communicate feeling in an objective form. (Nature interferes with the exactitude of such communication.) The work of art is a construction (not necessarily geometric) making use of all the potentialities of form and colour, not in an obvious way, for the most effective construction may be a hidden one, composed of seemingly fortuitous shapes—'somehow' related forms that are actually very precisely bound together. 'The final abstract expression of every art is number', but Kandinsky recognized that the artist might be dealing with irregular rather than regular elements, and that it would therefore be difficult to translate his structure into mathematical form. The motive is always psychological—Kandinsky did not hesitate to say 'spiritual', though the German word he used, 'geistig', has not quite the same superstitious overtones as the English word. But 'the artist must have something to communicate, for mastery over form is not his goal, but rather the adapting of the form to inner significance'. The test, the standard of judgement, is always subjective—in this Kandinsky identifies himself with the expressionist theory of art. 'That is beautiful which is produced by inner need, which springs from the soul.'

There is in this theory of art an Hegelian synthesis which must be appreciated: the eternal contradiction between inner and outer, between subjective and objective, between human consciousness and an indifferent world of fact (Nature), is resolved in the unity of the work of art. Kandinsky maintained that the supreme work of art is a highly conscious construction determined by the patient elaboration of plastic forms to correspond to a slowly 'realized' inner feeling. The forms might have an arbitrary beginning—a scribble, an improvisation of line and colour; but these forms are then modified or manipulated, teased and tested, until they correspond to an even more clearly realized inner feeling—the feeling is realized as the forms achieve a correspondence—can be realized only if the artist succeeds in so disposing the forms that they express the feeling.

The 'method' that Kandinsky now adopted has been described by Grohmann and others: what at first sight seems to be the most fortuitous kind of doodling was actually a careful disposition of irregular formal elements. The first composition relying entirely on such abstract elements is a water-colour of 1910 in the possession of the artist's widow. But Kandinsky did not immediately devote all his energies to abstraction. He felt his way slowly forwards, and between 1910 and 1914 there are many compositions that clearly have a basis in naturalistic elements (even much later, for example during the First World War when he returned to Moscow, he occasionally painted in a representational style). But there was no turning back, and after his return to Western Europe at the end of 1921 he never again returned to realism.

Kandinsky was alone at first, but he was soon to receive support from other and younger artists. During the course of 1911 he made the acquaintance of Paul Klee, Hans Arp, August Macke and Franz Marc. Of these Marc seems to have best understood Kandinsky's intentions, and together they decided to organize the group which they called 'Der Blaue Reiter' (The Blue Rider). They held their first exhibition in Munich in December of that year, and two months later, in February 1912, a second exhibition in Munich, followed later in the year by an exhibition in Berlin. This same year Klee, Marc and Macke visited Paris and made contact with Robert Delaunay, whose 'Orphic' painting was also developing in the direction of abstraction. Delaunay was henceforth to keep in close touch with the Munich group, and there is no doubt that he had a considerable influence on Klee, Marc and Macke, and was perhaps in his turn influenced by the theories of Kandinsky.

The outbreak of the war brought to an end the activities of the Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky was displaced and returned to Russia via Switzerland and the Balkans. In Moscow he found two abstract movements already in existence—Suprematism under the direction of Malevich and Constructivism under the direction of Tatlin. The first two years of his residence in Moscow do not seem to have been very productive—very little work survives from this period of his life (Grohmann calls it an 'intermezzo'). In 1917 Gabo and Pevsner returned to Moscow and the next five years were devoted to politics and administration rather than to creative work. After the Revolution Kandinsky became a professor at the National Art School and in 1919 founded and directed a whole organization of central and provincial art galleries. In 1920 he was appointed Professor of Art at the University of Moscow; in 1921 he founded an Academy of Art. But the thermidorian reaction was already setting in and the official policy of 'socialist realism' was opposed to a revolutionary art. Kandinsky decided to leave Russia. By the end of the year he had reached Berlin, a city he did not find very congenial. The artistic scene was dominated by Dadaists and Expressionists, for whom Kandinsky had never much sympathy, and a spirit of desperate nihilism pervaded the intellectual life of the German capital. Luckily he received almost immediately an invitation from Walter Gropius to join the staff of the Bauhaus, the school of basic design which Gropius had directed since 1919 in Weimar. There he found Klee and Lyonel Feininger, the architect Adolf Meyer, the designer Johannes Itten, and in general an atmosphere and a policy which were completely to his liking. Kandinsky was to remain at the Bauhaus until the tragic end in 1933—five years longer than Gropius himself, who resigned the directorship in 1928.

The Moscow 'intermezzo' and the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis are events that divide Kandinsky's abstract work into three distinctive periods—the Munich years (1908-14), a period of experiment and discovery; the Bauhaus years (1922-33), a period of definition and exposition; and the Paris years (1933-44), which were years of consolidation and elaboration. I have already described the formative period in Munich; I will now try to characterize the remaining periods.

Kandinsky ended his book of 1912 by announcing that 'we are fast approaching a time of reasoned and conscious composition, in which the painter will be proud to declare his work constructional', and this gives the clue to his own future development. The Constructivist movement which he encountered in Russia must have clarified his ideas and given him fresh confidence, though he seems at the time to have reacted against the severely geometrical forms of Malevich and Tatlin. The comparatively few pictures that have survived from the Moscow period, or of which photographic records exist, are continuous with the last paintings done in Europe—violently explosive forms often contained within an irregular oval outline. The shapes of the constituent elements are still vaguely suggestive of the features of a landscape, of the débris of an earthquake or a flood, but just at the end of the Moscow period a tendency towards geometric precision becomes evident—for example, the Bunter Kreis (Varicoloured Circle) of 1921 now in the Yale University Art Gallery. From 1921 onwards the geometricization proceeds apace, and by 1923, when Kandinsky was settled in the Bauhaus and fully productive once again, the process is complete. But if one examines a typical canvas of this period (In the Black Square, 1923) one can still see the skeleton of a landscape. The circles do not represent the sun, nor the triangles mountains, nor the curves clouds, but they are the archetypal elements of a landscape and suggest a deliberate refinement of such elements. 'Step by step,' Grohmann suggests, 'Kandinsky in Moscow approached a new harder and more objective form of composition which came as a surprise to his acquaintances when it was first shown to them in Berlin. As in the case of Klee, any new departure was always regarded by his friends as a mistake.'

But Kandinsky was now sure of himself, and the Bauhaus period is to be regarded as a period of consolidation in which a new method and indeed a new form of art was for the first time perfected. It was a lonely path that Kandinsky had chosen. In so far as it was always based on fantasy—that is to say, on a free combination of images—it had something in common with Klee's art. But Kandinsky did not possess Klee's sense of humour, nor Klee's essentially poetic imagination. Kandinsky's images were always plastic, that is to say, elements of form and colour that were completely divorced from sentimental associations (I use the word 'sentimental' in its precise and not in its derogatory meaning). This does not imply that the plastic forms have no symbolic function; on the contrary, a line, a circle, a triangle, or any other geometrical element, always has a reliable significance for Kandinsky. It is true that he would sometimes give a painting a sentimental title—Obstinate, for example. But this is an exception: the usual titles (Yellow Point, Sharp-calm Pink, Quiet Harmony, Calm Tension, Capricious Line, Contact, Bright Unity, Wavering, Counterweights, Upward, etc.) refer to physical forces or conditions. These physical elements constitute a language of forms, used to communicate a meaning, an inner 'necessity'. Kandinsky was not very precise in his definition of this inner necessity—he seems to have regarded it as an indefinite spiritual (or one can say psychological, or even neural) tension which was released in the act or process of composition. There is no doubt that he always had the analogy of musical composition in mind, and I know no better clue to Kandinsky's method of composition than the Poetics of Music by his compatriot and fellow exile, Igor Stravinsky.³ (There is, I believe, a close similarity between the formal evolution of these two great contemporary artists.) In the first chapter of this book Stravinsky writes: 'We cannot observe the creative phenomenon independently of the form in which it is made manifest. Every formal process proceeds from a principle, and the study of this principle requires precisely what we call dogma. In other words, the need that we feel to bring order out of chaos, to extricate the straight line of our operation from the tangle of possibilities and from the indecision of vague thoughts, presupposes the necessity of some sort of dogmatism.' And Stravinsky proceeds to define dogmatism as a feeling or taste for order and discipline fed and informed by positive concepts.

When he comes to deal with the composition of music, Stravinsky defines music in its pure state as free speculation. 'It is through the unhampered play of its functions that a work is revealed and justified. We are free to accept or reject this play, but no one has the right to question the fact of its existence. To judge, dispute and criticize the principle of speculative volition which is at the origin of all creation is thus manifestly useless.' Stravinsky then proceeds to maintain that 'inspiration is in no way a prescribed condition of the creative act, but rather a manifestation that is chronologically secondary.'

'Inspiration, art, artist—so many words, hazy at least, that keep us from seeing clearly in a field where everything is balance and calculation through which the breath of the speculative system blows. It is afterwards, and only afterwards, that the emotive disturbance which is at the root of inspiration may arise—an emotive disturbance about which people talk so indelicately by conferring upon it a meaning that is shocking to us and that compromises the term itself. Is it not clear that this emotion is merely a reaction on the part of the creator grappling with that unknown entity which is still only the object of his creating and which is to become a work of art? Step by step, link by link, it will be granted him to discover the work. It is this chain of discoveries, as well as each individual discovery, that give rise to the emotion—an almost physiological reflex, like that of the appetite causing a flow of saliva—this emotion which follows closely the phases of the creative process.'

I have quoted this passage at length because it is an exact description and explanation of Kandinsky's method of composition and indeed of his whole philosophy of art. Stravinsky once described himself (to a gendarme) as an 'inventor of music'. Kandinsky was an inventor of paintings, and both artists maintained that 'invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it'. Kandinsky invented his formal elements; but his creative imagination enabled him to give expressive coherence and unity to these elements.

Every apparently casual scribble or brush-stroke in a composition by Kandinsky is deliberately invented: he would spend many hours drawing and redrawing these apparently informal details, and not until they had become accurately expressive signs would he transfer them to the composition. This is what Kandinsky meant by 'conscious creation': it is identical with Stravinsky's 'principle of speculative volition', and it should not be confused with the 'informal art' that has come into existence since Kandinsky's death. This informal art (tachism, action painting, etc.) can claim some relationship to the first phase of Kandinsky's abstract development, and even to the early stage of 'improvisation' in the composition of his later compositions. What separates Kandinsky from most of the later 'informalists' is his insistence on the conscious control of the constituent elements of form and colour. Compare the difference between the disciplined structure of the atonal music of Berg and Webern and the informal expressionism of 'musique concrète'.

During his Bauhaus period, in 1926, Kandinsky set down his principles of composition in a treatise which he called Point and Line to Plane. This carries the theoretical exposition that forms a part of Concerning the Spiritual in Art to a more thorough analytical stage. The earlier book had been concerned mainly with the effect of colour in relation to form; Kandinsky now explores the dynamism of line and plane, especially in relation to the techniques of etching, wood-engraving and lithography. Horizontal and vertical are interpreted not merely as opposed directions, but also as symbolic 'temperatures': horizontal as cold, vertical as warm. In fact, a temperature or a temperament is ascribed to all linear directions and spatial areas—the bottom of a composition is an area of constraint or heaviness, the top an area of lightness and liberation. A composition thus becomes an orchestration of vital forces expressed in plastic symbols. The musical analogy is always in the background, and the concepts of time, rhythm, interval and metre hitherto reserved to music are freely introduced into the aesthetics of painting. Kandinsky's aesthetics (a total aesthetics covering all the arts) stands or falls by the justness of this analogy, and from the early days of the Blaue Reiter it was based on discussions with composers like Arnold Schönberg.

The Paris period does not differ fundamentally from the Bauhaus period, but Kandinsky was now free to develop his art in isolation, and with a self-confidence that had been proved in ten years of pedagogic activity. There is no decisive change in the character of his painting, though new motives are frequently invented and certain 'schema', such as a division of the picture-space into self-contrasted panels or architectural 'façades', are adopted. More remarkable, perhaps, is a certain barbaric richness of colour which seems to be a reminiscence of the indigenous art of Russia and Asia. Grohmann compares these late paintings with Mexican and Peruvian art, relying on the 'Amerasian' speculations of Strygowski for an historical link. Whether these and other similarities are due to an atavistic recollection on Kandinsky's part, or to his conscious knowledge of and sympathy for these exotic arts, is a question I would not like to decide.⁴

Since Kandinsky's death in 1944 the understanding and appreciation of his work has grown very considerably, but there is always a latent opposition to it. In so far as this opposition is part of a general failure to understand and appreciate abstract tendencies in art, it calls for no comment. But there are many sincere lovers of contemporary art, admirers say of Klee or Picasso, who are unmoved by Kandinsky's work. In the same way there are music lovers who admire Bartók or Prokofiev, but who remain unmoved by Alban Berg or Anton Webern. Perhaps the clue to this limitation lies in the word 'unmoved'.

In Kandinsky's work, as in the work of the composers I have mentioned, the emotion involved is Apollonian rather than Dionysian. 'What is important for the lucid ordering of the work—for its crystallization [I am quoting Stravinsky again]—is that all the Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the life-sap rise must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the law: Apollo demands it.' Kandinsky's art is not for every taste; but for those who can appreciate the strength and beauty of an art that imposes the clearest intellectual unity on a chaos of Dionysian elements, his achievement will rank among the highest in the history of modern art.

NOTES

¹ (p. 139), Cologne, 1958; London, 1959

² (p. 142), First German edition, Munich, 1908. English translation by Michael Bullock, London, 1953

³ (p. 146), London, 1947

⁴ (p. 149), Cf. Jean Arp: "Kandinsky told me that his grandfather had come trotting into Russia on the back of a small charger that was spangled with bells, arriving from one of those enchanted Asiatic mountains all made of porcelain. There is no doubt that this grandfather had bequeathed deep secrets to Kandinsky.' Wassily Kandinsky, by Max Bill. Paris, 1951