SOURCE: "'Les Tendances Nouvelles', The Union Internationale Des Beaux-Arts, Des Lettres, Des Sciences et De L'Industrie and Kandinsky," in Art History, Vol. 2, No. 2, June, 1979, pp. 221-46.

1. THE HISTORY AND CHARACTER OF LES TENDANCES NOUVELLES

The Parisian revue, Les Tendances Nouvelles, emerged in May of 1904 as part of an ambitious enterprise, consisting not only of a periodical, but of a gallery, an exhibition society, and an international artists' co-operative with explicitly Utopian goals. This effort actually put into practice many of the characteristic ideals of Symbolism, which still held sway in the Paris art world during the first decade of this century and were passed on to the young Expressionists. Despite the broad variety of individual viewpoints published by the magazine, its Symbolist profile remained clear—in its social aspirations for art, its co-operative nature, its belief in the metaphysical unity of the various arts, its espousal of parallels between art and science, and its not infrequent forays into the mystic. Even the wide range of authors with different beliefs stems from a Symbolist appreciation for sincere individuality. Indeed, Les Tendances Nouvelles may be a more concrete and representative embodiment of this period ideology than any other known document of the time.

Beyond its usefulness as an example and as a lexicon (of sorts) for lesser known artists of the period, Les Tendances Nouvelles also made significant contributions to the evolution of early modern art. These are of three general kinds: First, it established a network of contacts between a wide international spectrum of vanguard—as well as not so vanguard—artists. This established links for artists like Kandinsky and Jawlensky with associates of the Fauves, Mondrian, the young Duchamp-Villon, and other important, chiefly French artists at a time when they had been thought (until now) to have known nothing of one another. Second, it provided a vehicle for such major artists as Kandinsky, Feininger, Le Corbusier (Jeanneret), the Futurists, and Rodin, as well as for provocative thoughts by lesser known figures who, in their own turn, affected the work of the more prominent personalities. Lastly, it served as a model for other similar ventures, not the least of which was Kandinsky's Blaue Reiten but Kandinsky's very special relationship with Les Tendances Nouvelles will be taken up separately, in the second part of this essay.

The inaugural exhibition of this enterprise, the 'Groupe d'Art des Tendances Nouvelles' opened on 1 June 1904 bringing together an international cross-section of artists including French Symbolists, Fauves, German Expressionists, and individuals who a few years later developed strong allegiances to Cubism. As listed in the first issue of the magazine, the fifty-three members of this cooperative salon included J.-P. Dubray (the poet-painter who was a life-long friend of Jacques Villon), Pierre Girieud (who later showed with the Blaue Reiter), Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky (translated into French as 'Basile Kandinsky'), Kaethe Kollwitz, E. de Krouglicoff (who was active in the Union of Russian Artists in Paris, a frequent participant in Fauve exhibitions at the Galerie Berthe Weill, and an associate of the Abbaye de Créteil group), Georges Le Meilleur (a close friend of La Fresnaye and Le Fauconnier), A. Plehn (perhaps related to the German painter who in February 1906, in an article entitled The Struggle Against Pictorial Content', advocated the rejection of narrative representation and praised the spiritually enhancing value of art),¹ the later Cubist sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and others. This exhibition took place in its own 'Galerie des Tendances Nouvelles' at 20 rue Le Peletier, a little street that ran through the heart of the gallery district on the right bank.

As is explained in the second issue of Les Tendances Nouvelles,² the exhibition was intended to remain more or less permanent for a year—except as the participants wished to alter it. For each artist, the gallery kept nine works in storage to sell, in addition to the one on the wall, and took a ten per cent commission. The annual dues were 150 francs, with forty payable the first month and ten each following month. In addition, every member was entitled to a feature show of one week in the special display case. The membership shifted somewhat from month to month, but the major personalities remained.

The driving force behind all this activity was a part-Fauve, part-Symbolist painter named Alexis Mérodack-Jeaneau. Mérodack-Jeaneau conceived the idea of the periodical and exhibition society, and for most of its first year he ran it out of his studio at 9 rue du Val-de-Grâce, just south of the quartier latin.

Mérodack himself was born in Angers, 1 December 1873. He came from a well-off commercial and professional family and had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Angers. In 1890, he went off to Paris, where he studied for some time with Gustave Moreau and Luc Olivier-Merson. He exhibited regularly in the Indépendants (the so-called 'Neo-Impressionist salon') and from 1897 served as a member of its comité, where he became friendly with Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, and Manguin.³ Among Mérodack's fellow students in Moreau's atelier from 1891-9 were Matisse, Rouault, Marquet, Manguin, Jules Flandrin, René Piot, Charles Guérin, Jacques Brissaud, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Charles Milcendeau, and after 1897 Charles Camoin. Mérodack probably knew them all, but Milcendeau was the only one of the group to participate in the first Tendances Nouvelles showing in 1904.

In 1899, Mérodack had his first one man show (at the Bodinière) and it was warmly received by a number of critics. These critics included Gustave Geoffroy (whose writing appeared in the pages of Les Tendances Nouvelles from its inception), Arsène Alexandre, Louis Vauxcelles, Edouard Larradin, Léonce Bénédit, Pascal Tarthumy, Fontainas, Gustave Kahn, Gabriel Mourey, and Yvanhoë Rambosson. In 1902 Clovis Sagot gave him an exhibition which Gustave Coquiot reviewed for Le Journal, 14 May 1902. Mérodack showed regularly at the Indépendants from 1903, and although he did not usually exhibit in the Salon d'Automne, he showed three works there in 1904 (and in the catalogue listed his address as rue de Val-de-Grâce, 9).

Personally, Mérodack was highly unstable; hospitalized with emotional disorders on a few occasions, he suffered from a persecution complex centred on an abiding suspicion of plagiarism, which led later to some unnecessarily painful ruptures with friends and colleagues.⁴ In 1905 he apparently began spending more time in Angers; in the Indépendants catalogue of that year he gave his address as '26 rue de la Chalonière, Angers'. But presumably this was partly because he needed to be there during the summer of 1905 to organize the first salon of the Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts, des Lettres, des Sciences et de l' Industrie, into which the group around Les Tendances Nouvelles had by that time grown. He may have been sick again in 1906, and there was no salon of the Union in that year. He organized a second salon of the Union held in Angers during May and June of 1907, and this one included an enormous display of works by Kandinsky. In 1909 he composed his manifesto 'Le Synthétisme', based on ideas that had been germinating since 1899; however, he did not finally publish the work until around 1912-14. Still more salons of the Union took place in Paris in the years following 1909. The organization finally disintegrated with the start of the war, and on 8 March of 1919 Mérodack died in Angers.

Mérodack-Jeaneau's manifesto of Synthetism, as well as his other writings (published in newspapers),⁵ reflect all of the social idealism, the belief in the artist's prophetic role, and the rhetorical style of the other Tendances Nouvelles writers. Given his literary proficiency, the seemingly total absence of his prose from Les Tendances Nouvelles is conspicuous; notwithstanding Mérodack's almost exclusive responsibility for the administration of the organization and journal, his designs for its logo and the continued practice of his own art, it seems unlikely that he would never have found time to write for his own periodical. The motto added early in 1905 below Mérodack's design for the back cover was a slogan by the periodical's chief spokesman, Gerôme-Maësse: 'A renaissance can only come through a powerful and durable union.' The style and terminology of this motto—although generally consistent with most of what appeared in Les Tendances Nouvelles—sounds particularly like the writing of Mérodack himself. Gerôme-Maësse was the official critic of Les Tendances Nouvelles from its inception until the end; but he does not seem to have ever appeared in any other journal. In a review of the 1907 salon of the Union, Gerôme-Maësse referred to himself as the one who was responsible for the exhibition,⁶ whereas Mérodack actually did the job. So close are the turns of phrase, as well as the viewpoint and style in the writings of Gerôme-Maësse and Mérodack-Jeaneau that it is probable Gerôme-Maësse was a pseudonym for Mérodack-Jeaneau.⁷ One might even wonder if it is not a cryptic variant on 'Mérodack-Jeaneau', arrived at in emulation of Sâr Peladan, for whom Mérodack and his friends simultaneously felt admiration and rivalry.

Some of the articles by Gerôme-Maësse even seem to reflect Mérodack's personality traits. 'La Question Sociale en Art', for example, reveals a somewhat paranoid fantasy about the conspiracy of dealers and art critics. Gerôme-Maësse refers to the artist as the 'sad victim' who has been 'flayed' (écorché) by these oppressors.⁸ This terminology in itself indicates the intensity with which he felt the persecution of 'the artist', and it closely parallels Mérodack's later fantasy of being plagiarized by other artists and unjustifiably ignored by the critics.

Whatever Mérodack's personal peculiarities, he was a successful editor. For about a decade, Les Tendances Nouvelles brought elder statesmen and young talent into contact with one another by seeking out the patronage of the former while open-mindedly presenting the new ideas of the latter. Despite his own inclination for Symbolism, Mérodack's artistic and intellectual contacts cut broadly across stylistic and national categories, as his comité of honorary directors demonstrates.

In the first issue of Les Tendances Nouvelles, the well-known Symbolist critic Gustave Geoffroy wrote an opening statement entitled 'Un groupe d'Artistes' to express the ambitions of the new organization. He described the association: 'A group of artists has united in order to put itself in direct contact with the public. It is a sort of cooperative society which has come into being and that fact is interesting enough to remark upon.'⁹ They wanted to have their own gallery and magazine to promote young artists who might otherwise be suffocated by the salons, and as far as possible they tried to find art critics to write from within their own ranks. From the outset the journal manifested a broad interest in all the arts and attempted to chronicle theatrical events and concerts as well as the beaux-arts. The international scope and the idealistic notion of reaching (and even uplifting) 'the average man' with advanced art seem implicit from the first; and both ideas quickly evolved into strongly stated objectives.

With an article by Louis Leroy, 'L'Art et la Science', this first issue also expressed the poetic fascination with science and scientific means which recurred throughout the life of this association. Leroy lamented the past lack of complete co-operation between science and art, and indicated his belief in the usefulness of objective processes in art. He wrote that science should begin to consider art 'a materialization of thought, a tangible expression of human feelings',¹⁰ implying that it could thus be measured and analysed with 'scientific' methods—an idea that the Neo-Impressionists shared. Meanwhile, he also implies a reciprocal influence. 'The artist seeds science',¹¹ as another Tendances Nouvelles author put it, expressing the belief in art as a means of acquiring knowledge of the Creation, as an enquiry that goes hand in hand with science.

The pervasive social idealism of Les Tendances Nouvelles emerged frequently in its pages. Explicitly it was stated by the writers in almost every issue. In March of 1905, Gustave Huë (one of the regular spokesmen) outlined a programme for the 'groupe idéa' as he called the artists of Les Tendances Nouvelles. He said,

The principal purpose of 'Idéa' will be to group them [the artists] around the ideas which are common to them and—while permitting them, because of the association, to know each other's reciprocal efforts and to obtain a maximum of practical results—to aid them to reach the public, to educate it, and to guide it by a reasoned, scientific orderly initiation; finally, to form a living and permanent seed of a next renaissance where Art will be regenerated by Idea.¹²

Many of the Tendances Nouvelles writers—notably Gustave Geoffroy and Paul Adam—had already manifested a strong interest in social issues before they joined this group, and these involvements continued naturally through their association with the journal. But various new activities initiated by Les Tendances Nouvelles also indicate its deep commitments in this area. The association's large salon of 1907 was called 'Le Musée du Peuple' and as Gerôme-Maësse proclaimed:

The doors of the Museum of the People will therefore open very wide before the intellectual elite at the same time as before the mass of manual labourers.¹³

Les Tendances Nouvelles attempted to make good art more available to the average man by operating a mail order service for paintings, graphics and sculpture. Beginning in 1907 the back pages started to carry a list of half a dozen or so works by a couple of artists—different artists in each issue—intended for sale by post. They encouraged the artists to make the prices especially low so that a working man could afford them. The artists listed were by no means all minor; Khnopff, Maurice Denis, Guillaumin, and Ensor appeared there, and in one issue Kandinsky offered a variety of work, ranging from woodcuts starting around 20 francs to paintings (about a dozen in number) priced between 70 and 2000 francs.¹⁴

But inevitably there was some disillusionment with the public response to this project and, in an article entitled 'Notre Command-Office' (our mail order office), Gerôme-Maësse later admitted that 'certain goals in our programme have frankly been difficult to fulfill';¹⁵ mainly the hope of widely dispensing works of young unknown artists when the public just isn't used to things of good quality. The article laments the disappearance of the 'amateur' who paid little but bought regularly. Now, says the author, there is only the 'millionaire' who buys names; the 'command office' attempted to encourage the little collector again. The editor suggested—speaking in first person, probably Mérodack again—that only the best art be reproduced in the magazine so that the public would be properly educated. He proposed that he create a decorative stamp for works that he recommended for purchase (a sort of 'good housekeeping seal' to assure the average person of quality).

Les Tendances Nouvelles expressed its deep commitment to social causes, especially to public education, in many ways. The Union established a travelling scholarship for artists and began publishing novels, poems, and portfolios of artists' prints.¹⁶ In an article entitled 'L'Art populaire' Gustave Hu wrote,

if it is true that the public is unable to judge a work of art doesn't that come simply from a faulty education?¹⁷

And he goes on to say that it is the responsibility of artists to teach people. Accordingly, the Tendances Nouvelles group opened a school of applied art in the summer of 1905.

In addition, many Tendances Nouvelles articles discussed social issues such as the implications of private property (which must be maintained to preserve individuality in art without, however, abandoning responsibility to the masses, according to one writer),¹⁸ the impact of science and the machine on culture, and the theories of Kropotkin. The concept of the artists' co-operative periodical and exhibition society in itself reflects a social idealism, and early in 1905 Mérodack extended this cooperative when he established the Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts des Lettres, des Sciences, et de l'Industrie as the central organization for all the various activities.

This social concern was not unique to Les Tendances Nouvelles. A number of journals and writings of the period manifested a general interest in the masses of the poor. Special salons dedicated themselves to designs for homes and furnishings within the price range of working-class people—in 1905 L'Art Décoratif carried an article on 'La maison ouvrière' ('the worker's house') shown at the Grand Palais exhibition of social economy and hygiene; in 1907 Yvanhoë Rambosson (an admirer of Mérodack) wrote an article in the same journal on inexpensive designs for modern furniture; essays appeared on the simple folk crafts of Marie Tenichev's Talashkino colony; and many other similarly oriented writings frequently made their way into the revues of the period.

In a more abstract, philosophical form, Kandinsky, Mérodack-Jeaneau, and many others associated with Les Tendances Nouvelles vehemently expressed the same kind of social idealism in their belief that the artist had special obligations as a spiritual leader, and that art should raise the moral level of society. Mérodack-Jeaneau's international ambitions for the Union revealed his idealistic belief in his mission to uplift the masses with art. He advertised at the back of the journal that manuscripts could be sent in French, Spanish, German, Italian, or English and he attempted to set up a network of collaborators all over Europe. In one issue he spelled out the 'missionary' obligations of Union members, addressing especially those who had been selected as correspondants (this included at least fifty members).¹⁹ They were to consider themselves as the representative of the Union in their country or city and the house of the correspondent was therefore to be the gathering place where artists and literary people, 'irrespective of their religious or political orientation', could find support, particularly Union members holding the group's honorific distinction—the golden bee.

²⁰ The correspondent 'must' do everything possible to promote a positive atmosphere for art in his area, rallying around himself artists, literati, and collectors to form a circle receptive to the aims of the Union. He is to keep the Union up to date on the developments in his area and to make himself known as a representative of the organization to city authorities, museum officials, directors of all public institutions, presidents of salons, etc., so that he may be invited to participate in their various activities and promote Les Tendances Nouvelles. The correspondent must, without hesitation report the abuses—from the artistic point of view—committed around him while endeavouring, however, to remedy them.' The correspondent was also instructed to go to certain conventions on behalf of the Union and to organize local events (especially for educating young people from 'different social classes'). How many correspondents actually fulfilled these obligations is uncertain but their involvement with the Union must have been extensive. Like the claim that Les Tendances Nouvelles could be found in 'all important libraries' everywhere (which seems unlikely since it cannot be found anywhere today), this conception of the Union's great international activity and the extensive participation of all its members may contain an element of wishful thinking. Nevertheless, one newspaper reported that by 1912 the group had 2000 members.²¹

Exhibiting the work of its members became the most important task of the Union, apart from publishing Les Tendances Nouvelles. The first official salon of the Union opened 1 August 1905 in Angers, with three nights of lectures followed by a banquet attended by Henri Rousseau.²²

In 1906, the Union did not hold an exhibition, but the manifestation of May 1907, called Le Musée du Peuple, was large; according to Gerôme-Maësse, the catalogue included 1244 entries!²³ This show (probably the most ambitious one) aspired to open culture to the masses and involved the whole range of the arts, including concerts and theatrical performances every night. This salon took place in Angers. The 1910 salon was held in Paris; Mondrain, Kollwitz, and Christian Rohlfs all participated, as members of the Union.²⁴ Another Paris salon took place in 1911 and still another was planned for 1914. It is not certain whether salons were held in 1908 and 1909, 1912 and 1913, or after; verification of such occurrences does not appear in the magazine; probably no such shows materialized.

In an article anticipating the opening of the Union's 1907 salon, Gerôme-Maësse outlined the Utopian notions behind the planning.²⁵ He talked of how workers as well as intellectuals would flock to the show, he spoke of reviving the natural alliance between artists and artisans, and he attacked the tasteless bourgeois patronage which was 'contemptuous' of artists. At the same time he looked to science in a similarly idealized way, much as Seurat and Kandinsky had done. In addition, he fantasized of ultimately building a permanent home for the Musée du Peuple in 'la grande Cité d'Art'.

The Musée du Peuple attracted considerable attention in Angers; the mayor gave a speech at the inauguration and at least three major regional newspapers covered the events of the Congress and salon. The specific contents of the exhibition—including Kandinsky's contribution—remain unclear since no copies of the catalogue appear to have survived, although one did exist; hence the newspaper accounts provide some of the most important information available. The articles in Le Pays Bleu indicate not only the local pride in this organization but the fact that a previous congrès of the Union had taken place there in 1905.

This congress suddenly places our town on a level with art centres like Lyon and Nancy. Without fear, artists send their works to Angers to be judged by an audience already educated (by the previous congress of 1905).²⁶

The review cites the side-by-side exhibition of paintings with applied art objects and the revival of wood engraving (a painstaking medium in danger of extinction), specifically mentioning that

The prodigious Russian engraver Kandinsky, of whose works we reproduce here The Lake and Siege, will exhibit about a hundred works—paintings and prints—in the place where in 1905 there were the nineteen large canvases of the Lyonnais Jacques Martin.²⁷

Other participants are also mentioned, sometimes with specific works; among them,

the famous painter Henri Rousseau whose canvases captivate all Paris. He will probably exhibit the canvas which was acquired at the last Salon d'Automne by the dealer Vollard. It is well known that this year at the Indépendants the crowds were so large in front of Rousseau's works that in order to see them better a step-ladder was provided, of which not even a fragment survived after a few hours of use.

Cézanne's canvases will be exhibited along with these works. We expect still other important entries.²⁸

This review also reported that theatrical performances would be given by actors from the theatres Antoine, Palais Royal, Odèon, and Grand Guignol and that an orchestra would play during intermission while people go through the exhibition. In the next issue Le Pays Bleu listed more contributors. The most important were: André Lhôte, Auguste Chabaud (provincial landscapes), and Julio Gonzales (Spanish).²⁹ The next issue provided still more names, and remarked on the exhibit of 'the complete work of Kandinsky, his wonderful wood engravings and his little canvases bursting with colour and reality'.³⁰

The works in Le Musée du Peuple were grouped by nationality and all the pictures by any one artist hung together, sectioned off, where possible, for greater intimacy in the display. The Union even encouraged artists to show photos of themselves or of their country to make their exhibit more personal. In addition, Le Musée du Peuple included a book fair, presentations of industrial arts and a special exhibition of small private art collections. Lectures or study groups discussed (1) the relation of artist and artisan, (2) 'the moral and material life of artists', (3) the creation of 'the city of art', including a free art school and artistic manufacturing, (4) 'the hygiene of intellectual work', and (5) scientific discoveries applicable to the arts.³¹

Having started out of Mérodack's own studio, the March 1905 issue of Les Tendances Nouvelles announced a new official address near the gallery district on the rive droite, 15 rue Rochechouart, where it remained until around 1910. At about the same time (March or April of 1905), Mérodack also founded L'Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts, des Lettres, des Sciences, et de l' Industrie under the official presidency of Paul Adam, Auguste Rodin and Vincent d'Indy.³² The composer Vincent d'Indy (teacher of Debussy, Erik Satie, and Edgard Varèse, among others) had close ties to the Nabis artists;³³ Rodin, of course, was among the most prominent artists of this period; and Paul Adam had a considerable reputation as a novelist. The three thus gave status to the organization in its three foremost areas of interest—music, literature, and the beaux-arts.

At this time, Le Gendre mysteriously disappeared from the masthead as co-editor; the editors of Les Tendances Nouvelles—the 'Official illustrated organ' of the Union—were then Alexis Mérodack-Jeaneau and Louis Leroy. Since the establishment of the Union, the inside cover of Les Tendances Nouvelles also began to carry a list of principal collaborators. In 1905, the list included philosophie d'art: Jules Breton, L.-M. Themanlys; critique d'art: Gustave Geoffroy, Gerôme-Maësse, Gustave Huë, Frantz Jourdain, Louis Leroy, Jean Levallière, M.L. Neau; 'correspondants à l'étranger': Belgique—G. Lemmen; Angleterre—Léon Morel. Beginning with the 15 April 1905 issue (no. 7), the inside cover carried a comité d'honneur. From then on a number of other important names began appearing, mostly as honorary directors rather than as correspondents. They included: Vibert, Albert Besnard, Eugène Carrière,³⁴ Georges Lecomte, Louis Majorelle, Roger-Marx, Comtesse de Noailles,³⁵ Emile Perrault, Paul Sebellieau, M. Goldberg, Louis Vauxelles; and in later years: Leo Tolstoy, Aimée Wilson (a correspondent from England who was involved in Theosophy and reviewed Kandinsky's 1907 Musée du Peuple show in the English press), Troubetzkoy, Monet, Renoir, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France,³⁶ and others.

The tone of Les Tendances Nouvelles did not change after the formation of the Union, although it occasionally became even more explicit in its social idealism and in its desire to connect science with art. Its contributors' interest in Neo-Impressionism, for example, arose from their imputation of scientific method to this style of painting;³⁷ they understood it as a Symbolist interpretation of Impressionism. Despite the Symbolist character of Les Tendances Nouvelles, its critics reviewed all the major French salons and a variety of gallery exhibitions—Symbolist and otherwise. From the beginning, they followed a large sample of important avant-garde artists, ranging from Sâr Peladan to Julio Gonzales, Friesz, Matisse, Rouault, and André Lhôte. Kandinsky woodcuts illustrate certain articles, and somewhat later Feininger occupied practically a whole issue.

In a series of issues, dating from 1910 to 1913, Les Tendances Nouvelles devoted much attention to the Futurists, reproducing a number of their works, publishing Marinetti's 'Futurist Discourse to the Venetians', excerpts from the 'Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting' and the introduction to the catalogue of the contemporaneous first Futurist Exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune (the essay was called 'The Exhibitors to the Public'), Boccioni's 'Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture', and Valentine de Saint-Point's 'Futurist Manifesto of Lust'. The editorial spokesman, Henry Breuil (anticipating a number of enraged readers who wrote letters for the next issue), stated that he did not understand what the Futurists were doing. However, Breuil explained, Les Tendances Nouvelles attempted to be as open as possible to new ideas, and perhaps history might one day prove that the Futurists have something.³⁸ Works by Diego Rivera, lie Nadelman, and Torres-Garcia appeared, the magazine carried original woodblocks and reproductions of paintings by Gabriele Münter, and Le Corbusier's article 'Étude sur le mouvement décoratif en Allemagne' (written under the name of Jeanneret) was serialized in the last issues.

Both the range of artists and writers and the variety of styles and theories represented in Les Tendances Nouvelles are striking. What becomes increasingly clear as one studies this document—and indeed the intellectual history of early twentieth-century Europe as a whole—is how much communication of ideas existed, and how freely individual artists cultivated and drew upon associations that cut across all national, stylistic, and philosophical boundaries.

Edgard Varèse, for example, studied at Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum (like Debussy and Erik Satie); he came to know Rodin at about the same time and even lived with him briefly at Meudon. Varèse was an old family friend of Julio Gonzales (who came to Paris in 1900) and, through the sculptor, he met Picasso, Max Jacob and others. When Varèse conceived his revolutionary Arcana using a kind of immaterial leitmotif—an idea more abstract than conventional melody, a pure sound realized through effects of orchestration—he doubtless utilized a wide spectrum of sources not only from his own discipline (like the repeated sequence of sounds in Erik Satie's Furniture Music), but also from literature or art, such as the Symbolist poets' use of the repeated word as pure sound, or the neutralized object used "in an analogous way in Maillol's sculpture or in Kandinsky's abstraction.³⁹

Whether or not these specific extramusical sources shaped Varèse's Arcana, this example demonstrates the breadth and formal unpredictability of the intellectual sources on which the great individual talents of the twentieth century could have drawn. Les Tendances Nouvelles underscores the inadequacy of approaching modern art solely in terms of 'schools', 'isms', or other closed concepts, by documenting the extraordinarily fluid exchange of ideas that animated the intellectual life of this period.

2. KANDINSKY'S RELATION WITH LES TENDANCES NOUVELLES AND ITS IMPACT ON HIS ART THEORY

On 1 June 1904, a full two years before Kandinsky purportedly made his first contact with advanced French art circles, he participated in the founding exhibition of the Parisian 'Groupe d'Art des Tendances Nouvelles'. Kandinsky contributed several pieces to their next Paris show in 1905, and in 1907 the group's salon (this time in Angers) featured Kandinsky, showing 109 of his works! Les Tendances Nouvelles reviewed Kandinsky's entries in other Paris shows, discussed his work in feature articles, and published in its pages nearly forty original woodcuts by him. In 1909, Les Tendances Nouvelles produced a portfolio of six of Kandinsky's wood engravings—called Xylographies—with an essay on his art by their chief writer, Gerôme-Maësse.

The first critical notice of Kandinsky's work written in Les Tendances Nouvelles was Gerôme-Maësse's October 1906 review of the Salon d'Automne, in which he refers to the works of Kandinsky, Friesz and others as interesting and promising.⁴⁰ Kandinsky's woodcut of the Russian Rider appeared on the cover of the Christmas 1906 issue and inside, on pages illustrated with Kandinsky woodcuts, Gerôme-Maësse published a lengthy article on 'Kandinsky, La Gravure sur Bois, l'Illustration'.⁴¹

This article commends Kandinsky's skilful revival of the wood engraving despite the trend towards mechanical processes which do not directly show the artist's hand. The critic praises Kandinsky's richness of design, his facility, and his 'extreme originality', which leaves the viewer 'with the impression of things appearing in a dream'. 'The light which emanates [from Kandinsky's paintings] is of a bizarre radiance' and 'their author appears something of a magician'. The dark grounds on which Kandinsky painted gave the spots of bright tempera a mysterious dazzling luminescence so that they appeared like little lights hovering over the surface of the picture. Gerôme-Maësse sensitively picked out this quality in his article of 1906, making him perhaps the first critic to recognize the remarkable, original qualities of Kandinsky's tempera painting. The critic went on to remark on the richness of content with which Kandinsky invests his subjects and his use of minute details to evoke multiple emotions. According to Gerôme-Maësse, Kandinsky marvellously refuted the 'contemporary' notion that 'detail doesn't exist'. He even comprehended Kandinsky's intrinsically mystic spiritual intentions—perhaps because they resembled his own.

His language is that of an initiate. His formula, at first sight disconcerting, contains, for one who explores it, a very expressive scheme of innumerable material appearances. As he studies in it the least reflections, as he appreciates in it all the correspondences with the higher self of the beings, the images, which he opens up to us under an impulse from the external world, admirably sum up for us his most cherished internal visions.⁴²

At the end of issue no. 26 (December 1906), the editor noted that the library of the Union⁴³ received five original woodcuts from Basile Kandinsky (as the French referred to him) and photographs of several other works. The next four issues (nos 27-30) also contained Kandinsky woodcuts, and in the last of these Gerôme-Maësse discussed at length Kandinsky's large display at the Union's 1907 Musée du Peuple exhibition:

... the numerous entries of the Russian Kandinsky . . . paintings, watercolours, and prints extend across a panel of a dozen metres in length . . . every exhibition of the Union permits two artists, new ones each time, to present their entire oeuvre to the public. .. . As varied as they are numerous, the works of Kandinsky unfailingly entice the spectator. They intrigue him, then they captivate him. If some derive from the school of Munich, they all, nevertheless, express the slavic soul and the least of them remains a delightful discovery. The artist who created his work of imagination is still more imaginative in technique. Do we know from what mysterious mixtures of pastes and copal-varnishes are born these unforgettable splendours of the orient? (fn. Unfortunately I must warn the artist against the temptation to continue in that manner, very beautiful but susceptible in a short time to making his painting crackle.) This very modern artist, couldn't he have been an ancient glass maker, an old ceramist, or tapestfy weaver? Here the clocktowers of his 'town' appear to me like multi-coloured glass beads blown up in fusion! The blues, the yellows, and such strong yellows! Mixed with the lacquers. In the foreground, brick red cabarets, eastern prelates in violet, mujiks in strong green; the teeming crowd of likewise multicoloured costumes; manifold colouration of the popular life. For we are far from the tedious and restrained painting behind which one always feels the rationality and the compass, which bores even the one who made it and which I will readily personify in the character of honest and rich bourgeois, certainly pretty, but of such limited spirit! The painting which occupies our attention [almost certainly Kandinsky's Buntes Leben] is expressive, seductive, aggressive and charming, sometimes exaggerated, volatile and often disquieting, but it absorbs us and stirs our emotions; it is the unfaithful mistress, it enchants us. One of the most remarkable aspects of the artist's talent is this: a wood engraver of incontestable quality, he is also a real painter of 'values'. And this breaks with custom. The whole world knows that the pictorial efforts of many of his most appreciated colleagues—I will only cite Vibert—are silently passed over. For even without counting his important paintings of which I have already spoken and his great watercolours handled according to the formula of the wood; with characters whose clothing and flesh burst forth in a fanfare from a dark background, Kandinsky exhibits a series of little oil studies of an extraordinary accuracy of vision.⁴⁴

No more Kandinsky woodcuts appeared in Les Tendances Nouvelles again until issue 34 (February 1908).⁴⁵Les Tendances Nouvelles published Kandinsky's print Belief in issue 35 at the end of the first installment of an article which Kandinsky later cited in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and in no. 36 two more prints appeared along with the second part of the article.⁴⁶

Issue no. 36 also contained Henry Breuil's review of the 1908 Salon des Indépendants in which he praised 'The Russian Basile Kandinsky' as an 'alluring and captivating artist'. He went on:

One has been able to evaluate a part of-his oeuvre this year in Les Tendances Nouvelles where they have pleased us greatly. I am a great admirer of his Promenade.⁴⁷ Since then he has made an evolution towards the dream, the chimera. In his vignettes he seeks the abstract forms, the curious lines of bewildering newness. He varies and over-elaborates his arabesques in spirals or cuts them out in jagged blacks on the white horizons. It is rich with ancient symbols; a whole cabalistic world sleeps in Kandinsky. This beautiful artist has already given much but as a visionary he goes on dreaming a new concept.⁴⁸

Breuil's description here and three issues later in his review of the 1908 Salon d'Automne displays a remarkable sensitivity to Kandinsky's intentions. His encouragement of the artist's 'search for the abstract' may even have spurred Kandinsky on in that direction. Yet perhaps Kandinsky also influenced Breuil. In the Salon d'Automne review Breuil describes

Four graphics by the indefatigable Basile Kandinsky, who wants to join line and sound with darks and lights as part of the wonderful enchantments of the total art which combines itself in a single expression: a quest for the unity of artistic conception, an unexplored and desired domain.⁴⁹

This terminology, the talk of total unity and the allusion to synaesthetic sound in the painting, resembles the words Kandinsky himself used to describe his goals:

We should struggle for form only as long as it serves as a means of expression for the inner sound.⁵⁰

In issue no. 40 of Les Tendances Nouvelles (February 1909) there were three Kandinsky woodcuts. Five photographic reproductions of paintings by Münter appeared in number 42 (probably June 1909) along with an article by Gerôme-Maësse which praises the charm of her work. This issue also announced a free weekly class in 'Rhythmic-gymnastics (method Jacques Dalcroze) aimed at the development of the rhythmic, musical sensibilities and of the body . . .' .⁵¹ Kandinsky's comrade from the Stuck studio, Alexander von Salzmann, went to work with Dalcroze at about this time (after several years at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris) and created a new mode of theatrical lighting which used the lights as an expressive medium in their own right⁵² Salzmann's lighting probably influenced Kandinsky's abstract concepts of light in his Gelbe Klang. Kandinsky noted the name of Jacques Dalcroze in a sketch book of around 1908,⁵³ and his friend Michael Sadleir went to see Dalcroze immediately after visiting Kandinsky in 1911, possibly at Kandinsky's suggestion.⁵⁴ Another Kandinsky woodcut showed up in issue no. 46,⁵⁵ and the last one appeared in issue no. 49, probably from November 1910.⁵⁶

The high point and most intriguing episode in Kandinsky's relations with Les Tendances Nouvelles was the featured exhibition of his works that the organization sponsored at its salon in the late spring of 1907. Nothing is known of what Kandinsky showed in the exhibition of May 1904 or at the salon in the summer of 1905. But we can reconstruct at least a partial list of his probable entries to the great exhibition of 1907, in Angers.

Le Journal de Maine et Loire carried notes on this exhibition, called the Musée du Peuple, in about half a dozen separate issues. It said little of Kandinsky, however, except to mention 'the curious notations of Kandinsky, the Russian with the mosaicist's vision, whose entries occupy a side of the hall'.⁵⁷ From this and the statement in Le Pays Bleu it seems that Kandinsky showed the full range of his work—the woodcuts the nature studies, and the mosaic-like, temperas.

When the Angevine daily, Le Patriote de l'Ouest, reviewed this show, it mentioned Kandinsky only briefly; but it was more specific.

The complete oeuvre of Basile Kandinsky (109 nos.). We note: Esquisse, Au bord de l'eau, Promenade à cheval, La confusion des races, Jour de fête, Accident, Cavaliers, Vers le soir, Venise, Mardi Gras, etc. The work of Kandinsky colourful and strong is one of the principal points of this congress.⁵⁸

Without the exhibition catalogue it is impossible to identify securely all 109 works shown by Kandinsky, but these newspaper accounts and Kandinsky's personal house catalogue do help to pinpoint some works. The artist's house catalogue contains numbered, chronological lists of paintings, small oil studies, coloured drawings and prints. It contains only about 50 paintings, 130 coloured drawings, 100 little oil studies and around 30 woodcuts done before the middle of 1907. Although incomplete, the catalogue gives some basic idea of the size of Kandinsky's oeuvre by 1907 and indicates that an exhibition of 109 of his works at that time cannot have left very much out.

Kandinsky himself noted that "certain works were shown at the Angers exhibition of May 1907:

⁵⁹ 'paintings' (both of 1907)—no. 46 Buntes Leben and no. 47 Esquisse; 'woodcuts'—no. 21 Der Speigel (R49), no. 22 Le Chasseur (R50), no. 23 Trompette (R51), and no. 24 Moine (R52). On the list of small oil studies (dating from 1901 to 1907) the first ten are bracketed and marked with the initials T.N.' Next to these entries, as well as those of most of the other studies (nos 1-10, 19-75, 78-83, 100 and 101) on this list, are prices in French francs, ranging from 125 to 225 Fr. Presumably these first ten works were shown at the Angers exhibition, and perhaps also some of the later ones which have French rather than German prices. These first ten works are: no. 1 Etudie, no. 2 Etudie, no. 3 Le parc d'Achtyrka, nos 4-8 Kochel, nos 9-10 Kallmunz.

The pictures referred to in the newspaper review seem to have been: the oil painting Esquisse (house catalogue, 'paintings', no. 47); Au bord de l'eau is probably Vers le Soir (Au bord de l'eau) (house catalogue, 'coloured drawings', no. 61) which Kandinsky later listed for sale through the mail order office of Les Tendances Nouvelles;⁶⁰Promenade à cheval—also listed for sale by order—may have been the tempera Reitendes Paar of 1903 (house catalogue, 'paintings', no. 20), which the artist noted as having been shown at 'Ste. Nat. B-A Ap. 1907', but as no Kandinskys were catalogued in the Paris Salon National des Beaux-Arts for 1907 this may have been a confusion of name, intending to indicate the salon of the Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts; La confusion des races is certainly the great tempera Buntes Leben (house catalogue, 'paintings', no. 46) which the artist clearly marked as having been at the Angers show; Jour de fête was probably the tempera picture Feirtag ('coloured drawings', no. 101); Accident was probably the 1906 painting Ereignis ('painting', no. 44, tempera); Cavaliers could be the Russian riders listed as 'coloured drawings', no. 85 in the house catalogue (the only picture titled Cavaliers), but as the critic of Le Patriote seems not to have been very exact about the titles (as with Buntes Leben, where the identification is relatively certain), this title could also have been a variation on Cavaliers arabes ('coloured drawings', no. 96); Vers le soir was almost certainly Cegen Abend ('coloured drawings', no. 98); Venise (probably 'coloured drawing', no. 119); and the house catalogue does not list anything under the title of Mardi Gras but the picture was probably Bal Masqué ('coloured drawing', no. 111) and this may have been the work reproduced in the Der Sturm album along with Mosquée ('coloured drawings', no. 71) and Arabische Reiterei ('coloured drawings', no. 96).⁶¹

Finally there is also a notation in the house catalogue, regarding a group of prints, which consist of a list of nine numbers and written beside it 'aus T. N. Paris'. The numbers clearly relate to the house catalogue numbers for the 'woodcuts'; they are 1, 2^b, 4, 6^b 7^b 8, 11, 12 and 14. Kandinsky used the small 'b' to indicate the coloured state of a print, hence this list consisted of Promenade (Rl), the coloured state of Abend (also called Dame mit Facher, R2). Sängerin, Die Nacht (a colour state of the large version, R6), a colour state of the large version of Abschied (R7), Einsame (also called Der Goldene Segel, R8), Wintertag (R34), Mondaufgang (R35), and Abenddämmerung (R37). This list does not correspond at all to the prints by Kandinsky which were published in Les Tendances Nouvelles (which also never printed any colour) and must have been designated this way in the house catalogue to signify that they had gone to the Tendances Nouvelles show. However, it may also be that these prints went to one of the earlier Tendances Nouvelles exhibitions of 1904 or 1905.

It seems likely that the original prints given to the library of Les Tendances Nouvelles at the end of 1906 and the works of which they received photographs at the same time must have figured in the show. Kandinsky may also have exhibited the prints published by Les Tendances Nouvelles up to that time, but as they were made (at least in one state) for publication in the review the artist considered them 'ex libris' rather than as 'woodcuts', and none of them appeared in his house catalogue. Lastly, there are also a few works in the house catalogue with exhibition notes that do not clearly indicate the Angers show but which—by the hurried inscription or minor confusion of names—could have been intended as such. Der Blaue Reiter ('paintings', no. 18) bears the inscription 'Paris mai, 1907'; this picture may well have been in the Angers exhibition. The catalogue of the Paris Salon National des Beaux-Arts has no indication of participation by Kandinsky at any time, however, the notation 'Ste. Nat. de B-A Av. 1907' follows the artist's entry for Reitendes Paar ('paintings', no. 20) and since the reviewer did cite a Promenade à cheval by Kandinsky which seems to have been this work, the annotation in the catalogue may have intended 'Internationale des B-A mai 1907', which would have designated the T.N. salon.⁶² 'Coloured drawing', no. 63, Der Fremde Stadt, simply has the name 'Paris' written after it; perhaps this too went to the 'Union's' salon.

Bringing together all the evidence and speculation above, the following 72 objects may be suggested as a partial list of Kandinsky's 109 entries into the 1907 show at the Musée du Peuple. They are:

'paintings'

18 Der Blaue Reiter 1903

20 Reitendes Paar 1903

27 Sonntag (Altrussisch) 1904

40 Ankunft der Kaufleute 1905

44 Ereignis 1906

46 Buntes Leben 1907

47 Esquisse 1907

'small oil studies'

1 Étudiç

2 Étudie

3 Le parc d'Achtyrka

4 Kochel

5 Kochel

6 Kochel

7 Kochel

8 Kochel

9 Kochel

10 Kochel

'coloured drawings'

7 Zwei Kampf

25 Gräner Vogel

29 Im Garten

31 Petite Ville Ancienne

37 Abschied

38 Am Strande

40 Sommertag

61 Gegen Abend

63 Der Fremde Stadt

68 Mühle (Holland)

79 Die Ammen

85 Cavaliers (Russe)

87 Une Rue de Tunis

96 Arabische Reiterei

98 Gegen Abend

101 Feiertag

111 Bal Masqué

119 Venedig

'woodcuts'

1 Promenade (Rl)

2 Abend (Dame mit Facher, R2)

4 Sängerin (R4)

6 Die Nacht (R6)

7 Abschied (R7)

8 Einsame (Das goldene Segel, R8)

11 Wintertag (R34)

12 Mondaufgang (R35)

14 Abenddämmerung (R37)

17 Herbst (R40)

18 Parc St. Cloud (R41)

21 Der Spiegel (R49)

22 Le Chasseur (R50)

23 Trompette (R51)

24 Moine (R52)

'ex libris'⁶³

R11 Schiffe

R12 Der Rhein

R13 Gegen Abend

R14 Rosen

R15 Gebirgsee

R16 Zuschauer

R17 Altes Stadtchen

R20 Abschied (small version)

R21 Die Nacht (small version)

R22 Zweikampf

R23 Die Jagd (small version)

R25 Ewigkeit

R26 Drei Köpfiger Drache

R28 Im Schlossgarten

R29 Der Reitende Ritter

R30 Belagerung

R31 Finsterer Abend

R44 Arabische Reiter

R45 Promenade Gracieuse

R46 Die Ammen

R48 Russische Reiter

R72 Springbrunnen

Kandinsky's participation in this exhibition and in the Tendances Nouvelles manifestations of 1904 and 1905 may account for the artist's entry of many pictures in his house catalogue with French rather than German titles.⁶⁴ Eight of them are already on the list above but there are nine coloured drawings and six prints which do not figure there: 'coloured drawings'—66. Marseille, 74. Interieur, 84. Reiter (Cheveaux arabes), 88. Fêtes des moutons, 93. Ruine, 110. Redoute, 120. Enterrement, 121. L'ours, 122. Scène; and 'woodcuts'—19. Printemps (R42), 20. Promenade Gracieuse (R43), 26. subtitled Noir et blanc no. 1 (R54), 27. subtitled Noir et blanc no. 2 (R55), 31. subtitled Noir et blanc no. 3 (R59), 32. subtitled Noir et blanc no. 4 (R60).⁶⁵

It may also be that the medals Kandinsky received at the 1904 'Exposition International de Paris' and the 'Grand Prix de l'Exposition Internationale de Paris'⁶⁶ were actually awarded by the 'Exposition' of the 'Union Internationale' (i.e. Les Tendances Nouvelles), held in Paris in 1904 and organized from the office of the magazine in Paris.

Les Tendances Nouvelles may also have provided an earlier and more influential source for Kandinsky's interest in the occult than his encounter with theosophy around 1908, although his Russian religious upbringing certainly disposed him towards mysticism long before. To cite one example, Le Journal de Maine et Loire reported that the Musée du Peuple sponsored two spiritualist lectures (excerpts from which were published in Les Tendances Nouvelles):

The commandant Darget, who has been a long time specialist in the study of spiritism, will speak about vital rays: photographs of thought, of feeling, of anger, of illnesses, of animal and plant fluids (80 projections will be made in all).⁶⁷

Kandinsky's involvement with Les Tendances Nouvelles was unquestionably deep, beginning 1904, peaking around May of 1907 and trailing off around 1909-10. No one knows how Kandinsky came into contact with Mérodack-Jeaneau; although they could have met via Sagot, who showed Mérodack's work in 1902 and Kandinsky's somewhat later. But the relationship between Mérodack and Kandinsky probably explains how Kandinsky found his way to a little, out-of-the-way hotel on the rue des Ursulines when he first arrived in Paris in May of 1906, since it stood just around the corner from Mérodack's studio. The connection to Les Tendances Nouvelles provided Kandinsky with substantial inroads into avant-garde French art circles—especially the Symbolist and Neo-Impressionist groups that spawned Fauvism. Like the Fauves, Kandinsky seems to have understood Neo-Impressionism as a visual embodiment of the Symbolist belief that colour and composition have laws of their own, independent of nature; thus he explored Neo-Impressionism as a vehicle for liberating colour.⁶⁸

Even though the artists around Les Tendances Nouvelles indirectly made a great long-term contribution to Kandinsky's development by opening his eyes to a more profound pictorial understanding of Neo-Impressionism (and Symbolism), Les Tendances Nouvelles influenced Kandinsky's art theory, in the most direct and specific sense, far more than his painting. Intellectually, Les Tendances Nouvelles shared and encouraged Kandinsky's Symbolist ambitions; it supplied specific vocabulary for his theories on artistic expression; and it provided the model for the application of his Utopian ideas about the artist and society.

Symbolism nurtured Kandinsky's interest in the analysis and 'scientific' application of his expressive means; his art of 'conscious construction' discussed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art and his 'science of art' still present in Point and Line to Plane expressed this poetic infatuation with science. Similarly, Mérodack-Jeaneau advocated the use of science in art and asserted that artistic innovators were always linked with scientists.⁶⁹ Various aspects of science fascinated many Symbolists. Maurice Denis advised: 'to achieve the absolute, go back to the intimate secret of nature, the number'.⁷⁰ A renewed interest in the golden section, and an apocryphal notion that Leonardo based his theories on it, also gained popularity among some Symbolists, Cubists, and others in the decade before the Great War. In music, the period produced Schenker analysis, which postulated that the expressive continuity in all great music from Bach to Brahms could be reduced systematically to a single type of musical structure. The Russian poet André Bièly, in an article for Zolotoe Runo (La Toison D'Or), applied mathematical formulas to aesthetics.⁷¹ Numerous other examples of this romanticized invocation of science might be cited.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky correlated specific colours with definite emotions.

Blue is the typical heavenly colour; the ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. (note: Supernatural rest, not the earthly contentment of green. The way to the supernatural lies through the natural. And we mortals passing from the earthly yellow to the heavenly blue must pass through green). When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. It becomes an infinite engrossment in solemn moods.⁷²

In the Blue Rider Almanac, Kandinsky discussed 'various specifically curved lines, which always make a certain internal impression; they too can be "happy", "sad", etc.'⁷³ These passages exemplify Kandinsky's systematic analysis, and they have a narrower genaeology passing from Symbolism and Neo-Impressionist theory to more specific ideas in Les Tendances Nouvelles.

Kandinsky's first theoretical writings appeared in 1911-12, but he had begun making his notes for Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1906-7 at the height of his involvement with this French group. In the foreword to the first edition of Concerning the Spiritual in Art (December 1911), the artist explained, 'The thoughts which I set forth here are the results of observations and experiences of feelings which gradually collected themselves in the course of the last five or six years'⁷⁴ (i.e. approximately 1906-11).

One of the quasi-scientific credos of Mérodack-Jeaneau's 'École Synthétique' was that it 'follows the theories which tend to prove the fundamental unity of matter, infinitely variable in appearance'.⁷⁵ This has both transcendental and scientific inspiration and provided an appealing 'substantiation' of the idea of the unity of all the arts, particularly the parallels between music and painting which recurred so often in Kandinsky's writings and in Tendances Nouvelles articles, of which one of the most important is the 1907 essay, 'L'Audition colorée' by Gerôme-Maësse. In it the author coined the term 'a musician of painting' and discussed what he regarded as the inextricable intermingling of all the arts in that period. After passing through a literary stage, painting now, according to the author, encroaches on music. He cited scientific experiments and other evidence of correspondences between colours and pains, sounds, tastes, words and even numbers. He also correlated colours with specific musical instruments, as Kandinsky later did in Concerning the Spiritual in Art⁷⁶—however, they are tentative and do not correspond exactly with Kandinsky's pairings. In addition, Gerôme-Maësse related the experience of a nineteenth-century pianist who experienced a constellation of colour and smell sensations while listening to a Schubert symphony:

The Aria in A-major, in the scherzo, is of a heat so sundrenched and of a green so tender, that, in hearing it, it seems to me to breathe the scent of young pine shoots.⁷⁷

This resembles Kandinsky's later account, in his 'Reminiscences', of a synaesthetic experience he had while listening to Lohengrin.⁷⁸ Gerôme-Maësse also assigned colours to certain geometric configurations—specific angles, arcs, rectangles, etc.—and to natural phenomena. However, Gerôme-Maësse concluded that even though the artist can get precious information from articles such as his or books like that of Chevreul, he does not advocate following external rules.

The true artist is a medium endowed with special faculties, and this gift, which supplies everything, remains his guide and his internal beacon.⁷⁹

Like some of the writers for Les Tendances Nouvelles, Kandinsky later expressed an idealistic sympathy for anarchy:

[A]narchy is regularity and order created not by an external and ultimately powerless force, but by the feeling for the good. Limits are set up here, too, but they must be internal limits and must replace external ones.⁸⁰

This coincides with the anti-materialism and the broadminded acceptance of a wide variety of styles strongly advocated both by Les Tendances Nouvelles and by Kandinsky. Kandinsky explained:

The absolute cannot be sought in the form (materialism). Form is temporal, i.e., relative. . . . Since form is only an expression of content, and content is different with different artists, it is clear that there may be many different forms at the same time that are equally good.⁸¹

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky described the artist as a kind of prophet who

always comes to the rescue—someone like ourselves in everything but with a secretly implanted power of 'vision' he sees and points out. This high gift (often a heavy burden) at times he would gladly relinquish. But he cannot. Scorned and disliked, he drags the heavy weight of resisting humanity forward and upward.⁸²

Three years earlier, in his speech at the opening of the Musée du Peuple, Mérodack-Jeaneau stated a similar view:

Disdainful of the mummified model as of a cumbersome fetish, artists assert their right finally to freely express their thoughts or their feelings and reclaim awareness of their true role, that of initiator of the masses of which they are the primordial force. For it is in effect—whether one likes it or not—under the sole direction of the artist that the industry of nations can efficiently and nobly develop itself.⁸³

In a later chapter of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky expounded on the processes by which these elevating transcendental insights are communicated. He explained that each colour evokes certain emotions through sympathetic 'vibrations'.

If you let your eye stray over a palette of colours, you experience two things. In the first place you receive a purely physical effect, namely the eye itself is enchanted by the beauty and other qualities of colour. You experience satisfaction and delight, like a gourmet savouring a delicacy. . . . But to a more sensitive soul the effect of colours is deeper and intensely moving. And so we come to the second result of looking at colours: their psychic effect. They produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the physical impression is of importance.⁸⁴

This concept and terminology seem to have come out of an important article in Les Tendances Nouvelles by Henri Rovel, to which Kandinsky referred in a footnote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.⁸⁵ Rovel's article, 'The Laws of Harmony for Painting and for Music are the Same', appeared in the spring of 1908, in issues 35 and 36 of Les Tendances Nouvelles. It argued, as the title implies, that aesthetic harmony has universal rules which do not vary from one art to another. He advanced the theory that perceptions result from 'vibrations'—as Kandinsky first stated some three years later in Concerning the Spiritual in Art—and Rovel hypothesized that sound and colour have different magnitudes of corresponding wave lengths and that the vibratory capacities of the human eye are sometimes so active that they 'tune-in' on sounds so as to produce synaesthesia. Rovel admitted—as did Kandinsky—that the scientific structuring of the visual arts had not as yet developed to the point where the rules of harmony can be as systematically applied as they can in music. Rovel explained:

The human being is one; all the sensations of harmony which he feels are the result of vibrations; consequently whether he perceives these sensations with his eyes or ears the laws which govern them are the same.

Now music is precise and the rules which permit the connection of sounds bringing them together in relationships to produce such and such a sensation, are perfectly understood. For painting, on the other hand, the apportionment of colour has no mathematic, . . . also he has never been able to establish the laws of harmony of colours which, however, I don't doubt are identical with those of sounds.⁸⁶

He then reproduced a scale of colour wave lengths (based on O. N. Rood's Modern Chromatics) and compared it to a chart showing the relative wave lengths of musical chords, with the suggestion that the C major chord may correspond to the relation of the colour wave lengths in the spectrum. He reviewed the literature—including Chevreul, Rood, Maxwell, Helmholz, Young, Boll and Kuhne—but concluded that their explanations were too complex. Instead, he offered the idea that perception may be reduced simply to vibrations and a dilation or contraction of retinal nerve endings to correspond to wave lengths.

Life is characterized by vibration. Without vibration there is no life. The entire world is subject to that law. Individually we form a whole; our organism is activated by a single motor, and following the more or less great perfection of that organism we are more or less capable of vibration and hence of feeling.⁸⁷

In the second instalment of his article, Rovel carried this concept even further. He stated that each individual has a personal 'coefficient' which codifies his personal 'vibrations' and that, in a given experience, if two people's vibration coefficients are multiples or in simple mathematical relation to one another—like 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, etc.—they will have a harmonious relation in their sensations. But if the ratios have numbers like '13' or '29' there will be discord. With numbers like '30' and '3 ' the relation would be very close but dominated by '30' and exhausting for '3. ' This, he claimed, clarifies why so many marriages start off happily but end badly. He stated that happiness corresponds to long vibrations and that individuals with coefficients like 7, 13, 17 and 19 are probably those we think of as having bad luck. These vibrations explain telepathy and, indeed, Rovel also believed that eventually physiologists would be able to bring people back to life with vibrations—like starting the pendulum of a clock again.

Three years later, when Kandinsky wrote of 'vibrations', the theories of Rovel had made a deep impression (as indeed they must also have impressed Mondrian, who was a member of the Union and probably saw this article). In the Blue Rider Almanac, Kandinsky declared that

When the artist finds the appropriate means, it is a material form of his soul's vibration, which he is forced to express. If the method is appropriate, it causes an almost identical vibration in the soul of the audience.⁸⁸

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky emphasized the paramount importance of the 'spiritual vibration' which colour produces,⁸⁹ and in another part of the Blue Rider Almanac he asserted, 'these vibrations and the plus arising from them will enrich his soul as no means other than art can do'.⁹⁰ Kandinsky also believed in the healing power of these vibrations and (like some writers in Les Tendances Nouvelles)⁹¹ he even expressed an explicit interest in chromotherapy.⁹²

Behind the aspirations for universality in Les Tendances Nouvelles lies a broad acceptance of many different approaches to making art. Similarly, Kandinsky also expressed the conviction that artists of many varied styles make a positive contribution in their own terms to the moral revaluation of society through art; and that they should join forces to show their work and to write their own theory and criticism for the purpose of furthering their common moral goal. Kandinsky advocated 'an intense co-operation among artists'⁹³ in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and in his essay 'On the Question of Form', in the Blue Rider Almanac, he said that the critic should help further the spiritual goals of art by concentrating its expressive aspect and trying to communicate this subjective expression poetically to his reader.⁹⁴

In many respects the Blue Rider Almanac fulfills the programme of Les Tendances Nouvelles. Kandinsky's earliest correspondence with Marc about his idea for the Blue Rider Almanac includes many of the basic tenets of Les Tendances Nouvelles: the notion of a periodical, written and edited by artists, with a chronicle of art events; articles concerning all the arts (including music and dance); the international scope; the interest in children's art and in the gifted amateur; the aspiration to make art directly available to the common man and through that to uplift society; and even the idea of the almanac as the official organ speaking for a world-wide 'Union' of artists with 'representatives' in other capitals. In his letter to Marc, 19 June 1911 Kandinsky announced:

Well, I have a new idea. Piper must be the publisher and the two of us the editors. A kind of almanac (yearbook) with reproductions and articles . . . and a chronicle!! that is, reports on exhibitions reviewed by artists, and artists alone.⁹⁵

Although the plan for the chronicle was eventually cancelled, they did invite a number of articles for it. On 1 September 1911 Kandinsky wrote to Marc making specific reference to ideas of a 'Union' with 'representatives':

. . . I for my part wrote to Hartmann, told him about our union, and bestowed on him the title of 'Authorized Representative for Russia'.⁹⁶

For Kandinsky, Les Tendances Nouvelles was the paradigm of an international periodical-exhibition society completely run by artists, and it appears to have been the direct inspiration for his concept of the Blue Rider. The Phalanx prefigured this aspiration, with its stylistically broad-minded exhibitions and school (which Les Tendances Nouvelles also had);⁹⁷ but it had nothing of the ambitious programme of publication and international dissemination of Les Tendances Nouvelles, nor the full participation of all branches of the arts, nor the more democratic quality of the French group's organization. The Neue Kunstlervereinigung had more feeling of the artists' co-operative, but, again, it was limited to fine art exhibitions. Certainly none of the major European salons or societies were at all similar to it; the Salon d'Automne was the closest, offering readings and concerts associated with the salons and establishing a kind of 'democratic' structure to its governance. Just as Neo-Impressionism (possibly via Les Tendances Nouvelles associates) provided Kandinsky with the stylistic direction for realizing his Symbolist expressive goals, Les Tendances Nouvelles gave him the model of a theoretical programme for carrying out his Utopian ambitions, in which the artist stood at the centre of the regeneration of society.

NOTES

Note: An unabridged facsimile of Les Tendances Nouvelles, along with a complete index of names contained in it, is forthcoming from Da Capo Press in August of 1979. Footnotes for general references to individuals or articles in the magazine have therefore been eliminated from this article, since this information is readily available in that index. Other notes to Les Tendances Nouvelles have been abbreviated as much as possible. In the introduction to the 1979 edition, I have discussed the chronology of the journal in detail. Briefly, the schedule seems to have been as follows: numbers 1 (May 1904), 2 (July 1904), 3 (October 1904), 4 (December 1904), 4 (February 1905), 6-25 (monthly from March 1905 through October 1906), 26 (December 1906), 27 (February 1907), 28 (March 1907), 29-46 (bimonthly from April 1907 through February 1910), 47-51 (quarterly from May 1910 through May 1911), 52 (December 1911), 53-63 (quarterly from February 1912 through August 1914).

¹ A. Plehn, 'The Struggle Against Pictorial Content', Die Kunst für Alle, xxi (February 1906), 229 ff.

²Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 2, 20-2.

³ Musée de I' Athenée, Mérodack-Jeaneau, exposition catalogue (introduction by Jean-Luc Daval), Genève (October 1969), 9.

⁴ He writes about such an incident with Marinetti in a letter to Gil Blas, entitled 'Chez les Artistes: Bombe, Elephant, Carafe; manifeste de Mérodak-Jeaneau'. From an undated clipping found among Mérodack's papers—presumably around 1912.

⁵ Mérodack-Jeaneau published statements in Gil Blas (23 June 1913), L'Angevine de Paris (28 April 1912) and elsewhere. The two most important were in the Revue de l'Anjou (Summer 1907, 510-13) and 'Le Synthétisme' (published privately in Paris, 11 January 1914, and also published in an unidentified newspaper clipping found among Mérodack's papers).

⁶Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 29, 525 ff.; and nos 30, 557 ff.

⁷ This speculation was confirmed by the second husband of Mérodack's wife. The only evidence to the contrary is a newspaper report (probably taken from a Tendances Nouvelles press release which Mérodack could have written) quoting from remarks of both Mérodack and Gerôme-Maësse supposedly delivered at the Congrès of 1905. See Le Journal de Maine et Loire (8 August 1905) and Le Patriote de l'Ouest (12 August 1905) reprinted in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 11, 165.

⁸Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 17, 259-60.

⁹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 1, 2.

¹⁰Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 1, 6.

¹¹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 2, 15.

¹²Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 6, 60.

¹³Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 30, 557.

¹⁴Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 40, 882. The woodcuts were R20, Rl, and R52 (these numbers refer to the graphic raisonnée: Roethel, Kandinsky, das graphische Werk, Cologne 1970); the 'Études' were probably small oil nature studies; the two less expensive paintings were probably listed in Kandinsky's house catalogue as 'coloured drawings', perhaps the first is no. 61 Vers le soir (au bordde la mer); and two major works—probably Reitendes Paar of 1903 ('paintings' no. 20) and Buntes Leben (certainly 'paintings' no. 46).

¹⁵Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 40, 863.

¹⁶Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 22, 353.

¹⁷Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 3, 26.

¹⁸Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 44, 993.

¹⁹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 17, 265.

²⁰ The golden bee (L'abeille d'or) was the Napoleonic emblem of work. The writers of Les Tendances Nouvelles repeatedly spoke of a desire to strengthen the ties between artists and the craftsmen who are their natural co-workers.

²¹ A newspaper clipping found among Mérodack's papers, source as yet unidentified.

²²Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 10, 146.

²³Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 30, 569.

²⁴Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 49, 1152-64.

²⁵Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 30, 525-7.

²⁶Le Pays Bleu, 3 e année, no. 16 (Angers, dimanche, 21 avril 1907), 1.

²⁷Le pays Bleu, 3^e année, no. 16 (Angers, dimanche, 21 avril 1907), 1. The two Kandinskys were Gebirgsee (R15) and Belagerung (R30), reproduced in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 7, 482 and 489. 'Le prodigieux graveur russe Kandinsky, dont nous reproduirons ici Le Lac et Le Siege, exposera une centaine d'oeuvres—pentres et gravures—à la place où etaient en 1905 les dix-neuf grandes toiles du Lyonnais Jacques Martin.'

²⁸Le Pays Bleu, 3^e année, no. 16 (Angers, dimanche, 21 avril 1907), 1. 'et le fameux peintre Henri Rousseau dont les toiles firent courir tout Paris. Il exposera probablement la toile qui fut acquise au dernier Salon d'Automne par le marchand Voland [sic]. On sait que cette année aux Indépendants le public etait tellement nombreux devant les oeuvres de Rousseau que pour mieux les voir il fut apporte des escabeaut dont il ne restait miette au bout de quelques heures.'A côté de ces oeuvres seront exposes des toiles de Cézanne. On attend encore d'autre importants envois.'

²⁹Le Pays Bleu, 3^e année, no. 17 (Angers, dimanche, 28 avril 1907).

³⁰Le Pays Bleu, 3^e année, no. 18 (Angers, dimanche, 5 mai 1907). 'L'oeuvre entière de Kandinsky, ses prodigieuses gravures sur bois et ses petites toiles debordantes de couleur et de realité.'

³¹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 29, 553-4.

³² Later issues state the founding date of the 'Union' as 26 April 1905; however, the 15 March 1905 issue is subtitled 'organe officiel illustré de l'Union des Beaux-Arts et des Lettres'. It may have come out of an existing organization with which Rodin and some others were already associated.

³³ See Agnès Humbert, Les Nabis et leur époque (Genève, 1954), 15.

³⁴ In L'Angevin, Neuvième année, no. 17, dimanche, 28 avril 1912, I; Mérodack-Jeaneau refers to his friendship and early encouragement by Carrière, Lautrec, and various critics.

³⁵ The Comtesse de Noailles was an extremely wealthy writer and patroness of the arts who lived part of the time at Fontainbleau.

³⁶ In Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 31, 607-9; Anatole France published an article on art education for children.

³⁷ See for example the article by Milesi on Neo-Impressionism (Tendances Nouvelles, no. 29, 537-9) where the author discusses the book by Gaetano Previati, Les principes scientifiques du divisionisme.

³⁸Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 58, 1295.

³⁹ With Maillol this involves his repetition of a single subject—his female nude—until it loses its narrative quality and takes on an abstract, evocative power like a sound. Kandinsky removes an object-reference so completely from a narrative context and blends it in with abstract colours and shapes to such an extent that it loses its objective identity. For a more detailed discussion of Kandinsky's concept of the neutralized object see: Jonathan Fineberg, 'Kandinsky's Prints: Jugendstil to Bauhaus', Art in America, May-June 1974, 96-7.

⁴⁰Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 25, 402.

⁴¹Les Tendances Nouvelles' no. 26, 436-8. The Kandinsky woodcuts reproduced in this issue are: cover and page 436—Chevalier russe (Russische Reiter, R48), back cover and page 437—Cavaliers arabes (Arabische Reiterei, R44), p. 439—La Promenade (R1), p. 441—Femme à Véventail (Dame mit Facher, R2), p. 444—Promenade gracieuse (R45), p. 445—Paysage (Ewigkeit, R24), p. 446—Le Soir obscur (Finsterer Abend, R31), p. 447—Les Nounous (Die Ammen, R46), listed in the table of contents but not actually reproduced—Femme au manchon (R3).

⁴²Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 26, 438.

⁴³Les Tendances Nouvelles, was the journal of L'Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts, des Lettres, de la Science, et de l'Industrie. For further details see 'The History and Character of Les Tendances Nouvelles', above.

⁴⁴Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 30, 560-1.

⁴⁵ In his raisonnée entries for the prints published in issues 30 and 34, Roethel incorrectly dates issues 30 and 34 and hence incorrectly dates the states of the prints in question. The correct dates are issue 30—June 1907 (not March) and issue 34—February 1908 (not July 1907). For a complete history of all prints by Kandinsky in Les Tendances Nouvelles consult the index to the 1979 edition.

⁴⁶ W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 67, fn. 1. He cites Henri Rovel, 'Les lois d'harmonie', which appeared in two parts in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 35, 721-3 and no. 36, 753-7. Roethel misdates both issues and hence this state of R27, R73 and R62.

⁴⁷ Rl, Kandinsky's earliest print. It may or may not have been in the 1908 Indépendants but it was published in the February 1907 issue of Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 27, 439.

⁴⁸Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 36, 747.

⁴⁹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 39, 835. The four Kandinsky woodcuts were: (nos 1037-40) Son des cordes (R53) Leier (Kandinsky noted this—house catalogue no. 25—as having been in the Automne of 1908), Grüne Frauen (R57), Zwei Mädchen (R63), Verfolgung (R64). Breuil also praises Gabriele Munter's seven entries.

⁵⁰ Kandinsky, 'On the Question of Form', in The Blue Rider Almanac, English translation edited by Klaus Lankheit, Viking, N.Y., 1974, 149. The original German reads: 'Und man sollte nicht langer um die Form kampfen, als sie zum Ausdrucksmittel des inneren Klanges dienen kann.'

⁵¹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 42, 942.

⁵² See Franz von Stuck, Katalog Stuck Villa, Munich, 1958, 114.

⁵³ Kandinsky, sketchbook GMS 328 (Stadtische Gal., Munich), 86. Erika Hanfstaengl dated this notebook 1908-10 in Erika Hanfstaengl, Wassily Kandinsky Zeichnungen und Aquarelle im Lenbachhaus Munchen, München, 1964, 148.

⁵⁴ The account is in Michael Sadleir, Michael Ernest Sadler 1861-1943: A Memoir by his Son, London, 1949, 243; cited in Peg Weiss, Wassily Kandinsky: The Formative Years, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse U., 1973, 323. Weiss suggested the idea that Kandinsky might be responsible and this evidence seems to strengthen her supposition.

⁵⁵Frauen im Wald (R60) in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 46, 1048. Roethel incorrectly dated this issue to 1909; it probably dates from February 1910.

⁵⁶Vogel (R65) in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 49, 1166. Roethel incorrectly dated this issue 1909.

⁵⁷Journal de Maine et Loire, Angers, 10 mai 1907, 3; 'les curieuses notations de Kandinsky, le Russe a la vision mosaïste, dont les envois occupent un côte de la salle'.

⁵⁸Le Patriote de l'Ouest, Angers, mercredi, 12 juin 1907, 2; 'Toute l'oeuvre de Basile Kandinsky (109 nos.). Notons: Esquisse, Au bord de l'eau, Promenades à cheval, La confusion des races, Jour de fête, Accident, Cavaliers, Vers le soir, Venise, Mardi gras, etc. L'Oeuvre de Kandinsky colorée et puissante est une des principales curiosites de ce congres.' The review also mentioned the names of Tarkhoff and Princesse Annina Gagarine-Stourdza as fellow exhibitors.

⁵⁹ After the work's title in the house catalogue the artist usually noted a number of exhibitions. In this case he designated the pictures by 'Angers v. 07'.

⁶⁰Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 40, 882.

⁶¹Kandinsky: 1901-1913, Der Sturm, Berlin, 1913, 25.

⁶² House catalogue, 'paintings', nos 41 (Stilles Wasser) and 42 (Die Rivallen), and 'coloured drawings', nos 11 (Ausflug zu Pferde), and 12 (Alte Zeiten) have the suffixed note Taris Exp. d B-A 15 xi. 05'. A similar circumstance may apply here; Kandinsky did not show in the Nationale but may have sent these to the 1905 salon of the 'Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts' in Angers, which may have occurred in the fall.

⁶³ The 'ex libris' prints published in Tendances Nouvelles after May 1907 have not been included on this list although they were done before the show and could have been included. They were: Der Drache (R18), Katze (R69), Sterne (R75), Glaube (R27), Der Schleier (R73), Ohne Bewegung (R62), Kirche (R55), Sitzende Mädchen (R67), Reiterin und Kind (R74), Frauen im Wald (R60), and Vogel (R65).

⁶⁴ Some of these may also have been in the 1907 exhibition. The list includes 'paintings', no. 47; 'coloured drawings', nos 66, 74, 79, 84, 85, 88, 93, 110, 111, 120, 121, 122; and 'woodcuts', nos 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32.

⁶⁵ 'Woodcuts', nos 26, 28, 31, and 32 appeared later in the Tendances Nouvelles Kandinsky portfolio 'Xylographies' but other prints (for example 34 (R62) Ohne Bewegung) which appeared there had no French subtitle in the house catalogue; Ohne Bewegung is captioned there as Schwarz-weiss No. 6.

⁶⁶ These were noted by Nina Kandinsky in 'La Vie de Kandinsky', in Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsky, Maeght, Paris, 1951, 118.

⁶⁷Journal de Maine et Loire, Angers, juin 5 1907. Excerpts from the speech reprinted in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 30, 575-6.

⁶⁸ I have discussed this at greater length in my unpublished doctoral dissertation, Kandinsky in Paris 1906-7, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1975.

⁶⁹ A. Mérodack-Jeaneau, 'L'Ecole Synthétique', Angevin de Paris, 28 April 1912, 1.

⁷⁰ Maurice Denis, Théories, Paris (4th edn), 1920, 32; ' . . . pour realiser l'absolu, reprend l'intime secret de la nature, le nombre'.

⁷¹ Andre Biély, 'le principe dans l'ésthetique', Zolotoë Runo (La Toison d'Or), no. 11, November-December 1906, 88.

⁷² W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 58-9. Geothe's colour theories probably had some influence on this formulation.

⁷³ Kandinsky, 'On the Question of Form', Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 165.

⁷⁴ Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, first edition, Munich 1911, Vorwort; 'Die Gedanken, die ich hier entwickle, sind Resultate von Beobachtungen und Gefuhlserfahrungen, die sich allmählich im Laufe der Letzten funf bis sechs Jahre sammelten.'

⁷⁵ A. Mérodack-Jeaneau, 'L'École Synthétique', Angevin de Paris, 28 April 1912, 1. 'L'école synthétique suivra les théories qui tendent a prouver l'unité fondamentale de la matière, variable d'aspect à l'infini.'

⁷⁶ Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 71. Also, L. Sababiev in his article for the Blue Rider Almanac, 'Scriabin's "Prometheus" ' cited another article of 1911 in which Scriabin correlated colours and musical notes (Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 131).

⁷⁷ Louis Ehlert, Lettres à une amie, Berlin, 1859, cited in Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 33, 658; 'L'Air en la majeur, dans le scherzo, est d'une chaleur si ensoleillée et d'un vert si tendre qu'il me semble, en l'entendant, respirer la senteur des jeunes pousses de sapin.'

⁷⁸ Kandinsky, 'Reminiscences', in R. Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, N.J., 1964, 26.

⁷⁹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 33, 663.

⁸⁰ W. Kandinsky, 'On the Question of Form', Blue Rider Almanac, English translation, N.Y., 1974, 157.

⁸¹ W. Kandinsky, 'On the Question of Form', Blue Rider Almanac, 1974, 149-50.

⁸² Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 26.

⁸³ Speech by Mérodack-Jeaneau at the inaugural of the Musée du Peuple reported in Revue de L'Anjou, 1907, 510-14; 'Dedaigneux du modèle momifié comme d'un fetiche encombrant, des artistes, revendiquent leur droit d'exprimer enfin librement leurs pensées ou leurs sensations et reprennent conscience de leur role veritable, celui d'initiateur de la foule, dont ils sont la force primordiale. Car, c'est en effet—qu'on le veuille ou non—sous la seul direction de l'artiste que peut efficacement et noblement se développer l'industrie des nations.'

⁸⁴ W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 43-4. The text has been amended here, translating the German 'psychisch' as 'psychic' instead of 'psychological'.

⁸⁵ W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 67.

⁸⁶Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 35, 721.

⁸⁷Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 35, 727.

⁸⁸ Kandinsky, 'On Stage Composition', Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 191.

⁸⁹ Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 44.

⁹⁰ Kandinsky, On the Question of Form', Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 186. Einfühlungstheorie (Empathy theory) also emphasized an instantaneous projection of emotion and sensation but it did not offer this mystic explanation of vibrations nor was it overtly messianic and moralistic in its ambitions as Rovel and Kandinsky were.

⁹¹Les Tendances Nouvelles, no. 44, 1003-4.

⁹² W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 45; 'Those who have heard of chromotherapy know that coloured light can influence the whole body. Attempts have been made with different colours to treat various nervous ailments. Red light stimulates and excites the heart, while blue light can cause temporary paralysis.'

⁹³ Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, N.Y., 1947, 26.

⁹⁴ Kandinsky, On the Question of Form', Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 171.

⁹⁵ K. Lankheit, 'A History of the Almanac', Blue Rider Almanac, N.Y., 1974, 15.

96 K. Lankheit, 'A History of the Almanac', Blue Rider Almanac, 1974, 16: in the German letter he uses the word 'Union' and 'Bevollmachtigten Mitarbeiters für Russland'.

⁹⁷ The 'Union' may also have asked Kandinsky to teach at a school set up by Les Tendances Nouvelles. Johannes Eichner, Wassily Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter, Munich, 1957, 86; 'Die Tendances Nouvelles boten ihm 1907 "eine Klasse der Schule der Union" unter gunstigen Bedingungen an.'