More deliberately than any artist of our time, Kandinsky explored the spiritual in art through his work as a painter and through writings—articulate, generous, impassioned—which circulated the idea of the spiritual more widely than his paintings ever did. It was his central idea, and he regarded it as the central idea of the art emerging all around him in 1912 when his small masterpiece, On the Spiritual in Art, was first published. In his eyes the spiritual was also the emerging task of the twentieth century, which he thought destined to correct the materialism of nineteenth-century culture. His prewar work as a painter and printmaker may not fully demonstrate for all viewers the vision captured in his writings, but he was prompt to recognize that art had only begun to find its way along a new path. His early writings need to be sifted for ideas that have stood the test of time and even gained in substance. But Kandinsky does not disappoint at the conclusion of this process. Some of his art is very beautiful, and much of his thinking.¹

Born in Moscow in 1866 in comfortable circumstances, schooled in Odessa and at the University of Moscow, Kandinsky abandoned a promising career in law at age thirty to study painting in Munich, to which he moved in 1896. In a graceful autobiographical essay, "Reminiscences," he evoked a childhood and adolescence filled with precursor experiences that marked him as a born artist.

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time—or better: the experience of the color coming out of the tube—is with me to this day. A pressure of the fingers and jubilant, joyous, thoughtful, dreamy, self-absorbed, with deep seriousness, with bubbling roguishness, with the sigh of liberation, with the profound resonance of sorrow, with defiant power and resistance, with yielding softness and devotion, with stubborn self-control, with sensitive unstableness of balance came one after another these unique beings we call colors. . . . 2

It is a splendid passage—and notification to us here in the cynical residue of the century that we are attending to a Romantic from its flower-fresh debut.

"Reminiscences" chronicles Kandinsky's groping evolution from a richly decorative pictorial world, in which knights and their ladies were at home, to a fully abstract visual language such as the world had never seen. Arguably the father of abstraction, which was to become a dominant visual language of our time, he was an observer and born teacher; hence the extraordinary record he kept and the ease with which he assumed leadership in the world of art. In his journey from depicting known objects to the discovery of pure abstraction, perhaps most important for him was the realization that painting need not attempt to imitate the grandeur of Nature. It can conjure up a world of its own, prompted only by the artist's sense of "inner necessity." In a striking passage in "Reminiscences," he related this discovery to his conviction that humanity had reached the threshold of a new age.

For many . . . years . . . , I was like a monkey in a net: the organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these "walls around art." Thus did I finally enter the realm of art, which like that of nature, science, political forms, etc., is a realm unto itself, is governed by its own laws proper to it alone, and which together with the other realms ultimately forms the great realm which we can only dimly divine.

Today is the great day of one of the revelations of this world. The interrelationships of these individual realms were illumined as by a flash of lightning; they burst unexpected, frightening, and joyous out of the darkness. Never were they so strongly tied together and never so sharply divided. This lightning is the child of the darkening of the spiritual heaven which hung over us, black, suffocating, and dead. Here begins the epoch of the spiritual, the revelation of the spirit. Father—Son—Holy Spirit.³

How did Kandinsky understand the spiritual in art, in these years before World War I when he made his greatest contributions as a thinker? The answer to this question lies for the most part in the pages of On the Spiritual in Art. He shows there that he had no doubt about the crucial role of the guide ("a man like the rest of us in every way, but who conceals within himself the secret, inborn power of 'vision'").⁴ He had personally responded to the guiding influence of Theosophy and Steiner and became in turn a guiding influence in the world of art. He shucked off the paralyzing notion that he himself might be a "great initiate" by reasoning that some artists stand in a special relation to inspiring guides, better able to hear them, more quick to respond. The voice of Moses, he wrote, inaudible to the crowd dancing around the Golden Calf, "is heard first by the artist. At first unconsciously, without knowing it, he follows the call."⁵

Apart from the inspiration of a Moses, a teacher, Kandinsky found value in contemplative watchfulness, guided from within by what he insistently called "inner necessity." This watchfulness, not a physical listening but similarly receptive, led in his experience to awareness of the "inner sound" of each thing, be it a color on the palette, a composition on canvas, or an object in the world. "Inner necessity" within the human being and the "inner sound" of all things are the complementary realities that showed him the way to abstract art.

. . . It must become possible to hear the whole world as it is without representational interpretation. . . . Abstract forms (lines, planes, dots, etc.) are not important in themselves, but only their inner sound, their life. . . .

The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually active beings. Even dead matter is living spirit.⁶

The concluding sentence, more than any passage in his writings, is his credo—Romantic, to be sure, but clean in its affirmation and never betrayed in his art.

The ideas of inner necessity and the inner sound, expressed by Kandinsky in what may seem old-fashioned terms, deserve a restorer's attention. They are in fact powerful ideas, more ancient by far than the early twentieth century and important to creative people in any era. The idea of inner necessity was cast into Western tradition by Socrates, who spoke of the guiding daimon within that arrested him at the edge of a misstep and plunged him into thought while others moved on. "I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience . . . a sort of voice which comes to me."⁷ He could only obey. This was internal necessity at work. "Internal necessity," wrote Kandinsky, "which might be called honesty"⁸—of the most demanding kind, obliging the artist to search, to wait, to pay close attention.

[The artist's] eyes should be always directed to his own inner life, and his ears turned to the voice of internal necessity. Then he will seize upon all permitted means and just as easily upon all forbidden means. This is the only way of giving expression to mystical necessity.⁹

He speaks here of a discipline, and speaks with the freshness of rediscovery. Kandinsky rediscovered art as a way austere in method yet potentially ecstatic and liberating in its results. In his experience, attention to the inner life promises to free the artist from superficial self-centeredness:

. . . The artist works not to earn praise and admiration, or to avoid blame and hatred, but rather obeys that categorically imperative voice, which is the voice of the Lord, before whom he must humble himself and whose servant he is.¹⁰

The concept of the inner sound of all things is found among the earliest recorded instructions to artists in Chinese tradition. The first of the Six Canons of Hsieh Ho reads "Spirit Resonance, which means vitality," in the Bush-Shih translation of ch'i-yün-sheng-tung.¹¹ Gnomic words translated in various ways over the years, they clearly call on artists to attend to ch'i-yün, "spirit resonance," and it isn't stretching matters to recognize in this phrase Kandinsky's "inner sound." The eye defines, searching and poking among things, while the ear tends toward greater breadth and more constant openness. Hearing is less "material," telling us not how things appear but what vibration they emit. The ear reports on the invisible. This difference between eye and ear confers metaphorical power on hearing. To perceive the "inner sound" is to make use of eyes as if they were ears. Kandinsky's rather mystical expression in fact summons artists to a practical discipline of perception which does not ignore details but cannot rest until it apprehends the fine intrinsic signature of each phenomenon.

On the Spiritual in Art remains the largest fragment of the still incomplete whole of twentieth-century thought on the theme. Establishing Kandinsky as a central figure in the world of the avant-garde, it attempted to gather up many aspects of his own experience and that of artists around him. Liberal in praise of others, it speaks sincerely to the general condition without boosting its author's merit before a general public that still hardly knew or valued his art. Its essential achievement was to identify the new art as a legitimate language of the spirit and to lay groundwork for a way of thinking, particularly about abstract art, that made sense.

The key element in Kandinsky's reading of the historical moment was his conviction that a spiritual awakening had begun and would make its way in spite of dramatic clashes within individuals and the culture at large. Shared with other artists of his generation, Piet Mondrian and Franz Marc among them, his intuition of a general change in the quality of life and persons would be betrayed by later events many times over, but its force of sincerity at the time cannot be overestimated. The damnable nineteenth century was giving way. "Only just now awakening after years of materialism," wrote Kandinsky,

our soul is infected with the despair born of unbelief, of lack of purpose and aim. The nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game, is not yet passed; it still darkens the awakening soul. Only a feeble light glimmers, a tiny point in the immense circle of darkness. This light is but a presentiment; and the mind, seeing it, trembles in doubt over whether the light is a dream and the surrounding darkness indeed reality. . . . Our soul rings cracked when we sound it, like a precious vase, dug out of the earth, which has a flaw. . . . The soul is emerging, refined by struggle and suffering. Cruder emotions like fear, joy, and grief, which belonged to this time of trial, will no longer attract the artist. He will attempt to arouse more refined emotions, as yet unnamed. Just as he will live a complicated and subtle life, so his work will give to those observers capable of feeling them emotions subtle beyond words.¹²

No doubt, many readers will be put off by the excesses of this passage—its tendency to confuse autobiography with history, hope with necessity. On the other hand, passion of this kind is essential in human affairs; it is the passion of a good man dreaming. Creative people often call out the names of things loudly, like Adam, to confirm their existence. Kandinsky is doing magic in this passage, not scholarship, incantation rather than cogitation, and he keeps his dignity as he does so. His concluding reference to "refined emotions, as yet unnamed . . . subtle beyond words" within lives subtle and complicated, is quintessential Kandinsky; he could be a prophet of the inner life because he had an inner life, pressing on him.

He had a scholar's temperament as well. In On the Spiritual in Art and other publications, he regularly took note of other artists' work, provided pocket analyses, and allied the best in them to his presentiment of emerging spiritual vision. Of Cézanne, for example, whom he described as "a great seeker after a new sense of form," Kandinsky wrote that "he was endowed with the gift of divining the internal life in everything." Wary of Matisse's charm, Kandinsky nonetheless perceived enormous value in his work:

He paints "pictures," and in these "pictures" endeavors to render the divine. To attain this end he requires nothing but the subject to be painted . . . and means that belong to painting alone. . . .¹³

In this brief appraisal, Kandinsky implies the aversion to organized religion and conventional sacred imagery true of most twentieth-century artists who cared for the spiritual at all. Some would try "to attain this end"; few would rely on tradition. Artists were asking the materials of art itself, approached with few certainties apart from "inner necessity" and the answering "inner sound," to reveal what religion no longer revealed.

It is worth remembering that many of the opinions Kandinsky offered in his book were extraordinarily prescient. The year was 1912, much of the book was written in 1910, and yet he already knew much:

Matisse—color. Picasso—form. Two great signposts pointing toward a great end.¹⁴

He labored patiently in On the Spiritual in Art—sometimes wisely, sometimes with what now seems a wobbly, subjective method—to develop a new art theory that would allow reasoning about abstract and near-abstract form. His ideas about composition were prescient: in one swoop he recognized how to think about forms in art that modify or depart altogether from forms in Nature.

The flexibility of each form, its internal, organic variation, its direction (motion) in the picture, the relative weight of concrete or of abstract forms and their combination; further, the discord or concord of the various elements of a pictorial structure, the handling of groups, the combination of the hidden and the stripped bare, the use of rhythmical or unrhythmical, of geometrical or nongeometrical forms, their contiguity or separation—all these things are the elements of structure in drawing.¹⁵

Thinking of this kind moved on to the Bauhaus and later schools and evolved into a reasonably standard approach to compositional analysis not only in the fine arts but also in commercial design.

Color, about which Kandinsky cared so much, was more resistant to hard-headed analysis. Not that he didn't try. He was conversant with classical nineteenth-century color theory as well as fringe experiments ranging from medical chromotherapy to the Theosophists' clairvoyant studies. The challenge was to account for his own extreme sensitivity to color and to find a way of reasoning about color as an element of the spiritual in art. As always, he drew from the notion of the evolution of consciousness, relayed to him from Hindu and Buddhist sources largely by Theosophy. He did not expect much of the "average man"—and did expect much of the developed man.

Only with higher development does the circle of experience of different beings and objects grow wider. Only in the highest development do they acquire an internal meaning and an inner resonance. It is the same with color. . . .¹⁶

Building on established color theory but rapidly departing from it, Kandinsky found himself expressing the impact of color in poetic and metaphorical terms. For example, "The unbounded warmth of red has not the irresponsible appeal of yellow, but rings inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity."¹⁷ Such observations do not add up to a science, but they bear witness to brave effort, providing a rudimentary grammar of color in itself apart from forms in Nature. At the conclusion of the exercise he himself was not fully persuaded, but his general sense of direction hadn't failed him. Toward the end of On the Spiritual in Art, he could return to fundamentals with great simplicity:

Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business, and at first seemingly blind and unmethodical. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colors in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.¹⁸

The other great literary effort of this period in his life, The Blaue Reiter Almanac (Munich, 1912) represented a further attempt to explain and celebrate the new orientation of art, not only in painting and sculpture but also in music and theater. It was the first "textbook" on twentieth-century art. Serving as an author and as coeditor with his friend Franz Marc (1880-1916), Kandinsky anthologized the works and ideas of many of the founders of the new art, together with illustrations from the ancient, tribal, and folk arts from which they drew inspiration. The message of The Blaue Reiter Almanac, parts of it delivered most attractively by Franz Marc, was consistent with that of On the Spiritual in Art: humanity was entering upon a new spiritual adventure to which artists had much to contribute. The new art, far from capitulating to the forces of materialism and academic convention, would renew the spiritual in grand, partially unforeseeable ways. Already, wrote Marc about certain artists featured in the anthology,

their thinking has a different aim: to create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion. . . .¹⁹

He enlarged on this striking thought in his introduction to the second edition of The Blaue Reiter Almanac, published in 1914, two years before he lost his life in the war:

We know that everything could be destroyed if the beginnings of a spiritual discipline are not protected from the greed and dishonesty of the masses. We are struggling for pure ideas, for a world in which pure ideas can be thought and proclaimed without becoming impure. Only then will we or others who are more talented be able to show the other face of the Janus head, which today is still hidden and turns its gaze away from the times.

We admire the disciples of early Christianity who found the strength for inner stillness amid the roaring noise of their time. For this stillness we pray and strive every hour.²⁰

"The other face of the Janus head" remains a powerful image, implying a reserve of love, sensibility, and artistry. Franz Marc himself embodied his feeling for life in visionary paintings of horses and other creatures that stand apart from human violence. He was, one might say, a Nature mystic—in any case a man of great sweetness and intellectual capacity who recognized in animals an innocence something like his own.

Kandinsky's art in the years of On the Spiritual in Art has been studied in detail by gifted, persevering art historians.²¹ I will not attempt to summarize the research of Ringbom, Washton Long, Peg Weiss, H. K. Roethel, and others. It may seem something of an indecency that an artist of our own time has required such extensive interpretation; common sense whispers that a near-contemporary should be more transparent. On the other hand, in creating his first partially (and soon fully) abstract works, Kandinsky moved into an ambiguous imaginative world. Not quite willing to abandon all reference to real objects and familiar ideas, he often dissolved objects in his paintings so that, as he once put it, they could not be immediately recognized.²² Scholars have naturally been drawn to provide interpretive keys, and their work has been both necessary and effective.

The fully abstract works of these years, such as the especially beautiful Black Lines of 1913, can be approached without fear of misperceiving hidden imagery. Such works swirl. Seemingly suspended in turbulent liquid, broad color patches and a nervous linear network stream freely across the canvas—colliding, blending, moving on. The viewer looks in vain for the classical elements of composition, finds instead a passionate clash of color and abstract form, a dominant mood, and in time a theme that can be more or less clearly stated. Black Lines resolves into a combat between the positive, joyful energies of color and the scratchy, threatening overlay of lines. The painting surely conveys Kandinsky's experience of positive energies rising and dark energies subverting their expansion in a struggle between joy and constraint.

Is this the height of the spiritual in art? The inspiration, the sense of impending greatness, the untiring insistence on spirit in Kandinsky's Munich writings are not quite matched by the art of those years. Kandinsky's passion to break free and soar seemed unable to tolerate a more deliberate order in the world of his paintings. In these earlier years, he had broken down the old order of pictorial signs but had not yet evolved a new order. Obeying his sense of inner necessity, he brought brilliant color and dynamic interactions to the canvas—in a somewhat melted, unstructured visual language. In time this would change. In the art of his Bauhaus years, the 1920s and early 1930s, we will encounter more fully realized work in which Kandinsky's love of color and movement is contained but not constrained by geometric forms.

Yet in the years before World War I Kandinsky discovered and explored much of the pictorial vocabulary that would reappear in the late 1940s as Abstract Expressionism. The Munich works were intensely original, while the Bauhaus works were derivative of the art of Russian colleagues whom Kandinsky came to know in the early years of the Revolution. The Bauhaus works nonetheless represent his artistic maturity, if maturity means a mobile balance between passion and reason, impulse and restraint. Kandinsky, author and thinker, matured earlier than Kandinsky, painter, although the passionate turmoil in his early paintings exerted a great influence on the future.

"In the final analysis," he wrote in 1912,

every serious work is tranquil. . . . Every serious work resembles in poise the quiet phrase, "I am here." Like or dislike for the work evaporates; but the sound of that phrase is eternal.²³

Here again is the voice of his early writings, which in their great passages have lost none of their appeal. In those writings, Kandinsky conveyed many of the ideas that inevitably govern and nourish the spiritual in art—ideas about human consciousness and the inner life, about the obvious and subtle in Nature, about the artist's discipline as seer and technician. To all of this he gave a new voice, sometimes Romantic and of its age, sometimes echoing the timeless affirmation, "I am here."

NOTES

¹ Major Kandinsky bibliography includes listings under his name in the bibliography, as well as Bowlt/Washton Long (1984), Guggenheim Museum (1972), Herbert ( 1964), LA Catalogue, Poling (1983), Ringbom (1970), Rudenstine (1976), Washton Long (1980), Weiss (1979), and the publications of Hans Konrad Roethel.

² Herbert (1964), 34

³ Herbert (1964), 38-39. Ringbom (1970) explains that the epoch of the great spiritual was associated in Kandinsky's thought with a new revelation of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

⁴ Kandinsky CW, 131

⁵ Kandinsky CW, 137

⁶ Kandinsky/Marc (1974), 164-65, 173 (italics in original)

⁷ Plato, Apology 31D

⁸ Kandinsky (1974), 74n; cf. Kandinsky CW, 211n. The 1947 translation of On the Spiritual, while surely less accurate in places, is often more polished than the version in Kandinsky CW. It is also the voice of Kandinsky heard in English for many decades, given that the 1947 translation was a revision of the original 1914 version. Where I quote the 1947 translation, as here, the note gives the corresponding pages in Kandinsky CW.

⁹ Kandinsky CW, 175-76

¹⁰ Kandinsky CW, 400. Kandinsky's reference to the categorical imperative recalls Kantian ethics, evoked here to shed light on inner necessity, which Kandinsky took to be the heart of the artist's ethic.

¹¹ Bush/Shin (1985), 40; cf. 10-17, 39

¹² Kandinsky (1947), 39; cf. Kandinsky CW, 152

¹³ Kandinsky (1947), 36-39; cf. Kandinsky CW, 151-52

¹⁴ Kandinsky (1947), 39; cf. Kandinsky CW, 152

¹⁵ Kandinsky (1947), 51; cf. Kandinsky CW, 171

¹⁶ Kandinsky (1947), 44; cf. Kandinsky CW, 157

¹⁷ Kandinsky (1947), 61; cf. Kandinsky CW, 186

¹⁸ Kandinsky (1947), 67; cf. Kandinsky CW, 197

¹⁹ Kandinsky/Marc (1974), 64

²⁰ Kandinsky/Marc (1974), 259

²¹ See Washton Long (1980)

²² Kandinsky CW, 396

²³ Kandinsky (1947), 77n; cf. Kandinsky CW, 218