SOURCE: "Vassily Kandinsky: Art With No Object, 1911-1912," in The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 303-20.

The tall, narrow roofs of the Promenadenplatz and Maximiliansplatz, which have now disappeared, the old part of Schwabing, and especially the Au, which I discovered by chance on one occasion, turned these fairy-tales into reality. The blue trams threaded their way through the streets like an incarnation of the air of a fairy-story, which one inhales with delightful ease. The yellow mailboxes sang their shrill, canary-yellow song from the street corners. I welcomed the label "art-mill," and felt I was in the city of art, which for me was the same as being in fairyland.

—Vassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences"

The city was Munich, the capital of the southern German state of Bavaria. The artist was Vassily Kandinsky, who in 1911 was living and working in Munich's bohemian suburb of Schwabing. His studio at number 36 Ainmiller Street was a whirlpool of activity, and 1911 was to be his annus mirabilis. During the twelve months of his forty-fifth year, Kandinsky was to paint a dozen major paintings, together with innumerable studies and sketches, and show his work in four cities in three countries. In addition, he would publish two articles and a germinal book on the theory of modern art, edit a second book bringing most of the important central European voices in the arts together for the first time, and lead in the planning and execution of an international exhibition that is still considered one of the two most important group shows in the early history of modern art. A final divorce decree would end his first marriage halfway through 1911. Finally, somewhere along the way, Kandinsky would paint one of the first pictures ever to deserve the designation "abstract," "nonobjective," or "nonrepresentational" art.

Kandinsky's marvelous year began when he went to a New Year's party at the home of another pair of Munich artists, and went on with them to a concert of works by a new composer, Arnold Schoenberg. One of the out-of-town guests was a painter named Franz Marc, who there began his lifelong friendship with Kandinsky. Within a month Marc was writing that the "hours spent with [Kandinsky] belong to my most memorable experiences."

My initial response is to feel the great joy of his powerful, pure, fiery colors, and then my brain starts working; you can't get away from these pictures and you feel your head will burst if you want to savor them to the full. .. .¹

The maker of these mind-blowing pictures had a mustache, a sharply pointed black beard, and mephistophelean almond eyes behind thick glasses. Kandinsky's housemate, Gabriele Münter, an excellent painter herself, had already made several small portraits of him in which the professorial rumple was set off by an unfathomable reserve and an oddly authoritative, almost prophetic gravity. He was quite sure of what he was doing. He was so assured, in fact, that whenever his fellow artists got together they elected Kandinsky to run the show for them. The fact that he had a bit of an independent income helped. In 1909 the Schwabing avant garde had responded to his call to found ah exhibiting society, the New Artists Organization of Munich (NKVM), and promptly elected him president. In that capacity he had mounted a show in the fall of 1910 that for the first time brought work by the French cubists and the new Russian painters to Germany. Kandinsky was Russian himself, a Muscovite, and half the NKVM was Russian too. They had come to Munich to study art, and having studied it, had stayed.

Munich was yeasty with cultural pioneers. The journals Simplicissimus and Jugend (Youth), together with their art-nouveau style called Jugendstil, had begun there. The Eleven Executioners cabaret, one of the first outside of Paris, had been in Munich since 1900, and the playwright Frank Wedekind was part of it. Thomas Mann wrote stories there, and Stefan George wrote poems. But it was the artists, and especially the painters, who were the yeastiest of all. Munich was home to several hundred thousand people, and at times it seemed half of them were artists. Many had come from rather faraway places, like Pittsburgh, Glasgow, and Odessa. At least one Munich art show in 1869 had attracted 100,000 visitors, more than 60 percent of its 1869 population. 2 Munich's Glyptothek was the oldest public museum in Central Europe, and its Neue Pinakothek had been the only German public collection of contemporary art until the 1890s. There was a third museum for art that was neither Antique nor contemporary, a fourth small gallery for the Sezession, a fifth hall dedicated to industrial exhibits but often used for art, and a sixth, the Glass Palace, the largest in Germany, which was used on occasion for great exhibitions. The Munich artists' Sezession had been, in 1892, the first in Central Europe to declare its independence. Though it was a spent force in 1911, and its members had become respectable, a group of new artists were already pushing the envelope. In 1911, people were beginning to call them "expressionists."

The term Expressionismus was first used by Germans in 1911 to describe the new trend in French painting³ that had taken up where Matisse and his co-conspirators had left off—the fauves whose work Kandinsky, who had spent a year in Paris in 1906-7, could describe firsthand. Forms were simplified, colors saturated, and surfaces laden with paint. First in painting and later in theater and poetry, Expressionismus would be used after 1911 to describe the German avant garde much as Futurismo described the Italian. It would be used retroactively to describe Strindberg's drama. For painters, it represented the replacement of Seurat by Van Gogh as a model; and the assertion of a new goal: to paint not the observed moment in the life of nature, but nature's inner life, and the inner life of the artist as well. The style had come to Germany at the turn of the century, well before the word was coined. Among small artists' associations like Die Brücke (The bridge) in Dresden, the Worpswede Group near Bremen, the Neu-Dachau, Phalanx, and Scholle (Clod) groups around Munich that had succeeded the Sezession, expressionism was already under way. Kandinsky had seen some of this French, German, and Russian work that was about to be dubbed expressionist, and he had liked it. He had, in fact, founded the Munich Phalanx and helped mount all ten of their shows. His new friend Franz Marc painted blue horses and yellow cows in a village not far from Munich, and Münter, Marianne Werefkin, Alexei Jawlensky, and other neighbors who had helped him found the NKVM were making equally proto-expressionist art in Schwabing. Nevertheless, Kandinsky's own work was rather different. Though he had done some excellent woodcuts, often achieving the simplified forms beloved by Die Brücke, he had nearly given it up recently, turning instead to painting on glass the way folk artists of the Munich countryside had done for generations, and simplifying not his forms but his subject matter. Instead of using color as a fauve might, to make a white sailboat orange, Kandinsky splashed primary colors onto scenes from the past, from fairytale and myth. Where he had once painted trains rushing through a recognizable countryside, lately he had been painting mounted archers posting through fantasy landscapes under the outlines of mountains.

Even his picture titles were changing. "The direct impression of 'external nature,' expressed in linear-painterly form" he now called an "Impression," though it rendered something very far from a momentary effect of light. He made the first of his Impressions in 1911. Two years before, in 1909, he had painted the first painting to which he attached the label "Improvisation." The source for an Improvisation, he wrote in 1911, was "chiefly unconscious, for the most part suddenly arising expressions of events of an inner character, hence impressions of 'internal nature.'" Another sort of picture was what he called a "Composition." He had painted his first three of these in 1910. A Composition expressed the same internal events, but took more time because "after the first preliminary sketches," Kandinsky "slowly and almost pedantically worked out" how to express them.⁴

Kandinsky, in other words, was not trying to paint what he saw, but what he felt, or rather what he knew inside himself. Though the things he knew inside had no shape at all, Kandinsky was quite certain they were substantial, and well worth painting. He was convinced they were undergone in turn by a faculty that could be found within himself, and that could be reached in others—something he called the "soul," using an unabashedly religious term. He had been born in 1866, ten years after Freud, who called the soul "psyche" and thought its mysteries were material; but Kandinsky did not think, as Freud did, that the materialist millennium was coming in. He thought it was coming to an end. He saw no conflict between religious belief and the radical remaking of art, and indeed thought the two would reinforce each other. Except for some aging Russian symbolists, not many other artists still felt that way. Perhaps one key to Kandinsky's views was synesthesia, the condition Baudelaire had written of in his sonnet "Correspondences" where the sensations produced by any one of the five senses can evoke corresponding sensations in the others. Kandinsky was a cellist and a poet, and every one of his five senses was resonant. He was acutely sensitive, especially to color.

As a thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paintbox containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then—or, to put it better, the experience I underwent then—of the paints emerging from the tube. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors—exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish experience, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness and devotion, with obstinate self-control, with sensitive, precarious balance.⁵

Indeed, it was a synesthetic moment of vision that had come to him long ago in his native Russia that had turned Kandinsky into an artist. Sometime between 1891 and 1895, Kandinsky, a newly married, newly hired law school teaching adjunct with research interests in economics and ethnography, had gone to an exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow, and "suddenly, for the first time" seen a picture. It was a Monet painting called Haystacks, part of a time-series, fixing the effects of light. But Kandinsky had not seen the haystack. What he had seen, instead, was the picture.

That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn't recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory, always hovering quite unexpectedly before my eyes, down to the last detail. It was all unclear to me, and I was not able to draw the simple conclusions from this experience. What was, however, quite clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor. And albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture.⁶

It had been the first in a cascade of insights that sent Kandinsky from Moscow to Munich. At about the same time, he recalled, he had been amazed to experience the music of Wagner's Lohengrin as colors and lines, and he had learned of "the further division of the atom," probably the discovery of the electron between 1894 and 1897. "The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial."⁷

In 1911, some twenty years later, Kandinsky, his marriage at an end and his career in law no more than a memory, was still working out the consequences of these sudden revelations. It was the year he painted the first five of his numbered Impressions, variously subtitled Moscow (no. 2) or Park (no. 5). The motifs in them could be found by a viewer, but only by one intent enough to pick them out amid Kandinsky's insistent shapes and colors. Improvisations 19 through 22 were still more subjective. Composition IV and Composition V would take painting to the edge of complete subjectivity. He painted all of them in 1911.

Although few painters waste much time writing, Kandinsky wrote well enough and often enough to make his intentions clear even to some who could not make head or tail of his new work. He had already written a monumental attack on positivism and materialism, the book that was to explain his unique approach to painting. It was called Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the spiritual in art). He had read it to an audience in October 1910, and would persuade the adventurous Munich art publisher, Piper, to print it in 1911. Painting, he wrote, used three distinct instruments—color, form, and subject—to cause what he called "sounds" in the soul. Each instrument worked its own magic; color and form, for example, did not exist merely to serve the subject. Instead each one operated independently, creating consonances and dissonances with the others in the inner responses of a viewer. Arnold Schoenberg had much the same idea of how music worked, and Kandinsky, who had heard Schoenberg's breakthrough String Quartet #2 with his Munich friends on New Year's Day 1911, saw the point immediately. He began to write Schoenberg letters about the correspondence between their arts. His book On the Spiritual in Art likened painting to music in that both could go directly to the soul; but argued that the various means by which painting could do this had never been as well understood as those of music.

All through 1910, Kandinsky painted so as to increase his understanding of the separate roles of color, form, and subject, and as 1911 began he was approaching what he thought of as the next step: how to separate the way he used form or color to delineate a subject from other ways he used it that were more "abstract." The outline of a face, he thought, conveyed two things at once. One was the shape of a known subject—a face; the other was a variation on the ellipse—an absolute, abstraktes form that had quite different connotations of its own. The color of a face was yet another sort of abstraction, implying infinite extension in a way form did not. In the half-dozen paintings of 1911 whose subject was a horse and rider, Kandinsky left the subject recognizable, but dwelt more and more on the abstract forms it suggested to him, other shapes whose inner "sounds" set up consonances and dissonances with the "sounds" of a horse and a rider, and were thus much more than the mere outlines of straining man and beast.

Kandinsky began to paint Composition IV in February 1911. As he recalled it, his "inner necessity" required that he put eight "basic elements" into play in it, including "acute movements to the left and upward," "contrast between blurred and contoured forms," and "predominance of color over form." In fact, though a viewer is still hard put to see it, Composition IV was a painting of a battle, centered on a castle-crowned mountain, with struggling knights and horses to the left, lancers in the middle, and two wanderers and a reclining couple to the right. The only clue to their placement in space is in the overlap of one subject by another. Skeptics, knowing that Kandinsky found his thick eyeglasses indispensable, still try to blame the artist's myopia for their own problems discerning the subjects of his paintings, but this is no solution.⁸ Independently of vague representations of people and natural objects in Composition IV, overwhelming colors struck "sounds" of their own, much as Kandinsky intended them to: a rainbow-like parabola of red, yellow, green, and dark blue; the intense cold blue of the mountaintop; the bright yellow of the hill on the right behind the reclining couple. Kandinsky saw this yellow in fact as an entirely independent second meaning for the painting. As he recalled it two years later, "The juxtaposition of this bright-sweet-cold tone [yellow] with angular movement (battle) is the principal contrast in the picture."⁹

Kandinsky's colors had been intense for years, but now, as the result of another moment of vision, the true depth of their effects began to become clear to him. It was summer.

The summer of 1911, which was unusually hot for Germany, lasted desperately long. Every morning on waking, I saw from the window the incandescent blue sky. The thunderstorms came, let fall a few drops of rain, and passed on. I had the feeling as if someone seriously ill had to be made to sweat, but that no remedies were of any use. . . . One's skin cracked. One's breath failed. Suddenly, all nature seemed to me white; white (great silence—full of possibilities) displayed itself everywhere and expanded visibly. . . . Since that time I know what undreamed-of possibilities this primordial color conceals within itself.¹⁰

White, Kandinsky had discovered, was a color, a color as evocative as the primaries themselves, needing only to be set somewhere in its range, a range no less infinite than all color ranges. The experience also seems to have nudged him over the edge into complete abstraction.

This revelation turned the whole of painting upside-down and opened up before it a realm in which one had previously been unable to believe. I. e., the inner, thousandfold, unlimited values of one and the same quality, the possibility of obtaining and applying infinite series simply in combination with one single quality, tore open before me the gates of the realm of absolute art.¹¹

In August, Kandinsky began to paint Composition V. This painting too had a subject—the resurrection of the dead at the Christian Apocalypse; but by the time Kandinsky had arranged his forms and colors to evoke this climactic vision, even less of the actual subject was left to be perceived on the canvas than had appeared in Composition IV. The subject had clearly been in the painter's mind for a year or more; and along the way, Kandinsky made one picture of Gabriel himself blowing his horn and several others of the saints in concert that could easily have called up a chorus of "The Saints Go Marching In" from a brass band in New Orleans.¹³ Among the many riders Kandinsky painted in 1911 is a Rider of the Apocalypse in tempera on glass. There are also two glass paintings and an oil of Saint George that seem related, and another small glass painting of a bird of paradise and a hellhound.¹⁴ All the many aspects of the subject were evoked on a deep level in the final painting, not by representing the subject but by the use of forms and colors. "I deprived my colors of their clarity of tone," wrote Kandinsky, "dampening them on the surface and allowing their purity and true nature to glow forth', as if through frosted glass."¹⁵ By now Kandinsky had finally seen the new Picassos; photographs of some of his cubist paintings had been sent to Kandinsky by the Paris picture-dealer Kahnweiler. Kandinsky, fascinated, wrote to Marc in October that Picasso

splits the subject up and scatters bits of it all over the picture; the picture consists of the confusion of the parts. . . . This decomposition is very interesting. But frankly "false" as I see it. I'm really pleased with it as a sign of the enormous struggle toward the immaterial thought.¹⁶

About this time Kandinsky found the immaterial thought for himself, a picture that was neither an Impression, nor an Improvisation, nor yet a Composition. He called it, simply, Bild mit Kreis (Picture with a circle). It was pretty big, roughly three and a half by four and a half feet. Until quite recently, it lay in storage in the State Museum of Art in Tbilisi, Georgia, while a little watercolor focused the attention of scholars, an apparently purely abstract watercolor dated to 1910 by its owner, Kandinsky's second wife. This watercolor, however, looked so much like Kandinsky's first fully abstract Composition of 1913 that when Picture with a Circle was finally brought out in 1989, after sixty years, the "First Abstract Watercolor" was relabeled "Study for Composition VII," and the debate became moot.¹⁷ According to Kandinsky himself, Picture with a Circle was "my very first abstract picture of 1911," the first picture he ever painted that had no subject at all.¹⁸

He seems to have painted it sometime after Composition IV and perhaps after Composition V, which probably means the winter of 1911. As Kandinsky remembered it, Picture with a Circle was "a very large picture, almost square, with very vivid shape, and a large, circular shape top right."¹⁹ A memory without color, in other words; but that was when he had not seen it for years. The "circular shape top right" is yellow with an almond-shaped navy blue spot in the middle, like an animal's pupil, impossible to overlook. Equally compelling are the lower edge of the picture with its pink on one side and its deep rose on the other, the great yellow proto-sphere on the left split by a red zigzag, or the dark blue bubble with its black armature intruding from the right. Kandinsky was "dissatisfied" and did not feel that the colors and the forms quite achieved his aim of setting off the deepest resonances in the soul, so he neither signed the picture nor entered it into his home catalog. He did remember it later, however, as "a 'historic picture' .. . the first abstract picture in the world, because no other painter was painting abstract art at that time."²⁰

But that was not quite the case. In that same year, 1911, in a little house in the village of Puteaux, a mile or two up the Seine from Seurat's Grande Jatte, Frantisek Kupka was also moving down the long road toward abstraction. Indeed, he had embarked on it before Kandinsky. He had been working on a single large painting in stages for nearly three years now. In his modest studio at 7, rue Lemaître, studies for it had piled up, some in pencil, others in crayon or pastel. The latest studies in early 1911 were oil paintings of discs with colored sectors, abstractions in themselves, and there was an enormous oil study that had become, in 1909, a painting on its own, a great purplish canvas with paler discs overlaid on it in a majestic spiral. One might guess that its subject, if it had one, was the evolution of the solar system, but Kupka's title was simply The First Step. Finally, looking a bit forlorn in the back of the studio, there was Kupka's oil portrait of his stepdaughter, Andrée, awkwardly, immaturely nude, poised to play in the back garden with a red and blue striped ball. Kupka had painted that piece of realism in 1908, the year Braque and Picasso had stepped off from the Demoiselles into cubism, but Girl with a Ball was the picture that had become the trigger for Kupka's whole project,²¹ a project that would reach completion in the middle of 1912 under the title Amorpha—Greek for shapeless.

Kupka was another of Paris's immigrants, a Czech who had dropped out of both the Prague and the Vienna schools of fine arts to come to Paris because it was the capital of the new. He had starved for a while on Montmartre, had a brief affair with the former cancan star La Goulue, and made large oil paintings of Rubenesque women in symbolic settings, one of which had won a prize at the St. Louis World's Fair. Eventually he had found a way to make his living as an illustrator, picturing everything from popular science to the poems of Mallarmé. For an occasional pittance he made cartoons for the anarchist papers, including three entire series of full-page cartoons for L'Assiette au beurre (The butterplate)—which also employed Vlaminck—on the themes of peace, religion, and that old corrupter, money. In an unguarded moment in 1909 he had made a classic "artist's reconstruction" of anthropologist Marcellin Boule's Neanderthal Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints—a wild, brutish, stooped ape—for the mass-circulation weekly L'Illustration. He was a convinced evolutionist himself, and politically on the left; but he was no more a materialist than Kandinsky was, and he had plucked from the various spiritualisms at large in the 1890s a sense of hidden meanings in the universe—meanings that could be painted by the methods of the symbolists.

Not that Amorpha was Symbolist. If anything it was cubist or even futurist. What Kupka had decided to do after painting Andrée standing with her ball was to try to paint the motion that would have followed the snapshot: a moving ball, a moving girl, throws and catches, stops, starts, and reversals of field—everything the movies were just beginning to capture in the first decade of the twentieth century. As the cubists had painted all sides of an object on one picture plane, so Kupka conceived of painting all moments of a complex motion on one unmoving canvas. In his first sketches of 1908, he had suggested the outlines of the girl and of the ball in swirling strokes of pencil. Then, in each succeeding sketch, he made the arms and legs less recognizable, as he added positions they might assume in play. Black crayon sketches suggested an interplay of color, the ball's red and blue stripes whose constantly changing positions would also have to be painted somehow. When Giacomo Balla and his fellow Italians—the futurists—began to paint motion in 1911, they used a technique suggested by doubleexposed photographs, but this idea does not seem to have occurred to Kupka. Instead he seems to have tried to find a way of sampling all the curves described by all the moving points of Andrée's game and melding them together into just one or two complex curves. The oil studies of red and blue discs he made in 1911 were stills of a spinning color wheel intended to explore how the red and blue stripes of the ball might blend in motion. Amorpha was well under way before the futurists published their first technical manifesto in 1910 or mounted their first shows in Milan in 1911 and Paris in 1912, and Kupka's project owed little to them.²²

If Kupka owed anything to anyone else, it was to the other members of a group of mostly cubist artists that had slowly found each other in Puteaux, including Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Emile Le Fauconnier, and the Duchamp-Villon brothers. One of the brothers, Jacques Villon, had befriended Kupka when they were both still living in Montmartre, and another, Marcel Duchamp (who would in 1911 paint Nude Descending a Staircase), had met Kupka back in 1904 in the year his picture had gone to the World's Fair.²³ There was still another member of this group who was not a painter but an insurance actuary, Maurice Princet. Fascinated by mathematics and proud of his friendships with artists, Princet was the theoretician of the Puteaux Group, taking the same role Charles Henry had played in the Laforgue-Seurat circle. It was Princet who talked most about things like the classical ratio of the golden section, and Princet who read and recommended to his friends the writings of people like Charles H. Hinton, René de Saussure, and Einstein's mentors Henri Poincaré and Karl Pearson on the subject of non-Euclidean and multidimensional projective geometries.²⁴Kupka must have understood early on that the problem of painting complex motions was a dimensional problem in which time was a fourth dimension, and that representing four-dimensional events on a two-dimensional canvas could be accomplished only by analysis into elements and some sort of projection routine. If Kupka had been as mathematical as Princet he might have worked out a sort of four-dimensional version of the Renaissance rules of linear perspective, but instead he worked largely intuitively, as Giotto had. Amorpha, which would resolve itself in 1912 into two paintings—Amorpha: Chromatiques chauds (Hot chromatics) and Amorpha: Fugue à deux couleurs (Fugue for two colors)—defies step-by-step analysis as serenely as Picasso's cubist Ma Jolie, painted at the same time. Both Amorphas are full of continuous curves, but this is especially true of the second, where a sharply defined central swath of bright purple suggests where the red and blue stripes of Andrée's spinning ball ended up. The paintings would finally be exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912, where they would seem much more abstract than the Kandinsky Improvisations seen earlier that year at the Salon des Indépendants.

Kupka was a central European who had become part of the French art world and remained on its edges, but Robert Delaunay was French by inheritance. In 1910 and 1911 he was painting things no less French than the rooftops of Paris and the Eiffel Tower. One subject was the little medieval church of Saint Severin in the Latin Quarter, close enough to walk to, a few blocks up the Left Bank of the Seine from his studio on an upper floor of number 3, rue des Grands-Augustins. All his pictures of Saint Severin were of its interior, a dark forest of recognizable Gothic pillars and ogives, but every painting in the series portrayed those verticals as bowed out, the interior fantasized. His pictures of the Eiffel Tower showed the Tower increasingly broken up into red modules and surrounded by patches of white and pastel, patches that may have begun as representations of clouds but ended up representing no more than themselves. Cubism had reached Delaunay early, but unlike Picasso and Braque, he had persisted with color and stuck to an intuitive rather than a precise analysis of space.

Delaunay knew Maurice Princet and Princet's friends in the Puteaux group. When their work went on show in Room 41 of the Salon des Indépendants in March 1911. the first "Cubist Room" in exhibition history, Delaunay's paintings were there. In October he came to know Kandinsky when his wife persuaded one of her art-school friends, who was also a friend of Kandinsky's, to write and bring them together. Sonia Terk Delaunay, Robert Delaunay's wife, was more than a mere helpmeet. Russian-born like Kandinsky, she was a particularly adventurous painter who got into abstract art early in 1911 by way of design. When she presented Robert with their first and only child, Charles, on January 18, she made the baby a quilt of sharp-cornered patches dyed in primary colors that her friends instantly dubbed "Cubist." Soon after, she painted Charles a toy box in the same style.²⁵ Who influenced whom we cannot say, for the Delaunays always cheerfully supported each other's efforts, but we do know that very late in 1911, after he and Kandinsky had begun writing to each other, Robert Delaunay set to work on a new series of paintings called Windows made of interesecting planes of bright color. Playing with the time dimension, he called one of them Simultaneous Windows. By 1912 they would bring him into the same new world of pure abstraction that Kandinsky and Kupka had entered just before him.

There was yet a fifth artist in this new world in 1911, and he was an American. A laconic upstate New Yorker, Arthur Dove had thrown up his job as a commercial illustrator in 1907 and gone to Paris, where he had had a momentous encounter with the work of Cézanne. After two years he returned, married, and never painted another representational picture. However, Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who had established what he called the "Photo-Secession" in a storefront at 291 Broadway, had arranged for Dove to show a painting and managed to convince him to go on. In 1910 and 1911, while Dove was living and working in a house in what is now the New York City suburb of Westport, Connecticut, he made six paintings historians now agree are the first abstract or nonrepresentational paintings ever made by an American. Indeed, if they were made in 1910, they would be the first ever made in the West. The pictures are all owned by a private collector and rarely seen or studied, but enough is known to make it likely that when Kandinsky was painting Picture with a Circle in 1911, Dove's Six Abstractions were already leaning against the studio wall in Westport.

There were even a few seemingly abstract pictures made before 1910. In fact they were in Kandinsky's own native country, all made by a rather mysterious artist named Čiurlionis who had been born and brought up in what was then the Russian province of Lithuania. 1911, as it happens, was the year he died. Mikalojus-Konstantinas Čiurlionis, nine years younger than Kandinsky, had started out as a musician. After graduating from the conservatory and composing some successful tone poems on nature themes, he had given it up at thirty and turned to painting. The pictures had begun to appear in 1906 in series of from four to thirteen at a time, under a musical title, with each individual picture given a tempo marking, like a musical movement: Sonata of the Stars, Andante, or Sonata of the Sea, Allegro.²⁶ Since the medium Čiurlionis used, tempera on paper, was fragile, the pictures never traveled and have rarely been reproduced. Kandinsky is unlikely to have seen them, even after 1909, when Čiurlionis had moved to St. Petersburg and become better known. In St. Petersburg, Čiurlionis had been accepted easily as a late-arriving symbolist, championed in fact by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Russian symbolism's leading critic. These strange paintings seemed quite symbolist to Ivanov, and probably were to Čiurlionis; but although some shapes vaguely recalled objects fraught with symbolism—mountains, water, planets, pyramids, networks of bubbles—few had subjects that were recognizable from either the natural or the man-made world. Čiurlionis's pictures were "about" transcendent universes; but rather than representing transcendent things on canvas the way earlier symbolists like Mikhail Vrubel had tried to do, or reproducing them in the soul as Kandinsky had, Čiurlionis made his paintings point toward the transcendent in the same indirect way as Alexander Blok's poetry or Maeterlinck's plays. Ivanov had begun to believe they reflected the fourth dimension.²⁷ One so charmed young Igor Stravinsky around 1909 that he bought it. Were they the first abstractions? If the symbolist esthetic can be understood to produce pictures entirely without subjects, it seems that they were.

Then there is Piet Mondrian, who is more or less familiar to everyone as the creator of the primary-color rectangles outlined by straight black stripes. Mondrian was in Paris in 1911. The Dutch painter and spiritualist had gone to the French capital and seen works by Cézanne and the cubists. Then, as the story goes, Mondrian slowly but surely simplified the Dutch trees and waterways in his memory until he had brought them down to the simplest linear elements. Thereafter he kept the elements and dropped the subjects. The story has an irresistible dramatic shape, and a clarity that matches Mondrian's late paintings, but it occupies the wrong historical stage. In 1911 Mondrian's trees were still trees, and the nearest thing to an abstraction that Mondrian worked on that year was the incipiently cubist Ginger Pot he showed in 1912 in the Salon d'Automne. Mondrian was in fact the last of all the canonical founders of abstractionism to arrive in the new world; and he would not complete a purely abstract painting until his Composition no. 7 of 1914.²⁸

There is, of course, something puerile in determining priority in art. Unlike new science, new art does not replace the old, and the greatness of an artist, like that of a novelist, is not in the innovation but in the execution. Critics who know both artists have invariably found, for example, that there is more in the abstractions of Kandinsky than in those of Arthur Dove. A drift of opinion continues to find the Delaunays' work to contain more riches than Kupka's, even when they all painted the same nonsubject, the color disks of 1911-13.29 But it is not the priority that makes the difference so much as the effect of the innovation. Frantisek Kupka had little effect on his fellow artists, and Dove and Čiurlionis almost none at all. In the end it was Kandinsky whose hallucinatory color harmonies made the first impression and carried the day for "abstract" art.

Abstract art has always been a gift to skeptics. It is perennially necessary to contend against them that the first abstraction was not made by the Chat Noir wit Paul Bilhaud when he painted a canvas black and hung it at the first Salon of Les Arts Incohérents in 1882 under the label Negroes Wrestling in a Cave at Night. Nor was the first abstraction made by backing a donkey up to a canvas and putting paint on its tail. It is true that a certain Joachim-Raphael Boronali exhibited this asinine picture at the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1910 under the title And the Sun Dozed Off over the Adriatic. The title, however, gave away the game. Boronali's idea was to reserve his joke and keep the painting's secret for a while; but the effect of it was to give the painting a subject—in the visitors' minds certainly, and in Boronali's too, though perhaps not in the ass's. In that case, one can legitimately wonder whether it is possible in any philosophically precise sense to paint a picture without a subject. Did not Kupka's Amorpha have as its subject a girl and a ball in motion? Did not Čiurlionis put stars in Sonata of the Stars? Did not Delaunay paint Windows as he said they were, windows in the light? Did not every expressionist at least paint states of mind? Did not even Kandinsky, who snorted at the idea that he might be painting music, claim to strike notes in the soul and there compose something, however ideal? Kandinsky painted colors, as did every other painter; and are not colors in some sense a subject?

We might call this art "nonobjective," but if the philosophical meaning of "abstract" is a problem, the philosophical meaning of nonobjective is a bigger problem. "Objective," for philosophers, at least since Frege, is a condition of thoughts or things thought about that makes it possible for two or more minds to communicate about them, instead of just one. It is the contrary of "subjective," which is the condition of a thought or a thing that restricts it to one mind only. Kandinsky, however, was convinced that he was painting in a way that would evoke the same "sounds" in every soul that it did in his own—or in every soul that was sufficiently evolved. In its intent, therefore, philosophically speaking, his painting was objective. Robert Delaunay was among the first to use the adjective "nonobjective," or rather "inobjectif," in the nonphilosophical way that gives this [essay] its title. 30 This separate sense of the word describes a painting offering a viewer no object that he or she is expected to be able to name or to recall from nature. A similar struggle with meaning leads to the term "nonrepresentational" art. A nonrepresentational picture would be one that deliberately does not represent anything we can agree is part of a "reality" external to paintings, and possibly anything external to the mind. This would at least leave out Boronali's ass and Allais's putons, but could it not also threaten to exclude Kandinsky?

Better than philosophical wrangling is the careful study of where this impulse to nonrepresentation began, and one source must certainly be the cabaret-born irony that inspired Bilhaud. (Alphonse Allais had followed up Bilhaud's black painting in 1883 with one that was all gray and titled Drunkards Dancing in a Fog.) Another influential source of nonrepresentational art must be its arch-representational opposites, photography, illustration, and cartooning, the last two of which were the bread and butter of Arthur Dove and Frank Kupka. 31 There was considerable appeal for many artists in doing the contrary of what they had to do for a living. There may have been still more appeal in being first with the new, especially in an art market as crowded as that of some twentieth-century cities—Munich, for example—and it may well turn out that crowded markets can explain the birth of the "avant garde" more satisfactorily than an innovative spirit.³²

By and large, however, the inventors of abstraction were a solemn group. Irreverence was rare, and even irreverence was taken seriously. Čiurlionis, for example, read some theosophy and cast himself as one of the prophets of a new spiritual epoch. Others too, including Mondrian, were attracted by theosophy, the new religion founded by Madame Blavatsky at a series of table-rappings in a New York apartment in 1875. Kandinsky took it seriously as well, and in 1905, as historians of art have since noticed, the theosophists published a book in which the abstract experience of thought was represented by Kandinskyesque colors, abstract shapes, and the complex curves formed by metal filings on a vibrating plate. 33 Frank Kupka was also interested, despite his biological and political materialism, in drawing an intricate and eclectic spiritualism of his own from Blavatsky, the French guru Sâr Péladan, and anyone else with a pipeline to the ideal universe. Even Robert Delaunay, who was no fan of spiritualisms, wrote about trying to transcend the medium of painting in order to approach an ideal truth.

Often allied with theosophy, artistic symbolism made an even more powerful contribution to nonrepresentational art, seemingly from beyond the grave. Art, said the symbolist esthetic, was an attempt to point to the ineffable using symbols of the occult, the primitive, or the bygone. Gauguin and his friend Mallarmé had shown the way. The idea was hostile to positivism and not at all uncongenial to theosophy, but it was no longer very popular in 1911. Čiurlionis owed much to Russia's lateness in giving up symbolism, and so did Kandinsky, who exhibited with the Russian symbolist group Blue Rose after 1900, admired Maeterlinck, and seems to have brought the symbolist esthetic with him to Munich. Kupka too adopted symbolism, which he found in painter predecessors, in theosophical speculation, and in the writings of Mallarmé, which he illustrated. As the word "expressionism" came into use in 1911, it became clear that some of the more prominent of the old symbolist ideas of art were being absorbed into the new style, whose idealist premises were similar. Where symbolists found ultimate reality in alternate universes, expressionists found it in their own souls; and both made nonrealist art. Then, as the word "expressionism" began to mean anything new or French, or avant-garde, some of the old symbolism went along with it.

The abandonment of representation was also helped along by the rising status of ornament, which had rarely been more than a stepsister to architecture. In the 1870s William Morris's Arts and Crafts movement had become the first to reconstitute decoration as "decorative art." In the late 1890s, with styles like Jugendstil and art nouveau, and the founding of institutes like the Vienna Werkstätte (Workshops) and Kunstgewerbeschule (Handcrafter school), decorative art began to become what we now call "design." Jugendstil decorative art in particular, very strong in Munich, moved the work of Hermann Obrist and Hans Schmithals quite close to abstraction around 1900.34 Short of wallpaper patterns, or art nouveau's mania for plant forms in cabinetry, there wasn't much in decorative art that could be called representational, and at one time or another virtually every nonrepresentational pioneer described how decoration had helped him or her see the nonrepresentational light.

The emancipation of color by the fauves, of course, was another influence. So was the study by both artists and scientists of the foundations of geometry. The paintings of cubists and futurists depended on four-dimensional thinking as much as did the physics of Einstein and the mathematics of Hilbert and Poincaré. Kandinsky himself, following his compatriot Peter Ouspensky, thought of the spiritual world as more than three-dimensional;³⁵ and Kasimir Malevich, who would paint his first abstraction, Black Square, in Russia in 1914, came to believe that he was painting entities of four or more dimensions geometrically projected onto his two-dimensional canvas.³⁶

What is ultimately clear about abstraction, however, is not where it came from, but how it was done. The analysis of the subject of a picture into its smallest components, a procedure that had begun with the impressionists and was systematized by Seurat, reached a final point with the abstractionists of 1911. They broke up the subject into parts, and then used the parts more and more selectively. Finally the subject itself disappeared as the parts no longer recalled it.

By the time autumn came to Munich, Kandinsky was working nearly full time on the Blaue Reiter, the exhibiting and publication society he had conjured up in a letter to Franz Marc in June, choosing the name "Blue Rider" because Marc liked horses, he liked riders, and both liked them in blue. Already in January he wrote about getting one or more letters in each of Munich's five daily mail deliveries.³⁷ By September he was in correspondence with artists in every art capital in Europe, soliciting pictures for the exhibition and essays and cuts for the "almanac" Blaue Reiter would publish summing up the situation in the world of Western art. He asked Delaunay for pictures. He asked two Russian music critics to write essays. His correspondence with Schoenberg having revealed that the composer was also a painter, Kandinsky asked him for everything: pictures to exhibit, an essay on music, and some of the music itself, by himself or his disciples, for publication in the almanac. He gave himself the agreeable but time-consuming task of writing the article on the combination of theater and music, adding an example of his own composition, Der gelbe Klang (The yellow sound), a symbolist-expressionist play.

The painter Paul Klee, who was living and working two doors down from Kandinsky at 32 Ainmillerstrasse, wrote in his diary that autumn about the strange man

who lives in the house next to ours, this Kandinsky, whom Luli [Klee's friend] calls "Schlabinsky." . . . Luli often goes to visit him, sometimes takes along works of mine and brings back nonobjective pictures without subject by this Russian. Very curious paintings.

Eventually these two future founding members of the Bauhaus met in a Munich café and Klee became a cautious believer. "Kandinsky wants to organize a new society of artists," Klee continued in his diary. "Personal acquaintance has given me a somewhat deeper confidence in him. He is somebody and has an exceptionally finie, clear mind. .. . in the course of the winter, I joined his 'Blaue Reiter."'³⁸

By December the Blaue Reiter, both the almanac and the exhibition, was ready to go, but the NKVM artists' society was mounting its show at the same time. Kandinsky, who was still a member, made a final offer of his Composition V for the NKVM show; but on December 2 the picture was rejected, ostensibly because it was a little larger than their rules allowed. Kandinsky and his friends resigned immediately and Composition V was brought over to Thannhauser's Moderne Galerie in time for the opening of the Blaue Reiter show on December 18, two weeks after Kandinsky's forty-fifth birthday.

The Exhibition was a triumph. On the dark walls at 7 Theatinerstrasse, Munich, hung forty-three avant-garde paintings and drawings from half a dozen countries. There was a fantasy by the douanier Rousseau, a Saint-Severin and two Eiffel Towers from Delaunay in Paris, two of Schoenberg's Visions from Vienna, several canvases in the primitivist style by the Russian Burliuk brothers, another from the Swiss Jean Niestlé, several from Gabriele Münter, August Macke, and other German Expressionists, and several major pictures by Franz Marc, including the exuberant Yellow Cow.³⁹ Kandinsky himself showed Composition V, Improvisation 22, and Impression-Moscow, all on the brink of abstraction. Reviewers were fascinated and artists were galvanized. It felt like a whole new era.

The same month of December, Piper published On the Spiritual in Art, and in January the long-awaited Blue Rider Almanac. Kandinsky had clearly caught a wave. As 1912 unfolded, show after show in country after country affirmed expressionism and launched abstraction. Early in 1912, the Blaue Reiter itself went to Cologne and then on to Berlin, Bremen, Hagen, and Frankfurt am Main, shocking the academy at every stop and changing the direction of German art. To everyone's surprise and delight, several of the paintings sold, including three of the five Delaunays.

It was as if a signal had been given. In February 1912, Arthur Dove had a one-man show at Stieglitz's "291" in New York that included ten pastels with titles like Based on Leaf Forms and Spaces (or Leaf Forms) and Movement No. 1; the show later went on to Chicago.⁴⁰ The "Ten Commandments," as they came to be called, were the next generation of Dove abstractions after the original six of 1910-11, and neither city could make much sense of them. It was Dove's first one-man show—and his last—but it was also the first show of abstract paintings ever mounted, at a time when Kandinsky's new pure abstractions had yet to leave his studio.

One month after Dove's show, a world away in Moscow, painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova named their new artists' society The Ass's Tail, in honor of Boronali's hoax, and put on another scandalous art exhibit in Moscow. They accused the Munich crowd of being already "decadent" and ready to be superseded. At the same time, Blue Rider exhibitor David Burliuk and a small band of Russians soon to be labeled "Cubo-Futurists" published a doubly outrageous Blue Rider Almanac of their own called A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. (Kandinsky had to write to them protesting that they had used his poems without permission.) From May to September the fourth Sonderbund Special Exhibition of "Expressionisten" brought together Munchs, Kandinskys, and works by Die Brücke, amazing the Rhineland city of Cologne. In December the Russian "Slap in the Face" group became an exhibiting society and mounted an expressionist art show, while the newest Russian art society, "Soyuz Molodezhi" (Union of youth), put on its own first show. It was at the Union of Youth that Larionov showed a work whose subject had been almost completely turned into painted rays of light. Exhibiting another like it at the Society of Free Esthetics show later that same month, Larionov called the approach Luchist or Rayonnist and founded yet another school of abstract painting.⁴¹

Kandinsky wrote that he had no wish to displace representational painting, and representational painting has indeed survived; but so has the nonrepresentational. Since Kandinsky's Picture with a Circle there has been no going back.

NOTES

¹ Franz Marc, Papers, 10 February 1911; in Susanna Partsch, Franz Marc, 1880-1916 (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1991), 30; cf. Hajo Düchting, Kandinsky (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1991), 30.

² Maria Makela, The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 6.

³ A critic in the English Tait's Magazine 17, no. 394/2 (1850) had referred to "the expressionist school of modern painters" (entry on "Expressionist" in Oxford English Dictionary). The French critic Louis Vauxcelles had used "expressioniste" earlier to describe work by Matisse; and in 1901 the painter Julien-Auguste Hervé had described the style of a group of his nature studies as "expressionisme" (Wolf-Dieter Dube, Expressionism [New York: Praeger, 1972], 18). These swallows seem to have failed to make a summer.

⁴ Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the spiritual in art) (1911), trans. in Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 218.

⁵ Kandinsky, Rückblicke (Reminiscences) (1913), trans. in Complete Writings on Art, 371-72.

⁶ Ibid., 363.

⁷ Ibid., 364.

⁸ Jelena Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 168-69. This is the indispensable biography of Kandinsky.

⁹ Kandinsky, "Three Pictures," appended to Reminiscences (1913), in Complete Writings on Art, 384.

¹⁰ Kandinsky, "Cologne Lecture" (1914), ibid., 397.

¹¹ Ibid., 398.

¹² Kandinsky, Composition V (oil on canvas), private collection, Switzerland.

¹³ Kandinsky, Allerheiligen (All saints) I (oil on card); Allerheiligen I (glass painting); Allerheiligen II (oil on canvas); Engel des jüngsten Gerichtes (Angel of the Last Judgment) (glass painting), all in Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

¹⁴ Kandinsky, Apokalyptischer Reiter (Rider of the Apocalypse) (tempera on glass); St. Georg I, II, and III (glass paintings and an oil); Höllenhund und Paradiesvogel (Hound of hell and bird of paradise) (glass painting). All are in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

¹⁵ Kandinsky, "Cologne Lecture," October 1914, in Complete Writings on Art, 399.

¹⁶ Kandinsky to Franz Marc, 2 October 1911, in Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky, 196.

¹⁷ Hideho Nishida, "Genèse de la première aquarelle abstraite de Kandinsky," Art History 1 (1978), 1-20.

¹⁸ Kandinsky to J. B. Neumann, 4 August 1935, in Hahl-Koch, Kandinsky, 181.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Kandinsky to J. B. Neumann, 28 December 1935, ibid., 184.

²¹ Kupka, Girl with a Ball, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Paris. The long genesis of Amorpha has been traced with great intelligence by Ludmila Vachtová in Frank Kupka: Pioneer of Abstract Art (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Thames and Hudson, 1968).

²² Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, Milan, 11 April 1910, and in Comoedia (Paris), 18 May 1910; trans. in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 289-93.

²³ Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase II (Philadelphia Museum of Art) was first exhibited in January 1912. Kupka's 1904 picture was Ballad/Joys.

²⁴ Picasso, wrote Jean Metzinger, "defines a free, mobile perspective, from which that ingenious mathematician Maurice Princet has deduced a whole geometry." Pan (Paris), October-November 1910, 650; in Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art, 223. Princet's sources probably included: Charles Howard Hinton, Scientific Romances 1st and 2d ser. (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1884-5, 1896); René de Saussure, "Les Phénomènes physiques et chimiques et l'hypothèse de la quatrième dimension," Archives des sciences physiques et naturelles de Genève (January-February 1891) and Revue scientifique (9 May 1891). .. . Chapter 7 of Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science (London: Walter Scott, 1911) discusses motion with an extended example that may well have specificallyinspired Marcel Duchamp's most celebrated painting: "Let us take . . . the case of a man ascending a staircase" (Pearson, Grammar of Science, 222 ff.). Lynda Dalrymple Henderson's wonderful book, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometries in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) collects most of the popular references to the fourth dimension with which the turn of the century was crowded. Michio Kaku's Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) finds more. The plurality of dimension was probably better understood and described for a broader public in 1900 than it is now. . . .

²⁵ Sonia Delaunay, Nous irons jusqu'au soleil (Paris: Laffont, 1978), 33. A biographical profile based primarily on these and other memoirs is Stanley Baron, with Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay, the Life of an Artist: A Personal Biography Based on Unpublished Private Journals (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995). The quilt, much faded, is now in the Musée national de l'Art Moderne in Paris.

²⁶ Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922, 2d ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 119. Short of a visit to the Čiurlionis Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, one's best chance to see Čiurlionis's work is probably in a portfolio of reproductions: M. K. Čiurlionis, 32 Reprodukcijos (Vilnius: Grozines Literaturos Leidykla, 1961). For accounts of his career in English there is a special issue of the journal Lituanus 7, no. 2 (1961), with articles by George M. A. Hanfmann, Aleksis Rannit, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Raymond F. Piper, and Viadas Jakubenas; and notes by Romain Rolland, Bernard Berenson, Jacques Lipchitz, and Igor Stravinsky.

²⁷ "This geometrical transparency seems to be an attempt to approach the possibilities of visual signalization of such conception that the three dimensions we have on disposal are insufficient." Vyacheslav Ivanov, "Čiurlionis and the Problem of the Synthesis of Arts," Apollon 3 (1914); in Lituanus 7, no. 2 (1961), 45.

²⁸Composition no. 1 is in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. John Golding dates it to 1914 but puts it in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. John Golding, "Mysteries of Mondrian," The New York Review of Books 42, no. 11 (22 June 95), 59-65.

²⁹ Frank Kupka, Disks of Newton: Study for Amorpha: Fugue à deux couleurs, 1911-12 (oil on canvas), Musée national d'Art Moderne, Paris; Robert Delaunay, Disque, première peinture inobjective, ou disque simultané (Disk, first nonobjective painting, or simultaneous disk), 1912-13 (oil on canvas), private collection. Sonia Delaunay's Prisme électrique (1913; oil on canvas, Musée national d'Art Moderne, Paris) is said to have been inspired by the newly installed electric streetlights on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

³⁰ Delaunay, Disque, première peinture inobjective, ou disque simultané (Disk, first nonobjective painting, or simultaneous disk), 1912-13 (oil on canvas), private collection.

³¹ The American cartoonist Stuart Blackton, in fact, brought filmed animation to Paris in April 1907, a year before Kupka made his initial study of Andrée and her ball.

³² This suggestion was in fact made at the time about the crowded art world of Germany. A member of Strindberg's Black Pig Café circle in Berlin, the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, wrote in 1904, "The art exhibition [is] an institution of a thoroughly bourgeois nature, due to the senseless immensity of the artistic output, and the consequent urgency of showing regularly what has been accomplished in the year." Meier-Graefe, Modern Art (1904), trans. Simmonds and Chrystal, in F. Frascina and C. Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (London: Harper, Open University, 1982), 208.

³³ Sixten Ringbom, "Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pioneers," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (New York: Abbeville Press in association with Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986).

³⁴ Peg Weiss (Kandinsky in Munich, Exhibition Catalogue [New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1982], plates 52-71) reproduces work by Obrist and Schmithals.

³⁵ Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, Chetvertoe Izmierenie (The fourth dimension) (St. Petersburg, 1909). The book drew on earlier books by Hinton.

³⁶ Malevich, Black Square (1913-15); Black Circle; Black Cross; Black Square and Red Square, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).

³⁷ Kandinsky to Schoenberg, 13 January 1911, in Arnold Schoenberg and Vassily Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures, and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. J. C. Crawford (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984).

³⁸ Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 265.

³⁹ Marc, Die gelbe Kuh, now in the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

⁴⁰ Arthur Dove, Leaf Forms, private collection; Movement No. 1, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. For more, see William Innes Homer, "Identifying Arthur Dove's The Ten Commandments,'" American Art Journal 12 (summer 1980), 21-32.

⁴¹ Mikhail Larionov, Glass, Guggenheim Museum, New York. See Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 145.