Wassily Kandinsky

One of the truly great figures of our century, Kandinsky belongs, in spite of his Russian background and subsequent French canonization, to the Munich school of the period before the First World War. As in the case of Paul Klee, it is futile to bicker over nationality as such; more important are Wassily Kandinsky's contribution as an artist and his place in the pattern of the Expressionist movement.

Perhaps the clearest, the most useful and lucid statements, the most influential words of any modern artist, are those of Kandinsky. His epoch-making 'Ober das Geisdge in der Kunst' ('Concerning the Spiritual in Art') appeared in 1912 at a time most favorable to its potential effect. It ran through three German editions the first year, was widely read elsewhere, and ultimately was translated into many languages including the Japanese. Its theories may well have affected the development of Orphism, or color orchestration, as well as nonfigurative art in general, an area in which Wassily Kandinsky appeared with actual pictures (i. e. 1910) even before publication of the book.

Suprematism and Constructivism, the chief developments of modern Russian painting, were anticipated by Wassily Kandinsky in theory, although the idea of purely nonfigurative art was being practiced by the Russian Rayonists as early as 1911, parallel in date with Kandinsky's first exhibited efforts along those lines. Though it is usual to speak of the influence of Suprematist geometry on Kandinsky, who returned to Russia in 1914, two points should be made: first, the aforementioned theoretical proposals of Kandinsky in his 1912 book (written in 1910) include discussion of simple geometric forms, e. g. circles, squares, and triangles, as elements in nonrepresentational art; second, although Kandinsky became increasingly rigid in form as his Russian period developed, his art always retained its fanciful and intuitive quality.

Although it would appear that Wassily Kandinsky, in writing these words on the need for artistic freedom, is echoing in a fashion earlier statements by Matisse, there is a world of difference between the primarily aesthetic distortions of the French painter and the increasingly symbolic painting of the Blue Rider leader. Unquestionably Wassily Kandinsky was influenced in the period between 1906 and 1910 by the Fauve school, but it is clear even from his remarks concerning the "mysterious and secret" origin of the work of art, its autonomous existence, its spiritual potential, that Kandinsky was headed in a different direction. Likewise, the indictment of the French "form for form's sake" attitude shows once more where he stands. "The artist," he remarks further on, "must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance."

The entire book by Wassily Kandinsky - as the title itself would indicate - is taken up with these spiritual qualities and how the artist may move the spectator in that direction. In addition to the symbolic function of color, there is, as we see from the foregoing statement and from the paintings themselves, a deeply musical quality in Kandinsky's art that may be regarded as another Expressionist way of piercing the material shell to the spiritual core of reality.

The relationship between the various arts had existed in Wassily Kandinsky's mind even before the Blue Rider period. In his native Russia the composer Scriabine often spoke of a pictorially conceived music, and Wassily Kandinsky considered Scriabine the leading young Russian composer. Kandinsky worked for some time on a kind of synthetic art, on one occasion with the composer von Hartmann and again with the famous Russian dancer Alexander Sacharoff who was a member of the New Artists Federation.