Booklet de kandinski

Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (detail) 1910–11 Tate © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

KANDINSKY THE PATH TO ABSTRACTION 22 JUNE – 1 OCTOBER 2006 Information and activity pack for teachers

Introduction This teachers’ pack accompanies Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908–1922 at Tate Modern. It focuses on three key works by Kandinsky, providing information, discussion points and classroom activities about each one. A theoretical and historical context for Kandinsky’s abstraction is illustrated with 4 further works. The pack has been designed to both support a visit to the exhibition and to link with work you are doing in the classroom.

For more information

Becks-Malorny, Ulrike (2003) Wassily Kandinsky 1866–1944 The Journey to Abstraction, Taschen Behr, Shulamith (1999) Movements in Modern Art: Expressionism, Tate Gallery Publishing Dube, Wolf-Dieter (1998) The Expressionists, Thames and Hudson Harrison, Charles and Frascina, and Perry, Gill (eds.) (1993) Modern Art Practices and Debates: Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, Yale University Press in association with The Open University Press Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (eds.) (1995) Art Theory – 1900–1990 – An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing (for excerpts from Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning The Spiritual in Art) Lankheit, Klaus (2006) Documentary Edition of The Blaue Reiter Almanac, Tate Publishing Robinson, Michael (2006) Kandinsky, Flame Tree Publishing www.tate.org.uk/collection (This pack links to work by Luc Tuymans, Dan Flavin and Tomoko Takahashi. Further information about their work, and details of its location on display at Tate Modern, can be found on the Tate website.)

QCA schemes of work

Viewpoints A sense of place Shared view Objects and viewpoints Life events Personal places, public spaces

@ Tate 2006. All rights reserved www.tate.org.uk

Written by Dr Jackie Steven

Designed by Martin Parker at www.silbercow.co.uk

Theory and History: Inner Necessity ‘Our starting-point is the belief that the artist is constantly engaged in collecting experiences in an inner world, in addition to the impressions he receives from the external world, from nature. The search for artistic forms in which to express the mutual interpenetration of these two kinds of experience, for forms which must be free of every kind of irrelevancy in order to express nothing but the essentials... this seems to us to be a watchword which is uniting more and more artists at this present time.’ KANDINSKY, Statement as president of The New Artists Association of Munich Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866, and he trained in law, economics and ethnography. However, by the age of 30, he had abandoned law and was working as the director of a print shop, making reproductions of artworks. In 1896 he turned down a university teaching post and decided to give more serious attention to his love of painting. He moved to Munich, with is wife Anya, to pursue a career as an artist.

Munich was a magnet for artists at the time. The visual arts had featured prominently in the cultural life of the city for many years, a result of the patronage of the Catholic Church and the Bavarian monarchy, who sponsored the first public museums in Germany. There were also highly rated teaching institutions, workshops for painters and spaces for exhibition.

The Glaspalast (built to emulate London’s Crystal Palace) was a venue for popular quadrennial salons that exhibited international art.

By the time Kandinsky arrived in Munich, the Munich Secession had been founded, exhibiting a wide range of progressive art such as Impressionism and Symbolism. The Secession group played a central role in the development of Jugendstil, which was a German equivalent to Art Nouveau.

The fluid lines and highly decorative embellishments of Jugendstil were a significant departure from the naturalistic detail of nineteenth-century realism.

As a student in the painting classes of Franz von Stuck, who had cofounded the Munich Secession, Kandinsky made contact with artists and performers, founding and then becoming leader of the Phalanx group, in 1901, through which he organised exhibitions, exhibited his own work and began teaching. His poster design for the first Phalanx exhibition is in the Jugendstil style, and it depicts ornamental soldiers as an advancing (or ‘avant-garde’) force, lances raised against traditional art. With this poster, Kandinsky entered the avant-garde of the Munich art world. His contribution to the European avant-garde, through exhibitions, publications and as an

organiser, would prove immense.

The key concept explored through Kandindky’s commitment to the avantgarde was that art should grow out of ‘inner necessity’ and not depend on external impressions for guidance. Rather, the ‘inner voice’ of the artist would provide the authority in deciding upon ‘essentials’ in art. Kandinsky’s reason for believing in the importance of this reorganisation of priorities from naturalism to what was ultimately to from the first abstract art, was his belief that art served a spiritual role. On The Spiritual In Art, his most important and influential essay, describes not only the artistic means to serve this purpose, but the purpose itself, observing that culture had become dominated by materialistic thinking, and that humankind’s spiritual potential was under threat.

On The Spiritual In Art was first published in 1911, and together with Franz Marc, Kandinsky made plans for the compilation of an almanac of articles by painters and musicians to be printed along side reproductions of folk art, art from Asia and Africa, art by children, ethnographic artefacts and illustrations of artwork by painters such as Van Gogh, Cézanne and Rousseau. This was ultimately published as the Blue Rider Almanac, an attempt to push the existing limits of artistic expression by juxtaposing diverse cultural sources, and through a new spiritual language in art. As editors of the Blue Rider Almanac, Kandinsky and Marc also organised exhibitions, becoming the nucleus of the avant-garde art group called the Blue Rider.

Kandinsky later gave an account of how the title came about for the Blue Rider Almanac, stating that it was simply because both he and Marc loved blue, and that Marc loved horses, and he riders. But there was more than this to the motif of a blue rider. The rider often appears in Kandinsky’s woodcuts and paintings in various guises, such as a romantic fairytale figure, mediaeval knight, messenger or herald. Lyrically (1911) features a horse and Lyrically 1911 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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Sketch for Composition II 1910 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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rider, and the free, dynamic treatment of the subject shows his familiarity with the calligraphic style of Asian art and his skill with the medium. The fluidity of this print, gives the image an appropriate dynamism as the rider rushes forward. It is a symbol of change, of conflict, and of engagement.

Sketch for Composition II (1910) shows the motif of the rider on a white horse leaping from left to right. Just below and to the right, a white rider rears up on a purple/blue horse, amid what is ostensibly a landscape. The recognisable elements of this painting, such as the scene and the figures, no longer serve illustrative purposes, but have sprung from the inner necessity of Kandinsky’s imagination. Kandinsky made many preparatory sketches for the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac, and finally chose to produce a print referring to St George, the dragon-vanquishing Patron Saint of Russia. In On The Spiritual In Art Kandinsky described blue as a spiritual colour, and the Blue Rider Almanac is a symbol of the avant-garde’s battle with the traditional limits of artistic expression, while it also represents the battle between spiritual values and the materialism of contemporary life.

Sociology was developing as a new discipline at the time, with theorists such as Georg Simmel analysing Germany’s recent transition from a rural to an urban society. Urban centres appeared to be entirely governed by industrial production and material consumption. Germany’s first department store was built in 1896, but slums emerged at the same time. The rate of change was startling. Mystical philosophies and religions, which questioned the validity of the ‘outer world’ and promoted a search for hidden truths, were fashionable. Kandinsky’s conviction that abstract art had a role to play in developing humankind’s capacity for spiritual experience was buoyed by the sociological and mystical issues of his time.

Composition VI 1913 State Hermitage, St Petersburg Š ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Composition VI 1913 ‘In general, colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.’ KANDINSKY While still living in Russia, Kandinsky found an important connection between colour and music. Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthia, a condition that makes people perceive colour not only as a visual property of objects, but with sounds of different qualities and intensities. As he looked out over the rooftops of Moscow, he felt that what was profound about the scene before him could not be represented in graphic and realistic detail although he had a desire to capture the scene on canvas. In Kandinsky’s words: ‘The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, set all of one’s soul vibrating... To paint this hour, I thought, must be for an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy.’ It was sometime later, at a musical performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin, that Kandinsky believed his sunset hour had been realised in art, in all of its emotional intensity.

In his book On The Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky associated properties of shape and colour with certain emotional effects. Kandinsky further suggested that the artist should not seek a strictly harmonious abstract art, but that the current social and spiritual conditions demanded ‘opposition’ and ‘contradiction’.

These effects can be seen in Composition VI. The surface of this large canvas is teeming with energy, and even though the individual elements are balanced, the composition is very complex, and does not have a central point of focus. Kandinsky described this painting as having two centres. One, to the left, comprised delicate, indefinite lines over a rosy and blurred centre, and a second focal point is to the right, and is a ‘crude, red-blue, rather discordant area’ with strong and precise lines. Less obvious is a third focal point, seething with red and white, closer to the centre of the canvas.

Kandinsky’s initial idea for this composition developed from an earlier work on the theme of the Deluge and Composition VI retains an effect of immersion. Kandinsky compared the indefinite effects of this canvas to being in a Russian steam bath.

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Links with other works in exhibition

Improvisation 30 (Cannons) 1913 The Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur Jerome Eddy Memorial Collection Š ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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Kandinsky had started referring to musical protocols, in 1909, henceforth titling some of his works Impressions, Improvisations or Compositions, depending on his method of working and his inspiration. Compositions were the most complex and researched works, which is true of Composition VI, where Kandinsky had made numerous studies and sketches before he could begin the final canvas. An Impression, as the title indicates, was the result of an engagement with an external source of inspiration, while an Improvisation was drawn more from internal nature, and was more spontaneous. Improvisation 30 (Cannons) painted during the same year as Composition VI, is certainly less complex, and is also smaller in scale and freer in handling. There are more recognisable elements, such as the group of figures in the bottom left corner, and mountains with dome-topped castles. For the most part, the linear elements float freely within the picture and colour does not serve a descriptive function. However, the cannons of the title have a solid physical appearance, with shading on the barrels and they seem to be affected by gravity. Yet Kandinsky explained to his dealer in a letter that his subtitles were mostly for his own use and not intended as a guide to the ‘content’ of his work. He acknowledged that he could not remove objects from his paintings until 1914. The cannons, Kandinsky explained, may have arisen unconsciously as a result of the imminent war.

Discussion and further development in the classroom

Significant Experiences • Discussion – Do any of your students identify with Kandinsky’s experience of Moscow at sunset? Discuss their own significant experiences (what emotions were involved?) Would they be willing to put their personal experiences into art? Is this what art is for?

• Activity – Compare the experiences discussed. Divide students into groups of similar experience. What art forms might best capture their experiences?

Consider ways to combine art forms into one artwork per group. Wagner’s idea of a gestamtkunstwerk, being a total work of art for the stage (music, backdrops etc.) was influential for Kandinsky as a way to enhance the emotional effect of art.

Music • Discussion – What music do your students listen to? Why – what effect does it have? What other kinds of music are they familiar with? Is music abstract, or does it involve imitation, representation, or the inclusion of actual sounds?

• Activity – Ask your students to bring music into the classroom (an example of abstraction in music, and a counter example) or (music to match/create a particular mood.) Some members of Kandinsky’s Phalanx art group were cabaret performers. He was fascinated by their performance of ‘musical drawings’ where a drawing was made in the rhythm of music being played.

Try it.

Abstract language of form and colour • Discussion – Do your students associate meanings with any colours or shapes? Black, red, green? Circle, zigzag? Do they all agree? Where do these meanings come from?

• Activity – Compile, and then use, a colour/form vocabulary with your students. Is there a vocabulary like this at use in a wider context, such as advertising? In small groups, look at or discuss an advert, and try to isolate a formal vocabulary at work. In what way do adverts ‘convince’ us to buy?

Links to other works

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Dan Flavin’s sculptural materials were familiar fluorescent light tubes of varying lengths and colours. The colours, and colour combinations he used created intense and emotional installations. Monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) was made in response to the Vietnam War, and consisted simply of an otherwise darkened room, with a small pile of intense blood red fluorescent light tubes arranged on the floor jutting out from a wall.

Cossacks 1910–1911 Tate. Presented by Mrs Hazel McKinley, 1938 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Cossacks 1910–1911 ‘It took a long time before this question “What should replace the object?” received a proper answer from within me.’ KANDINSKY

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While still a law student in Moscow, Kandinsky encountered abstraction in painting. He saw a work from Monet’s Haystacks series, but failed to recognise the subject. After reading in the catalogue that this was a haystack, Kandinsky could still not perceive the subject, and later wrote that he had ‘the dull sensation that the picture’s subject was missing. And I was amazed and confused to realise that the picture did not merely fascinate but impressed itself indelibly on my memory and constantly floated before my eyes, quite unexpectedly, complete in every detail.’ He had a similar experience with one of his own paintings some years later when, on returning home to his studio, he was surprised to find a beautiful canvas with no recognisable subject. It was, in fact, his own work that was on its side. Undoubtedly, these experiences were instructive for Kandinsky, but he did not discover abstraction accidentally. Although these experiences illustrated that colour could impress itself on the viewer with considerable power, and that a painting with no reference to recognisable forms could be beautiful, this would not help Kandinsky determine the forms he would use in his own paintings.

While Kandinsky prioritised inner necessity, his move towards painting that made no reference to the objects of the world was far from impulsive or dogmatic. Kandinsky recognised the authority of the inner voice above external impressions, but this emphasis on spirituality did not initially necessitate a complete rejection of recognisable motifs. Prior to, and following his breakthrough to painting free of external references, objects are to be found in his paintings, often dissolving into the composition, and barely recognisable. They have not been drawn from nature but have welled up from his emotional imagination, and Kandinsky maintained that they therefore had a spiritual resonance. Motifs are also dissolved into his paintings to varying degrees so that the viewer would uncover by stages, what references he was making in his work – so that the emotional overtones would be experienced gradually.

Many of the motifs in Kandinsky’s paintings are of Russian origin, and their spiritual resonance is bound up with Kandinsky’s own emotional mythology. In his painting Cossacks, the landscape and figurative elements have been abstracted into familiar but cryptic motifs that can be easier to recognise for a viewer with access to other works by Kandinsky. Cossacks depicts a mountainous landscape with zigzag birds, and to the right, a fortress, where three Cossacks are to be found, with red hats and lances, while two more riders clash on horseback waving sabres, above a central

rainbow. Cossacks were a romantic motif, legendary soldiers with free reign to exercise military power throughout Imperial Russia. They had helped thwart Napoleon’s advance on Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Links with other works in exhibition

Song 1906 Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne/centre de création industrielle. Bequest of Nina Kandinsky, 1981 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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Much of Kandinsky’s early work shows nostalgia for Russia, a quality emphasised by being painted in tempera on board, and varnished to give the paintings a mosaic-like quality. Song is an example of this kind of painting, and it is similar to other works with Russian themes, with subjects that have a fairytale quality. The title refers to a Volga River boatmen’s song, which they sang to help them endure backbreaking work, pulling barges against the tide. Russian artists such as Ilya Repin, whose work Kandinsky had seen exhibited while still living in Russia, depicted this theme with meticulous realism to highlight the harsh conditions of the boatmen’s life. As Kandinsky has painted this scene, it is closer to his memory of Moscow dissolved by sunlight, and its emotional resonance for him may well have been as a generalised signifier of Russia as his spiritual homeland.

Discussion and further development in the classroom

Abstraction • Discussion – What are your students’ opinions about abstraction? What makes a painting abstract? Is abstract art only found in galleries? Is graffiti abstract?

• Activity – the art historian Charles Harrison distinguished between ‘weak’ abstraction and ‘strong’ abstraction. ‘Weak’ abstraction applies to paintings where the subject is simply difficult to see, and ‘strong’ applies to paintings that are presented simply as a composition, and are not the result of a process of distortion. Ask your students to collect examples of abstract images – postcards, magazine images, images from the Internet – and determine whether or not they are ‘weak’ or ‘strong.’

Personal Subjects • Discussion – Do your students have favourite subjects to see or to create in paintings/drawings/sculpture? What subjects do they consider important?

Does it matter if a painting has a subject, which the viewer doesn’t recognise?

• Activity – Individually, ask your students to develop a set of motifs (such as Kandinsky’s memories and myths of Russia) that have personal meaning.

Begin with a scrapbook of images and work towards a set of simplified cryptic line drawings to use in larger compositions.

Accident in art • Discussion – Have any of your students had a similar experience to Kandinsky, and accidentally seen abstraction because they did not recognise the subject of a painting? Has any artwork they were making ever been improved by an accident?

• Activity – Ask your students to work on a large-scale drawing/painting, in small groups. Think of ways to introduce chance into the group artwork – such as with eyes closed, working from all sides at once etc. Introduce a subject to the group drawing half way through (a theme or a current newspaper image.) How does this alter your students’ experience of painting/drawing?

Links to other works

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Luc Tuymans paints profound historical events, such the Holocaust, but rather than selecting recognisable scenes, he uses banal details and he paints in an almost abstract style, making the content of his paintings difficult to see. His motifs are all the more striking for being obscurely painted. His triptych Investigations appears to depict ordinary objects (a lampshade, a tooth, a window) painted in thin washes with little attention to naturalistic detail, but they are all objects from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald museums.

Murnau – Staffelsee I 1908 The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Murnau – Staffelsee I 1908 ‘I had little thought for houses and trees, drawing coloured lines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife, making them sing just as powerfully as I knew how.’

KANDINSKY

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While teaching at the Phalanx art School in 1903, Kandinsky formed a relationship with one of his students, Gabriele Münter, and she became his intimate companion during his years in Munich. Having separated from his wife Anya, he embarked on frequent extensive trips abroad, often accompanied by Münter, before they settled together in Munich in 1908.

They travelled regularly to the Staffel Lake near Murnau in the Bavarian Alps. Murnau was a popular tourist destination, easily accessible by train, but it had represented an entirely different way of life. A small market town with a predominantly agrarian, Catholic population, Murnau captured the group’s imagination as an example of untainted rustic piety. Münter bought a property there in 1909, which became known as the Russian House, and which they decorated in the style of local folk art. Kandinsky designed a stencil of stylised flowers and riders for the banisters. He even wore traditional Bavarian costume. After several unsettled and often distressing years of travelling, Kandinsky was very happy in Murnau. He became a keen gardener, and even though trains thundered past the Murnau garden, the apparent authenticity and ‘spiritual values’ of the pre-industrialised Murnau village remained compelling.

The dramatic landscape round Murnau, combined with the creative energy of his fellow artists, including the Russians Werefkin and Jawlensky, would prove a very fertile environment for Kandinsky. His painting underwent a profound transformation during his long summers away from Munich.

Kandinsky’s use of colour in his Murnau landscapes is gradually released from its descriptive role and develops a rich intensity, while the shapes of discernible landscape features such as mountains, trees, and buildings, are subordinated to the picture as a whole, eventually informing the landscape symbols of his later work.

While Kandinsky found a welcome spirituality in the rural environment, the theme of landscape provided a pretext for modernist experimentation.

His landscape paintings, such as Murnau – Staffelsee I, show an intensely emotional response to the beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Clouds merge into the general looseness of the scene. Kandinsky’s inner voice dominates his sensual impressions of a landscape.

He admired Matisse, Picasso and the work of the Fauves, who had exhibited in Paris as group for the first time in the Salon d’ Automne in 1905, along with Kandinsky and Jawlenksy. Jawlenksy was active as part of the French art scene, and would have made Kandinsky aware of European

theories of abstraction. He also suggested to Kandinsky that he paint with a short-haired brush rather than a palette knife, which contributed to the further loosening of forms in Kandinsky’s painting.

The Russian House proved a productive environment for Kandinsky’s development of abstract painting, and experiments with abstraction in other forms, such as theatre and text. He began writing poems, published with the title Sounds, and illustrated with woodcuts, using a method, common to childhood, where through constant repetition, a word is emptied of all meaning and becomes ‘pure sound’ to ‘set the soul vibrating’ in the same way that he believed painting freed from recognizable objects, would bring him closer to ‘the spiritual in art.’

Link to another work in the exhibition

Two Girls 1917 Private Collection, London © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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Alongside the influences of progressive French art, Kandinsky was also influenced by the forms and graphic style of Bavarian folk art, which in spite of the growing tourist trade in folk objects, appeared to Kandinsky and Munter to be authentically unaffected by the economic values of modernisation. It was Jawlensky who first drew their attention to Bavarian hinterglasmalerei (glass painting) which had been developed during the medieval period, but which was used during the nineteenth century for decorative panels. The local brewer in Murnau had a collection, and both Munter and Kandinsky learned the technique from a Murnau glass painter.

He returned to glass painting periodically, but the influence of these Bavarian folk images had a more subtle resonance in his paintings, particularly the use of simplified forms, flat patchwork areas and prominent black outlines.

Discussion and further development in the classroom

Sharing Ideas • Discussion – Throughout his life, Kandinsky was actively involved with several art groups and benefited from sharing ideas with other artists. Does this come as a surprise to your students? Who/where do they get ideas from?

How do they exchange ideas?

• Activity – Divide your students into small groups, and using a newspaper, select a topic/issue for each group to investigate collectively to produce a group sketchbook representing their responses to the issue. In the style of the Blue Rider Almanac, the sketchbook could contain opinions, pooled knowledge, images and cuttings, and ideas for art projects addressing there given topic/issue.

A better way of life • Discussion – Murnau represented a better, more spiritual way of life, to Kandinsky and his friends. What do your students think/know about urban life now, and rural life now? What makes one place or way of life better than another? What are the good things in your students’ local area?

• Activity – Kandinsky chose to paint the landscape around Murnau as more and more abstract during his time there, which to him, was a way to focus on its spiritual qualities. How would your students represent the best in their local environment? Through collage or assemblage, create work that emphasises the good in their environment (people, places, values.) Is there a local/environmental project that your students could get involved with?

Inspiration from folk art • Discussion – What do your students think of as ‘folk art’? What contemporary forms of expression exist outside of art galleries? How is their everyday environment decorated or made more interesting? Could this be an inspiration for a work of art in the same way that Bavarian Glass painting was inspirational for Kandinsky?

• Activity – Individually, ask your students to find examples of objects, images, hobbies that make the texture of life interesting. Use these as a basis for individual art projects. It could be sweet wrappers, knitting, comics, films, etc.

Links to other works

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Tomoko Takahashi creates installations from ordinary objects. Her installation My Playstation at the Serpentine Gallery was an arrangement of 6000 pieces of ‘stuff’ that viewers wandered through like an enchanted maze. Her affection for life’s ephemera goes hand-in-hand with an environmental conscience and casts a critical eye over consumption in contemporary culture.

Theory and Politics: Politics and Abstraction ‘So this is it! Isn’t it terrible? I’ve been roused out of a dream. I’ve been living in an inner world where things are completely impossible. I have been stripped of my illusions.

Mountains of corpses, dreadful suffering of all kinds, inner culture put on hold for an indefinite period...’ KANDINSKY

Black Spot 1921 Kunsthaus Zürich © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

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In 1914, Kandinsky was unprepared for the outbreak of War. As a Russian, he was now classified as an alien in Germany, and two days after war was declared, he and Münter left Germany for Switzerland, where they spent 3 months in the hope of an end to hostilities. Ultimately, their relationship ended as, accepting that the end to conflict was not in sight, Kandinsky retuned to Russia and Münter returned to Munich. During 1915 Kandinsky painted nothing, and between 1916 and 1921, although his mood was much improved by meeting Nina Andreevsky, who he was to marry in 1917 to become his intimate companion for the rest of his life, he only produced 41 oil paintings. Even considered in combination with various etchings, glass paintings and watercolours, this does not compare to his productive experimentation during his years travelling between Munich and Murnau.

Although Kandinsky had been aware of the formal experiments of the Parisian avant-garde, the majority of avant-garde developments towards abstraction took place in Germany, Austria, Holland and Russia where the theoretical basis for a pure non-objective art was given a distinct formulation. By 1915, Mondrian was composing paintings entirely from short straight black lines set at either the horizontal or vertical Axis, and Malevich had painted Black Square, which consists of a black square on a white ground. Kandinsky’s paintings and publications were already well known in Russia when he arrived there, and he had maintained an involvement with the developments of the Russian avant-garde, some of whom were in turn involved with Blue Rider exhibitions and publications. On The Spiritual In Art had been published in Russia in 1914 and Kandinsky’s proposal of abstraction as the elimination of representational and associative forms in favour of inner emotional content had been interpreted

by Malevich in particular in a rigorously geometric style, which he called Suprematism – the supremacy of pure feeling.

Kandinsky’s painting of this Russian period is varied, but the pictorial language of his abstraction is clearly influenced by such developments.

Malevich used the diagonal as a

compositional device, with simple identifiable geometric forms moving across a plain background. In Black Spot of 1921, there are far fewer marks than his earlier Munich abstractions, arranged into a more readily identifiable diagonal composition. The forms of his earlier work, some of which can be traced back to stylised ciphers for mountains and figures, (such as the wavy lines and arc which had once described landscape and sabres among other things) have begun to develop a life of their own and have settled into a pictorial vocabulary that Kandinsky is using more sparingly at this time, and in simpler compositions.

Circles on Black 1921 Circles on Black, of the same Solomon R. year, shows the impact of geometry Guggenheim Museum, on his work. The ambiguous New York painterly quality of his Munich © ADAGP, Paris and abstraction has all but gone, and DACS, London 2006 identifiable geometric shapes, such as rectangles, spots and points, combine with his own repertoire of shapes. This new geometry would continue to play a significant role his work form this time onwards and he was later to accord the circle in particular the status which the rider motif had held during his time in Munich, explaining that the circle is a ‘synthesis of the greatest oppositions’, bringing together eccentric and concentric forces into equilibrium. However, Kandinsky’s abstraction remained distinct from Suprematism as he was wary that geometry in his work would result in rigid schematic compositions. He retained an expressive freedom in the combination of elements in his work. These differences were to prove artistically and politically significant.

Kandinsky had been independently wealthy, the son of a rich tea merchant, but as a consequence of revolution in Russia, where Tsarist rule was replaced by a Communist system, he lost his property during a redistribution of land. Consequently his plans to build a large studio had to take second place to financial concerns such as selling work and finding employment. Having remained distant from politics prior to this time in his life, he was to find himself involved with the formulation of cultural policy in the newly reorganised Russia. Alongside various academic appointments, as head of the state commission for acquisitions he was also responsible for opening new museums across Russia. In 1919 he founded the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK.) Kandinsky’s particular interpretation of abstraction brought him into conflict with faculty members at INKhUK. They insisted on the rigorous 19

rejection of subjective and atmospheric elements in painting, complaining of Kandinsky’s work as ‘harmonious’, ‘painterly’ and based on ‘spiritualistic malformations.’ Abstraction and the forms it should take had acquired ideological significance, as artists had sought to engage with the same struggles as the rest of the Russian people, and to use a utilitarian and accessible vocabulary that was appropriate to this end – which unfortunately for Kandinsky involved the rejection of individualism.

However, the political situation in Russia was about to place such theoretical considerations in the hands of the state rather than the avantgarde, and in 1921 the Communist Party’s new economic policy required that art, literature and film were to be employed for propaganda purposes, which would result in social realism. Abstraction was considered damaging and subversive.

Fortunately for Kandinsky, he was offered a teaching post at the Bauhaus in Berlin, and he left Moscow, taking 12 of his paintings from the period 1919 to 1921 with him. Before taking up his post in the Bauhaus mural workshop, Kandinsky exhibited these 12 paintings, plus two more. The critical response to his new developments in abstraction was nostalgia for the colour and exuberance of his Murnau work, in preference to the cool and intellectual quality that these later works display. Kandinsky’s response was that ‘People only want what they know.’

In 1933 the Bauhaus came under pressure from the Nazi party in Germany and the faculty agreed to dissolve the institution, from which Kandinsky had been recently dismissed by orders of the Gestapo. He once more became an exile, this time in Paris where he continued to work as an artist, although the conditions were not originally favourable. Cubism and Surrealism were fashionable in Paris, but Kandinsky continued to paint abstractions and to contribute defences of abstraction to journals. Among other smaller works, he painted two more large Compositions (IX and X) that show the geometric influences of his Russian work, and the marks of his Murnau period, but inflected now with some of the whimsical elements of Surrealism. The first of these Compositions was purchased by the Jeu de Paume museum, and became the first large abstract painting to enter the collection of a French Museum in 1939.

In 1937 several of his earlier works had also been included in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Germany, along side other works of modern art to have been removed from German museums by Nazis. The confiscated work was installed with defamatory slogans in order to present it as evidence of ‘cultural decline’. One such curatorial intervention incorporated a copy of Kandinsky’s Black Spot crudely painted onto the display wall incorporating graffiti style slogans and exclamations.

Kandinsky died in Paris, aged 78, in 1944.

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