Chapter 41

Painting with Troika

 

The first picture I picked out to look at with my eyes at the Art Institute was by this guy Wassily Kandinsky. It said on the card he was French, born in Russia in 1869, and died in 1944. The picture is called Painting with Troika, and he did it on January 18, 1911.

The reason I picked this to look at was that I liked it. I liked it right away, the first second I saw it. They had a few others by him, and I liked them, too, but this is the one I picked to look at. I looked at it for a pretty long time, maybe twenty minutes, and all the time I was feeling that it was in some way friendly and familiar. Here are a few things I noticed about the painting—the colors were bright and clear, it was sort of simple in a way, like a kid’s kindergarten painting. This made me feel happy. Also like a kid’s painting, he didn’t try to show things arranged with the earth or floor at the bottom like a straight line, and the objects in the painting piled up on top as though they were solid and had weight. I forgot to say, it is an abstract painting, and the thing that is supposed to be a troika, which I looked up, and it is a kind of wagon or carriage pulled by three horses, could be a troika, or maybe not—it’s kind of up to you. Behind the troika there is this blue thing with what might be roofs on top, then to the right is a flowering tree, or a bunch of flowers, then this thing that is pretty certainly a hill, and in front of that what might be a couple of people, one of which is holding some kind of musical instrument—maybe. It’s all maybe. Oh yes, and there were mountains, or maybe ocean waves, at the bottom. Kandinsky didn’t try to draw anything so it absolutely looked like some real thing. Also things did not appear to be solid, or stationary. It was as though everything was in motion, maybe spinning slowly.

And then I realized why I liked it, and why it seemed familiar. My father has these bound copies of Krazy Kat, which is a newspaper comic strip from the 1920s, done by this guy named Harriman. Krazy Kat and Ignatz the Mouse are the main characters, and mostly they hit each other in the head with bricks. And yet it is funny, and I have always liked looking at it, because the drawings, while very simple, are also very interesting. And they look almost like if Kandinsky wanted to draw a comic strip, it might look something like Krazy Kat. They were alive at the same time, so maybe Herriman had seen paintings by Kandinsky. Or, for all I knew, Kandinsky had seen Krazy Kat. Or maybe each of them had seen something else that gave them the idea to draw like that. Or maybe some optician had given them both the same kind of wrong glasses—I can’t say. But it was interesting to think about. And the Kandinsky picture made me think of music. Krazy Kat would be like someone whistling a tune, and the painting would be like someone playing maybe an accordian or a harmonica. It made me feel good—full of energy. I could have done a little dance in front of the picture.

When I came out of the Art Institute, I had a similar experience to the time I had looked at the de Kooning. Not as extreme or surprising, but things had a fresh look. I was going to have to look up my mentor, Golyat Thornapple, and ask him if this was supposed to happen every time.