Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, on December 4, 1866—in the same decade that Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment were published, and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov was first performed. His earliest memories consisted of shapes and colors of the sort that would eventually become the substance of his art. When he was three years old, the family’s coachman would strip spirals of bark from thin branches, “cutting away both layers of bark from the first spiral, and from the second only the top layer.” Little Wassily saw the forms as abstracted horses, with the outer bark a “brownish yellow … which I disliked, and would gladly have seen replaced,” and the second layer a “juicy green … which I loved most particularly and which, even in a withered state, still had something magical about it.” The wood of the now-naked branch was “ivory-white … which smelled damp, tempting one to lick it, but soon withered miserably and dried, so that my pleasure in this white was spoiled from the outset.”8 Colors would induce intense emotions in him for the rest of his life.
Bright hues made him rapturous; black induced fear. At age three, he also went to Italy with his parents and his Russian governess, and retained an impression of a frightening black carriage in which he and his mother crossed a bridge over “dirty yellow” water in Florence when he was on his way to kindergarten. Even more terrifying were “steps leading down into black water, on which floats a frightening, long, black boat with a black box in the middle. … I … bawled my head off.”9
When Wassily was five, his family moved to Odessa, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He had not been there long when he painted a water-color of a horse. His aunt—his mother’s older sister, Elizaveta Ivanovna Tikheeva, who lived in the house and helped him with his art—had asked him to hold off doing the hooves until she was there to advise him. Initially, the boy was content to comply. Then, suddenly, he couldn’t wait a moment longer.
He loaded his brush with black paint and globbed it onto the bottoms of the horse’s legs. “I thought, if I make the hooves really black, they are bound to be completely true to life. I put as much black on my brush as it would hold. An instant—and I was looking at four black, disgusting, ugly spots, quite foreign to the paper, on the feet of the horse. I was in despair and felt cruelly punished.” The repulsion fascinated him. “Later, the prospect of putting black on the canvas would still put the fear of God into me,” he said.10 That fear carried an excitement. In the night scenes and landscapes he would start making when he was in his twenties, and in the abstractions he crafted at the Bauhaus, he would often slather black on—perhaps deliberately to conjure what was disturbing, or else because he relished a certain victory in having overcome his fear of it. In the house in Dessau where the Klees occupied the other half, he and his young Russian wife painted a wall of their dining room pure, unadulterated black.
IN A PORTRAIT PAINTED in Rome, Kandinsky’s mother, Lidia Ivanovna Tikheeva, has a majestic stare. Her face is perfectly proportioned, with aquiline nose and rosebud lips framed by a complex chignon, and her gown and jewelry are splendid. “Characterized by inexhaustible energy and marked nervousness,” Lidia was a force to reckon with.11 Wassily, however, did not have to deal with her most of the time, because when he was a small boy she divorced his father, who was left to bring him up. In a memoir he wrote in 1913, Wassily Vasilevic Kandinsky portrays his father as “a deeply human and loving soul.”12 Wassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant, fostered his son’s interest in making art. He hired a private drawing tutor for young Wassily and let him, at age ten, choose between a school that emphasized the humanities and one that focused on science. When Wassily picked the former, his father was delighted.
Wassily’s maternal grandmother, a Balt who spoke German, and Elizaveta Ivanovna indulged him in Lidia Ivanovna’s absence. The boy had a penchant for a horseracing game and loved being read fairy tales—mostly in German, his first language. It was a magical childhood, except when he suffered from “inward trembling” and terrifying dreams. To escape, and go “beyond space and time”—his words—he latched on to drawing as the sole solution.13 Like the young Paul Klee, he made pictures as instinctively as he breathed and ate.
At age thirteen, Wassily bought a paint box with money he had saved up from his allowance. He later described the sensation of the pigments being extruded from their tubes: “One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings … which one calls colors—exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, 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.”14 He “longed to be a painter” and “loved art above all else.” Yet when Kandinsky left Odessa at age nineteen for the University of Moscow, he decided that “art was an unallowable extravagance for a Russian.”15 He studied economics and law, even though he painted in his free time. The “intricate, conscious, refined ‘construction’” of Roman law “enchanted” him, but left him unsatisfied “as a Slav because of its far too cold, far too rational, inflexible logic.”16 He turned to the old peasant code in Russian law, which was unusual for its flexibility and the way it treated the same crimes differently according to a measurement of the good or evil at their root. This less rigid approach fascinated him, and when Kandinsky was twenty-three, it inspired him to go on a trip to Vologda, a northern province full of monasteries and medieval towns, so he could write a report on peasant laws and paganism in the Syryenian tribes.
The journey was funded by the Society for Natural Science, Ethnography, and Anthropology. Kandinsky traveled from village to village studying folk art and sketching peasant architecture and people dressed in traditional costumes. Visiting the colorfully carved houses with profusely ornamented furniture and icons, and traveling through the woods, marshes, and sandy desert, he felt as if he were “living inside of pictures.”17
Kandinsky’s report was published, and he had the rare distinction of being elected a member of the society. In 1892, now twenty-six, he passed his law exam and married a cousin, Anja Shemyakina, one of the few female students at the University of Moscow. The following year, a paper he wrote on the laws concerning workers’ wages won him an appointment as instructor at the university.
What Wassily Vasilevic Kandinsky desperately desired, however, was to paint “the most beautiful hour of the Moscow day. …To paint this hour, I thought, must be for an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy.” He was fixed on the moment when the sun is “getting low and has attained its full intensity which it has been seeking all day, for which it has striven all day.” That craving to make paintings of comparable force would eventually provide the basis of his teaching at the Bauhaus. “The sunlight grows red with effort, redder and redder, cold at first, and then increasing in warmth. The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s soul vibrating.”18
In Kandinsky’s mind, there was not just “always an and;” there was often a however.
No, this red fusion is not the most beautiful hour! It is only the final chord of the symphony, which brings every color vividly to life, which allows and forces the whole of Moscow to resound like the fff of a giant orchestra. Pink, lilac, yellow, white, blue, pistachio green, flame red houses, churches, each an independent song—the garish green of the grass, the deeper tremolo of the trees, the singing snow with its thousand voices, or the allegretto of the bare branches, the red, still, silent ring of the Kremlin walls, and above, towering over everything, like a shout of triumph, like a self-oblivious hallelujah, the long, white, graceful, serious line of the bell Tower of Ivan the Great.19
In the limited time Kandinsky could devote to painting given his obligations as a law professor, he did his best to evoke those sights. But it would be a while before Kandinsky’s art could begin to live up to what he saw in his mind. “These impressions … were a delight that shook me to the depths of my soul, that raised me to ecstasy. And at the same time, they were a torment, since I was conscious of the weakness of art in general, and of my own abilities in particular, in the face of nature.”20 It would require him to have a totally different approach if his art was to match the forces inherent in the universe.
Two decades later, Kandinsky would develop a form of painting that completely eliminated the idea of representing known sights. Abstraction “put an end to the useless torment of the useless tasks that I then, despite their unattainability, inwardly set myself. It cancelled out this torment, and thus my joy in nature and art rose to unclouded heights. … To my enjoyment is added a profound sense of gratitude.21 As the senior figure in Weimar and Dessau, he would invoke that redolent sense of gratitude and the specter of those “unclouded heights.”
Such intense feelings had a hefty price. In his reminiscences about his craving to express his feelings through art, Kandinsky alludes to the inner turmoil that Will Grohmann considered the clue to his comportment at the Bauhaus. “My soul was kept in a state of constant vibration by other, purely human disturbances, to the extent that I never had an hour’s peace,” Kandinsky acknowledged. The slightest visual event triggered either overwhelming joy or intense anguish in him: “Everything ‘dead’ trembled. Everything showed me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, inclined more often to silence than to speech—not only the stars, moon, woods, flowers of which poets sing, but even a cigar butt lying in the ashtray, a patient white trouser-button looking up at you from a puddle on the street, a submissive piece of bark carried through the long grass in the ant’s strong jaws to some uncertain and vital end, the page of a calendar, torn forcibly by one’s consciously outstretched hand from the warm companionship of the block of remaining pages.”22
IN THAT PERIOD in Moscow, even if Kandinsky did not feel entitled to devote his life to art and release that extraordinary responsiveness, to enjoy rather than repress his fiery nature, he was developing the sensibility that would determine his life’s course and become the substance of his Bauhaus teaching. “Every still and every moving part (= line) became for me just as alive and revealed to me its soul. This was enough for me to ‘comprehend,’ with my entire being and all my sense, the possibility and existence of that art which today is called ‘abstract,’ as opposed to ‘objective.’ “23
In the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the young lawyer came to believe that “the great divisions of light and dark” in Rembrandt’s paintings resonated like “a mighty chord.”24 They evoked for him the trumpets in Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, a performance of which he attended at the Court Theatre. Listening to Wagner, Kandinsky envisioned the Moscow twilight as he wanted to paint it: “The violins, the deep tones of the basses, and especially the wind instruments … embodied for me all the power of that prenocturnal hour. I saw all my colors in my mind, they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”25
He still was not ready to let those forces determine his life’s course, but he recognized that his internal storm needed an outlet. “Even as a child, I had been tortured by joyous hours of inward tension that promised embodiment. Such hours filled me with inward tremors, indistinct longings that demanded something incomprehensible of me, stifling my heart by day and filling my soil with turmoil by night.”26
Then Kandinsky experienced a powerful moment of relief from his suffering. He was in front of a Monet in a show of French impressionist painting in Moscow. Standing close to the canvas, he could not recognize its subject as a haystack, although the catalogue listed it as such. Initially, he “found this nonrecognition painful.” But then “I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture … gripped me.” He succumbed to “the unexpected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor.”27
The law professor abruptly decided to start anew and to head to Munich to throw himself full-time into painting. “At the age of thirty, the thought overcame me: now or never. My gradual inner development, of which until now I had been unconscious, had progressed so far that I could sense my artistic powers with complete clarity, while inwardly I was sufficiently mature to realize with equal clarity that I had every right to be a painter.”28