In 1910, Kandinsky painted a watercolor that went one step further than his previous work by eliminating any reference whatsoever to known subject matter. This is possibly the first entirely abstract painting—as opposed to objects with abstract decoration—by anyone, ever. That same year, he wrote On the Spiritual in Art. This book, which declared painting “a spiritual act,” embraced the supernatural and irrational as valid components of art.31 In advocating what was sensory and intuitive and opposing materialism, On the Spiritual in Art liberated many readers; following its initial publication at Christmastime of 1911, it went through two more printings within a year.
Observing Kandinsky firsthand, Grohmann had the opinion that the artist’s beliefs derived directly from his own mental state.
According to all who knew him, his was a complex mind, given to violent contrasts, and his deep-rooted mistrust of rationalism drove him in the direction of the irrational, that which is not logically graspable. We know that he suffered from periodic states of depression, imagining that he was a victim of persecution, and that he had to run away. He felt that part of his being was closely tied to the invisible; life here and now and in the hereafter, the outer world and the inner soul, did not seem to him opposed.32
Although the stated goals of the Bauhaus stressed the practicality of objects and the utilization of modern technology for aesthetically worthy results, Kandinsky’s presence there would cause many people to explore mystical realms and to accept the inevitability of neuroses as an aspect of creativity. Kandinsky declared his purpose to be the creation of “purely pictorial beings” with their own souls and religious spirit. He believed that such art would have major ramifications. At the same time that he bravely accepted the reality of the mind’s tortures, Kandinsky had “an absolute faith in the onset of a new era, in which the spirit will move mountains” and in which painting would defeat materialism “by asserting the primacy of inner values, and by directly appealing to what is good in man.”33
In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky conceives of a “spiritual triangle” divided into three tiers, with atheists in the lower segment, and, in the layers above, “positivists, naturalists, men of science, and art students.” This middle category does not have an easy time; “they are dominated by fear,” for they grapple with “the inexplicable” while remaining unable to accept it, and thus suffer great “confusion.” He writes of the plight of these people as if he were narrating the plight of the damned at the Last Judgment: “The abandoned churchyard quakes, the forgotten grave yawns open. … All the artificially contrived suns have exploded into so many specks of dust.”34
Denizens of this middle tier suffer from their illusion that it is possible to create or live in an “impregnable fortress.” The occupants of the highest realms of Kandinsky’s triangle recognize the fallacy of that assumption. Among this select group of “seers” and “prophets,” creative geniuses who have entered the realm of “light” and “the spiritual,” Kandinsky names Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, explaining how each eschewed superficial beauty in preference for a true representation of “inner life” as well as “the divine.”35
Kandinsky considered music the ultimate art form, which is why he included more composers than painters in his pantheon. But he attributes to color some of the same transformative effects he cherishes in music. To chart the process of the impact of color on the viewer, he draws an analogy to the workings of a piano: “Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings.”36
THESE IDEAS that Kandinsky developed in a phenomenal burst of energy in 1910–11 would underlie his teaching and his comportment more than a decade later in Weimar and Dessau. “My personal qualities consist in the ability to make the inner element sound forth more strongly by limiting the external. Conciseness is my favorite device. … Conciseness demands the imprecise.” For Klee and Gropius, but also for the Bauhaus population at large, he was an exemplar of the idea that the most mysterious people are often the most restrained in demeanor; in his case, the veneer and carefully controlled behavior were deliberate. “I have an explicit dislike for ‘shoving things under people’s noses,’” he wrote. Kandinsky abhorred those people who, “like street vendors, proclaim their excellence in loud tones to the entire marketplace.”37
In his art, though, he had no inhibitions. There was nothing boastful or immodest about his work; it openly soared with a feeling of liberation. Between 1911 and 1914, Kandinsky made paintings of stupendous physical and emotional charge. These extraordinary artworks are paeans to energy, to the power of line and color to evoke spiritual and physical force.
EVERYTHING CHANGED with the onset of world war. It wasn’t until Kandinsky went to the Bauhaus eight years later that he regained the strength of his fertile prewar period.
On August 3, 1914, Kandinsky, who as a Russian could not remain in Germany, went to Switzerland. He felt no need to go as far as Russia, because he thought the war would not last. Münter had stayed behind; on his own, he went from one friend’s house to another, waiting out the situation. In September he was in the village of Goldach, on the Bodensee.
In that tense time period, the Klees came to visit, both to offer Kandinsky some companionship in his solitude and to enjoy the beautiful mountain lake themselves. The friend’s villa where they all were staying was in a small park, where Felix, now seven years old, liked to play.
After the Klee family had been there for a couple of days, Felix was running around in the park when he came upon a toolshed he had not seen before. He could hardly wait to explore it, and was about to open the door when he heard unexpected sounds coming from inside. Felix, whose imagination was not unlike his father’s, pictured ghosts. He quickly bolted the door to keep them from escaping the shed and attacking him. Then he ran off in terror. But he did not tell anyone about his moment outside what he considered a haunted house.
Felix had his dinner earlier than the adults, then went to bed. Later in the evening, when everyone else was summoned to the dining room, Kandinsky failed to appear. The host and Paul and Lily Klee went to search for him, assuming he was outside painting or enjoying the evening air and was out of earshot. He was nowhere to be found.
Just as darkness was setting in, the search party spotted a white tissue waving from an upper window of the toolshed. Felix had locked Kandinsky into his improvised studio.
Years later, at the Bauhaus, the Klees and Kandinsky would roar with laughter at the memory of that event. Given all that had happened since, it was nice to have such an lighthearted problem to think back on. It wasn’t long after that summer in Switzerland that Kandinsky realized that the conflict sweeping through Europe wasn’t going to end quickly, and that, as a Russian, not only was he unable to return to Germany, but he could not even remain in neutral Switzerland. In mid-November, he left Zurich to go via the Balkans to Odessa, where he arrived on December 12. He then traveled on to Moscow, arriving there on December 22.
Münter continued to stay in Munich. They got together in Stockholm, where they both had exhibitions at the start of 1916, but shortly after the opening of Münter’s show there, Kandinsky returned to Moscow. They never saw each other again.
Gabriele Münter, who lived to be eighty-five, would, for the rest of her life, lament that they were no longer together. For her, it had been both a great love affair and an extraordinary period of artistic cross-pollination. They were co-workers as well as lovers, and if, to the people he knew at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky was always like a Russian general with a slight air of superiority, and an intellectual painter preoccupied by theory, to the fetching Asian-looking young woman who had bicycled to his class in Munich, he was a warm companion in their mutual effort to use animated forms and vigorous color to convey the magnificence of the act of seeing in art that was a celebration of love and sunlight and rural living.