9

In that room in Weimar where he enjoyed an author’s idyllic circumstances—quiet, solitude, minimal financial and time pressure, even if he wished he were painting instead—Kandinsky wrote Point and Line to Plane. He was glad when it finally went to press, because he kept revising until the last possible minute. But for all the discontent that privately surrounded its creation, Point and Line to Plane is an upbeat, enthusiastic treatise. The book puts forward the case that “form is only a means to an end” and amplified Kandinsky’s own goal “to capture the inner secrets of form.”⁸¹

In relation to the goals of Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky wrote Grohmann, “Once you referred to ‘Romanticism,’ and I am glad you did. It is no part of my program to paint with tears and to make people cry, and I really don’t care for sweets, but Romanticism goes far, far, very far beyond tears.” Talking about his art in its ideal form, the Russian made the exact comparison he made when talking about himself:

The circle which I have been using of late is nothing if not Romantic. Actually, the coming Romanticism is profound, beautiful (the obsolete term “beautiful” should be restored to usage), meaningful, joy-giving—it is a block of ice with a burning flame inside. If people perceive only the ice and not the flame, that is just too bad.⁸²

This wonderful life force pervades Point and Line to Plane. In his text, Kandinsky starts with the simple point. He then describes the life that grows from it, the chords that develop. He also analyzes the straight line, outlining the personality shifts that occur according to its position: “As a horizontal it is cold and flat; as vertical it is warm; as diagonal it is lukewarm.” He also discusses the drama that occurs when lines meet at angles or are curved. “Straight, zigzag, and curved lines are to each other as birth, youth, and maturity.”⁸³

That multifacetedness of the purely visual applied to life itself. Kandinsky accepted the apparent contradictions of his own personality, and he celebrated the immense diversity of human experience. Following a summer holiday with Nina at Binz-on-Rugen, the normally hardworking, self-punishing painter wrote Galka Scheyer, “Our laziness had no limit.”⁸⁴ He delighted in creating a picture of his wife and himself on vacation, comparing their existence to a zigzag line curving in a carefree way to a relative halt. He was pleased to have a side that was the opposite of being pedantic or spiritually constipated; there was, indeed, always an and.

When Kandinsky wrote that letter, Scheyer was in Honolulu, which, Kandinsky wrote her, “for me might as well be Mars or Jupiter.”⁸⁵ That idea of the unknown, the notion of living on another planet, was in keeping with what Kandinsky had discovered visually. The quip had the larkiness and escapism he considered essential to human existence if one were to have a chance of prevailing over life’s harshness—just as verticality is vital to the life of a line that is otherwise horizontal.

SCHEYER, WHO WORKED WITH KANDINSKY much as she did with Klee, had in 1925, in her effort to find an audience for modernism, moved from the East Coast of the United States to Sacramento, California. Kandinsky wrote her:

Let’s hope that the people in California have a better sense and can see the difference between art and currency. The so-called mentality of New Yorkers is something so deadly and repulsive that it gives one goose bumps. But this is inevitably the last stop for the purely materialistic mindset. The Germans and, as far as I know, the Russians have already begun to suffocate in this atmosphere.⁸⁶

Revealing his usual blend of enthusiasm and skepticism, hope and doubt, he continued:

The youth are still ashamed (at least in Germany) to admit their—in part unconscious—hunger for a different purpose in life. They generally want to appear very serious, logical and matter-of-fact. They also demonstrate courage, but a false courage; since it only serves to conceal the inner division, it is easily seen through. It appears to me nonetheless that for many the burden of this little coat appears to be too much of a bother, and I see here and there a gradual inner transformation. In such cases Germans are too cautious, and even the young person has an exaggerated fear of looking foolish.⁸⁷

Kandinsky craved the spiritual aspect of life, in a territory devoid of materialism.

Yet, with a perpetually needy wife and desiring certain luxuries himself, he was not without some of the same conflicts he observed in others. His thinking was like his painting: tortured and then celebratory, lighthearted and then overwrought. His keen alertness to appearances, the human veneer, combined with his craving for the soul and the revelation of the inner self, gave the man the spotty energy of his canvases.

At times, however, he could not contend with the complexity of his own observations and feelings, the pull in contradictory directions. He told Scheyer, “Sometimes it drives one to despair and one wants to see nothing other than one’s studio. It’s no less despairing sometimes, when one thinks about for whom one is really working, for whom and what purpose! But luckily, the artist can no more shake off his work than the drinker his schnapps. So, pour me ‘nother one!”⁸⁸

This was classical Kandinsky: to move, in one brief but sweeping monologue, from anguish to a solution, then return to anguish, and, finally, achieve a joyful acceptance of the addiction to art.