For me, the province of art and the province of nature thus became more and more widely separated, until I was able to experience both as completely independent realms. This occurred to the full extent only this year.—Vasily Kandinsky, in 1913
The birth of abstract art—art that makes no direct, immediately discernible reference to recognizable objects—has long been recognized as a fateful event in the history of art. Yet the intellectual origins of this event, which promptly established abstraction as one of the central traditions of twentieth-century painting and sculpture, have remained a vague and little-understood subject for the vast public that now takes abstract art for granted as part of the familiar scenery of modern cultural life. That the emergence of abstraction early in the second decade of this century represented for its pioneer creators a solution to a spiritual crisis; that the conception of this momentous artistic innovation entailed a categorical rejection of the materialism of modern life; and that abstraction was meant by its visionary inventors to play a role in redefining our relationship to the universe—all of this, were its implications even dimly grasped, would no doubt come as a shock to many people who now happily embrace the history of modern art as little more than a succession of styles, or art fashions, which may have something to do with the history of taste but do not have much to tell us about life.
As for the academic study of modernism, Professor Rosalind Krauss no doubt spoke for many of her colleagues in the universities when, in the 1980s, she declared that she found it “indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence.” Yet the artists who first created abstract painting—Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian preeminently among them—did not share that embarrassment. They really did conceive of their artistic endeavors as serving a spiritual mission, and if, some eighty-plus years after the birth of abstraction, we still take an interest in the art of its progenitors, we are obliged, I believe, to examine the ideas that shaped it, however odd or alien those ideas may look to us today.
This is certainly the case with Kandinsky, whose work is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that takes the birth of abstraction as its principal focus. Organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Kandinsky: Compositions is a small exhibition about a very large subject. Yet it has the virtue of concentrating our attention on one of the pivotal moments in modern cultural history: the years 1910 to 1913, when Kandinsky was deeply engaged in painting the pictures that led him into the realm of abstraction and, at the same time, formulating the theories that supported this audacious endeavor. The exhibition includes some of the most beautiful paintings that have ever been created in the name of abstraction, and the greatest of them—Composition V (1911), from an unidentified private collection; Composition VI (1913), from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; and Composition VII (1913), from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow—have the additional interest of being relatively unfamiliar to the American public. The many studies that are also included in the exhibition give us a vivid account of the inspired, painstaking pictorial thought that Kandinsky lavished on this crucial turn in his artistic development. If only because of the masterpieces of lyric abstraction the show contains, it would have to be considered an important occasion. What may not be so apparent is that it also marks an event in modern intellectual history.
Kandinsky was very much a man of ideas—a cosmopolitan artist and intellectual straight out of the emancipated bourgeois intelligentsia that dominated the life of art and social thought in Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. His keen interest in music, theater, poetry, philosophy, ethnology, and myth was an essential element in his thinking about art. So was his deep interest in the occult—an interest that he shared with Mondrian and certain other creators of early abstract art. The character of Kandinsky’s mysticism was different from Mondrian’s, however—more socially and emotionally engaged, and less inclined to take refuge in strategies of withdrawal from the trials of life. Kandinsky relished intellectual combat and critical controversy. Even his celebrated treatise On the Spiritual in Art, which he published in the period covered by the current exhibition, bristles with argument, assertion, and polemical heat.
The paintings that Kandinsky first produced in his pursuit of abstraction, culminating in the Compositions he created in 1913, are likewise very different in character from Mondrian’s. Whereas Mondrian’s aesthetic of abstraction derived from the “logic” of Cubism, Kandinsky’s had its origin in the more disorderly, emotion-charged conventions of Expressionism. While Mondrian’s mode of abstraction found its ideal in a pictorial style of straight lines, primary colors, and rectangular structures, Kandinsky’s abounded in graphic improvisation, coloristic invention, “hidden” images, and a tumult of painterly dynamism—in other words, lyric inspiration. Whereas everything in Mondrian’s abstraction seeks fixity and order, Kandinsky’s embraces the fluidity and flux and thus the sensuality of the mind’s impressions as an essential ingredient of his art.
For both Mondrian and Kandinsky, the artistic base from which they made their fateful leap into abstraction was landscape painting, but their respective approaches to landscape were, again, very different. Whereas Mondrian’s was that of an ascetic determined to strip nature of its mutable attributes, Kandinsky’s was that of a mystical lyricist for whom nature is an enchanted realm of poetry and symbolism. Yet for both, the leap into abstraction was at once guided and sanctioned by their faith in the metaphysics of the occult, which in the end emancipated them from the mundanity of the observable world.
Kandinsky enjoyed a distinct advantage, however, in coming from a vastly richer intellectual and cultural milieu—one in which all artistic issues were subjected to intense analysis and informed argument by artists and critics who, in many fields, were energetically engaged in advancing new ideas. The Symbolist movement in Russian literature, music, and philosophy in the 1890s, itself deeply immersed in mystical systems of belief, had already disposed Kandinsky to look beyond the boundaries of naturalism and materialism for the foundations of his art. Munich, where he established himself at the turn of the century, was also the scene of a good deal of avant-garde activity that devalued any abject dependency on the imitation of nature in favor of stylized and symbolic representations of it. Compared to the pinched and provincial cultural atmosphere that Mondrian experienced in Amsterdam in the nineties, Munich was a veritable hotbed of modernist thought, much of it addressed to imaginative departures from academic convention and the canons of realistic depiction in the arts.
In his pursuit of abstraction, moreover, Kandinsky was, if anything, even more directly indebted to the doctrines of theosophy than Mondrian, himself a confirmed acolyte of the occult. There are many pages of On the Spiritual in Art, as well as other writings by Kandinsky during the period of his turn to abstraction, that are barely intelligible without recourse to the ideas of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Both are briefly mentioned in On the Spiritual in Art, but their influence—and that of two other theosophical writers, Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater—on Kandinsky’s artistic thought was far greater at this crucial juncture in his development than the artist could bring himself to disclose at the time. His entire Weltanschauung, his worldview of life itself, was shaped by their philosophy of the occult.
On the Spiritual in Art takes as its point of departure a religious crisis that Kandinsky describes in terms virtually paraphrased from these theosophical writers. “Our souls, which are only now beginning to awaken after the long reign of materialism, harbor seeds of desperation, unbelief, lack of purpose,” he writes in the Introduction, echoing the theosophists’ diagnosis of the spiritual malaise that had overtaken mankind in the modern world. He continues:
The whole nightmare of the materialistic attitude, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, purposeless game, is not yet over. The awakening soul is still deeply under the influence of this nightmare.
Owing to the nature of this spiritual nightmare, Kandinsky writes, the artist’s whole world of feeling has been radically altered. In an apparent reference of the “decadent” art movement of the 1890s, Kandinsky declares that “coarser emotions such as terror, joy, sorrow, etc., which served as the content of art during this period of trial, will now hold little attraction for the artist.”
What, then, was to take the place of this failed artistic content? Kandinsky speaks of the artist’s yearning “to awaken as yet nameless feelings of a finer nature.” He invokes the possibility of an art that “also has an awakening prophetic power,” and links this to “the spiritual life, to which art also belongs and in which it is one of the powerful agents.” Yet because it is an essential part of Kandinsky’s purpose in On the Spiritual to discredit alternatives to the “spiritual” program he envisions for the art of the future, he inveighs against a number of the reigning artistic orthodoxies of the period before outlining the terms of his agenda.
The primary target of his criticism is, of course, naturalism in all its materialist manifestations. Scorn is lavished upon the social radicals in the art world who favor naturalism—the “atheists” and “socialists of various shades,” as Kandinsky calls them, given to quoting from Marx’s Capital and announcing that “God is dead.” Yet the aestheticism which, with its credo of l’art pour l’art—“art for art’s sake,” had itself rebelled against materialist orthodoxy is also denounced as a “dissipation of the artist’s powers.” For Kandinsky, this soulless aestheticism, which attempted to make a religion of art itself, was as much a threat to the “spiritual in art” as the most orthodox forms of the materialism it opposed.
It is at this point in On the Spiritual in Art that Kandinsky invokes the name of Madame Blavatsky. He cites theosophy as “one of the greatest spiritual movements” of the new century, and commends its mystical “path of inner consciousness” as the proper approach to “problems of the spirit.” He then reminds his readers of Madame Blavatsky’s prophecy that “in the twenty-first century this earth will be a paradise by comparison with what it is now”—a prophecy that, in Kandinsky’s view, the new art of abstraction was destined to play a crucial role in fulfilling. For in Kandinsky’s conception of the artist’s new vocation, he was destined to become a spiritual leader of mankind—still another idea he derived from theosophical doctrine. Other than a brief footnote reference to Rudolf Steiner, no further direct mention of theosophy occurs in On the Spiritual, yet the entire work is based on theosophical ideas.
It wasn’t only in his conception of the artist as a spiritual leader, moreover, that Kandinsky drew upon occult doctrine. On the Spiritual in Art is, after all, a treatise on the aesthetics of painting, and a good many of what appear to be purely aesthetic observations—about form, about color, about spatial relationships—are similarly derived from theosophical pronouncements. In this respect, Thought-Forms—the theosophical classic by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater that was translated into German in 1908—seems to have been of capital importance. When, for example, in the chapter of On the Spiritual devoted to “The Language of Forms and Colors,” Kandinsky sets about the task of assigning specific meanings to specific colors, he is clearly appropriating an occult practice.
Thus about the color blue Kandinsky writes that “the deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man toward the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, the supernatural”—an obvious echo of the assertion in Thought-Forms that “the different shades of blue all indicate religious feeling.” When he writes about green that “pure green is to the realm of color what the so-called bourgeoisie is to human society: it is an immobile, complacent element, limited in every respect,” this description, too, bears a distinct resemblance to the statement in Thought-Forms that “green seems always to denote adaptability; in the lowest case, when mingled with selfishness, this adaptability becomes deceit,” etc. And while it is true that Kandinsky takes certain liberties with this theosophical practice, deviating from some of the meanings assigned to colors in Thought-Forms and other occult writings, he nonetheless follows the practice of conferring upon each color a significance that is finally metaphysical.
So, too, with Kandinsky’s conception of pictorial form. In The Sounding Cosmos, the definitive study of the place occupied by occult doctrine in Kandinsky’s theory and practice of abstraction, the Finnish scholar Sixten Ringbom reminds us that “thoughts and feeling, theosophy taught, have direct formative powers, and in Thought-Forms there is an important passage which only required an artistic application in order to serve as a manifesto for non-objective art.” In this passage there are said to be “three types of form-producing thought, of which the first two take the image of persons or material objects, and the third takes a form entirely its own, expressing its inherent qualities in the matter which it draws round it.” In this third category, wrote the authors of Thought-Forms, “we have a glimpse of forms natural to the astral or mental planes”—in other words, abstract form. To which Ringbom adds:“If, as theosophy maintained, there was a world of form and color independent of material objects, then such forms could be exploited artistically and provide the content replacing the object.”
In his pursuit of abstraction, Kandinsky similarly divided his paintings into three categories—Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions—and while they are not in every respect congruent with the division of form outlined in Thought-Forms, they nonetheless trace a similar course. As Magdalena Dabrowski writes in the catalogue accompanying the current exhibition at MOMA:
Impressions were the pictures stimulated by “direct impressions of external nature,” expressed in “linear-painterly form.” Works that were intended to convey “impressions of internal nature” and that represented “chiefly unconscious, for the most part, suddenly arising expressions of events of an inner character” were called Improvisations. [Kandinsky] described the most ambitious of these categories, Compositions, as “the expressions of feelings that have been forming within me in a similar way (but over a very long period of time), which, after the preliminary sketches, I have slowly and almost pedantically examined and worked out. Here, reason, the conscious, the deliberate, and the purposeful play a preponderant role. Except that I always decide in favor of feeling rather than calculation.”
In a long career that was copious in production, Kandinsky reserved the term Composition for only ten paintings between the years 1910 and 1939. The first three Compositions were, alas, destroyed during the Second World War, and so we know them today only from preliminary studies and photographs. The last three, though they are included in the current exhibition, fall outside the period that is its principal focus—the period that saw the birth of abstract painting. It is therefore in Compositions IV through VII and their related studies that we can follow Kandinsky’s development as he struggled to formulate his artistic ideas and create the pictorial language that enabled him to produce his first abstract paintings.
But did Kandinsky really succeed in these works in creating an art of pure abstraction? I believe he did; but early on in the history of abstract painting, as its champions divided into factions and each upheld an orthodoxy that precluded the admission of any rival version of abstraction, questions were raised as to whether Kandinsky’s Compositions could be accepted as authentic examples of abstract art. No less a critic than Mondrian himself was one of the first to express some doubts on the matter. In the September 1918 number of the magazine De Stijl, five years after Kandinsky painted his first abstract paintings, Mondrian published an essay called “The New Plastic in Painting.” With that essay he reproduced two pictures, Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece Le Violin (Jolie Eva) (1912) and Kandinsky’s Composition VI (1913), and insisted that the Cubist painting, even though it still “represents particular things,” came closer than Kandinsky’s in expressing “the human spirit” because it “introduces the straight line where it is not directly seen in the object.” Then, confining Kandinsky to a footnote, Mondrian wrote as follows:
Kandinsky too broke the closed line that describes the broad contour of objects, but as he did not sufficiently tense the natural contour, his work remained predominantly an expression of natural feeling. Comparing the works of Picasso and Kandinsky . . . one sees clearly how important are the tension of curved line and use of the straight. Kandinsky’s generalized expression, like Picasso’s, came about through the abstraction of naturalistic form and color: but in Kandinsky’s line still remains a vestige of the contour of objects, whereas Picasso introduces the free straight line. Although Picasso still uses fragments of the contour of things, he carries them to determination, whereas Kandinsky leaves somewhat intact the confluence of line and color found in nature.
Mondrian was certainly right in claiming to find in Kandinsky’s Composition VI some trace of a “confluence of line and color found in nature,” but his argument with Kandinsky cannot be understood entirely in terms of the aesthetics of abstraction. It was because Mondrian had come to believe that the spiritual mission of abstract art could not be fully realized except by means of straight lines that he condemned Kandinsky’s lyrical abstraction as “predominantly an expression of natural feeling.” Among theosophists, which Mondrian and Kandinsky both were, this was a pronouncement of spiritual failure. Needless to say, this was not the way Kandinsky saw the matter. By 1913 he believed he had arrived at a stage in his development when he was able, as he wrote, “to experience both [the province of art—meaning spirit—and the province of nature] as completely separate realms.” Within a decade after 1913 he would, to be sure, abandon the Expressionist component in abstraction and make use of straight lines. But the straight line never became for him, as it did for Mondrian, either a sign of his spiritual mission or an exclusive component of his aesthetic. Yet for both of these masters of abstraction, theirs was an art born of this strange alliance of aesthetics and mysticism.
[1995]