These three artists, who have contributed more than any others to the development of modern art, cannot be assimilated to any particular phase of it. Movements were founded on their discoveries and inventions, but they themselves remained individualists, centres of creative energy influencing movements and even giving birth to them, but not themselves remaining attached to any one school. We have already seen how Picasso, in close association with Braque, initiated the Cubist movement. It cannot be claimed that he initiated the Surrealist movement, but as I have suggested, and as we shall see in more detail, his post-Cubist development cannot be dissociated from the typical manifestations of Surrealism: Picasso was always providing grist for their theoretical mills. As for Kandinsky, it cannot be claimed that he initiated non-figurative art, either in its expressionistic or geometric aspects, but he had the most intelligent prevision of the possibilities that awaited the new epoch, and more precisely than any other individual painter, indicated the likely lines of future development. As for Klee, it might perhaps be claimed that he possessed the supreme intelligence among all artists of the modern epoch, and both in theory and in practice established its aesthetic foundations.
‘When you come right down to it, all you have is your self. Your self is a sun with a thousand rays in your belly. The rest is nothing.’ Picasso said this in 1932 in a conversation with E. Teriade, while he was supervising the hanging of his pictures in a retrospective
exhibition held that year in Paris. 1 Picasso gave Matisse as an example of an artist to whom his aphorism would apply, but as he looked round the exhibition lie must have had himself in mind, and it remains the best description of his talent. There is a single glowing centre of energy, and each of the rays that spread outwards from it represents adilferent aspect of his style. Apart from saying that the style is always the man himself, one cannot usefully distinguish these thousand rays one from another. They merge into one another as they approach the burning source, and it is only their more obvious aspects, which are farthest from this centre, that can be separated and named. Wc may distinguish these superficial characteristics as Cubist or Classical, Realist or Surrealist, but then we are faced with Classical drawings that are Surrealist in intention, or with Surrealist compositions of Classical serenity. Style and significance continually overlap and contradict each other.
Equally any attempt at a chronological classification is soon defeated, lor no period is a closed period, confined to one style. It is true that there are short periods at the beginning of his career when the artist seems for a while to maintain some consistency of mood—the Blue period of 1901-4 and the Rose period of 1904-6 - so called from the predominant colour in the paintings of each period. But within even these periods there are considerable variations of style —La belle Hollandaise of 1905, for example, has a grey solidity which contrasts strongly with the effete delicacy of the Mother and Child of the same year. Cubism was a consistent passion with Picasso for about five years, but it was an exploratory passion and every canvas revealed new possibilities, new variations of the dominant idiom. Once all these possibilities had been explored, but not abandoned, Picasso suddenly in 1915 reverted to a most precise and subtle realism; but again with no set intention, for he alternated his classical portraits and groups with new variations of his Cubist style, his realistic still-lifes with geometrical abstractions derived from the same motif. One could conceivably arrange a thousand works of Picasso in an order beginning with the academic exercises of his youth and passing through the various modes of realism until one came to geometrical compositions like
The Table of 1919-20 (Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts), and there would be no abrupt change between any two contiguous paintings. But the significance of this fact would not be fully appreciated until it was realized that the stylistic transitional order corresponded in no way with the chronological sequence. Each ray had been emitted from the sun in the artistic belly at a different date in a different direction.
We must, however, make some attempt to record these kaleidoscopic changes. From 1914 onwards the following phases have been distinguished: 2
1914: Further development of Cubism in a ‘rococo’
direction. Enrichment of colours, exploitation of materials and textures other than oil-paints.
1915-16: Bold linear Cubism, large compositions.
1915—2 1: Classical realism, mostly pencil drawings in the style of Ingres. (Two Seated Women , 1920, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Collection).
1918-25: Mannerism, distortions and elongations of the human form (The two versions of Three Musicians [p. /J./]. Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art).
1920-24: These two styles merge into a neo-Classic style which is resumed at intervals throughout the rest of Picasso’s career.
1924-28: Period of large Cubist still-life compositions.
1923-25: Development of a ‘curvilinear cubism’.
1925: Beginning of Picasso’s Surrealist phase (with the
Three Dancers of 1925 [ p. 155 ]). Barr avoids the word ‘Surrealist’ and substitutes epithets like ‘convulsive’, ‘disquieting’, and ‘metamorphic’, but Picasso’s work from this year onwards illustrates the Surrealist thesis, and there can be no doubt that he had been impressed, not only by the theoretical writings of Breton and his colleagues, but also by the work of artists like Arp, Miro, and Tanguy.
ISO Picasso
1928-33:
1929-31:
1931 - 34 :
1932 - 34 :
1937:
1938-40:
1940-44:
1946- 48:
1948-54:
Sculptures beginning with metal constructions, but developing towards heads cast in bronze. Monumental archetypes, such as Woman in an Armchair (versions of 5 May and 13 May 1929) and the Standing Bather and Seated Bather of 1929 and the Figure throwing a Stone of 8 March 1931. But this style also continues throughout the rest of Picasso’s career: cf. the Girls with a Toy Boat (1937) in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; The Rape of Europa (1946); and the. Nude of 1949 (cf. Boeck-Sabartes, Classified Catalogue No. 213).
Period of renewed sculptural activity.
Scries of large canvases of women in a curvilinear style.
(May -June) The painting of Guernica.
Period of large, vigorous and sculpturesque compositions. Night Fishing (1939).
The war period in Paris: return to flat, two-dimensional compositions; return to synthetic Cubism. Revival of sculptural activity.
Post-liberation exuberance.
Idyllic interlude at Antibes. La joie de vivre (1946); Pastorale (1946).
Ceramics at Vallauris.
Such a chronological sequence has about as much value as a guide to a jungle; rather we should try to determine whether among these vacillating phases of Picasso’s manifold activity we can discover any stylistic unities that have contributed to the general development of art in our time. That Picasso has been the most influential artist of the first half of the twentieth century is obvious, but not all influences are good influences, and indeed for an age to be dominated by the idiosyncrasies of a single personality is a sign of weakness. The example of Michelangelo in the past is a melancholy witness to this fact.
pablo picasso Seated Woman. 1927
One obvious stylistic unity that can be separated from Picasso’s prodigious output is the archaicizing neo-Classicism to which he has reverted at frequent intervals. In so far as this constitutes a certificate' of academic competency (‘after all, Picasso can draw !’) this may have' been more than paradoxical: it may have created an executive standard by which all contemporary experiments must be' judged. An e'xpe'rimental period in the' arts is harvesttime- for tin' charlatan. Some of Picasso’s mannerisms can be imitated wry convincingly lie has himselt made mistakes of identilie atie>u. Hut only a Picasso could have drawn the' illustrations he- maele for the Skira edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (193 i), or the series e>t'etchings known as The Sculptor's Studio (1933).
Prom tlu- point of view of his own personality, we can regard Picasso’s periodic return to neo-Classicism as a return to order, as an occasional submission to a necessary discipline, or simply (and most probably) as a refreshing display of virtuosity. One has emly to watch Picasso drawing (in one of the films that have shown him in action) to se-e- how instinctive and effortless the activity is in his case. There is no deliberation, no anxiety: merely a hand that moves as naturally as a bird in flight. Such ease may be a product of early training, but it is also an innate gift; other artists have had a similar training but do not arrive at the same degree of skill. This style, therefore, is personal to the artist, but at the same time it is universal. As a linear idiom it does not differ from the drawings on Creek vases, the engravings on Etruscan mirrors, or even the prehistoric drawings on the walls of the Altamira caves. Only in so far as Picasso introduces manncristic distortions of the motif 'into them can his neo-Classical drawings be said to have any relevance to the modern movement.
Nevertheless, the same calligraphic instinct functions in drawings which are not ueo-Classieal: is, indeed, present in every line and brush-stroke of his work.
As for the main body of this work, it falls into two main groups which again merge into each other, but at their extremes can be distinguished, in the manner already indicated, as imaginative and fantastic. ‘1 don’t work after nature, but before nature—and
pablo picasso Sculptor at Rest, Reclining Model and Sculpture, rgjj
with her’ is another of Picasso’s gnomic utterances. 3 Before nature might indicate an intuitive awareness of symbolic form; with nature (as distinct from after nature) the endowment of such symbolic forms with a natural vitality. That, at any rate, is the distinction I propose to make to characterize the two main postCubist divisions of Picasso’s work.
Alfred Barr has already emphasized the significance of the large oil-painting of 1925, Three Dancers , still in the artist’s possession, and has contrasted it with the two versions of the Three Musicians of 1921, and the neo-Classical Three Graces of 1924 (also still in the artist’s possession). These three paintings are indeed the prototypes of the three categories into which Picasso’s work may be divided. ‘Instead ofstatic, mildly cubist decoration’, writes Mr Barr, ‘the Three Dancers confronts us with a vision striking in its physical and emotional violence. Seen objectively as representations of nature, cubist paintings such as the Three Musicians of 1921 are grotesque enough—but their distortions are comparatively
pablo picasso Three Musicians. ig2i
pablo picasso Three Dancers. 1925
156 Picasso'a 1 Three Dancers'
objective and formal whereas the frightful, grinning mask and convulsive action of the left-hand figure of the Three Dancers cannot be resolved into an exercise in esthetic relationships, magnificent as the canvas is from a purely formal point of view. The metamorphic Three Dancers is in (act a turning point in Picasso’s art almost as radical as was the proto-cubist Demoiselles d'Avignon. The convulsive left-hand dancer foreshadows new periods in his art in which psychologically disturbing energies reinforce or, depending on one’s point of view, adulterate his ever-changing achievements in the realm of form. 1
The compositional distinction between the Three Musicians (either version) and the Three Dancers is that the former is a calculated rearrangement (Kandinsky would say ‘a constructive dispersal’) of fragmented and geometricized images derived from the motif , whereas the latter is, to use Alfred Barr’s term, a metamorphosis of the motif itself. But these terms are inadequate, and even misleading. Calculation, as we shall see when we come to discuss Kandinsky’s early experiments, does not necessarily imply a conscious process of selection and adjustment: the arrangement of the elements within the picture-space remains intuitive. But these elements are derived from the motif by calculable or explicable stages. The cubic visages of the musicians are still frontal; their eyes arc in the same plane, their limbs and musical instruments conform to a rational order, however dislocated. But in the Three Dancers the dislocation of the naturalistic elements—eyes, breasts, limbs is no longer rational or calculable. Eyes are shifted to the side of the head, a breast is transformed into an eye, and for the first time the composite image (of side and frontal views of the face) appears. The ‘order’ of the Three Musicians no longer prevails; instead the elements of the painting display a convulsive energy which seems to burst out of the boundaries of the canvas.
The Seated Woman of 1926-7 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the related Seated Woman of 1927 | p. 151 ] (James Thrall Soby Collection) developed this new ‘metamorphic’ tendency to a more marked degree. Three simultaneous images of the woman seem to be combined, and the dislocation of eyes, mouth, and
Metamorphosis
157
breasts is arbitrary, though still ‘with 1 nature in the sense that these features remain vital and not abstract. But Picasso quickly exploited this new tendency to further extremes, best typified by the bronze Figure of early 1928. In this year he made a scries of drawings in which the human figure is subjected to extreme degrees of metamorphosis, the head becoming a pin-head, the limbs merging into flaccid breasts, eyes and mouth inserted in arbitrary positions. Mr Barr suggests that he may have taken hints from the metamorphic figure paintings of his friend, Joan Miro, or the early paintings of Yves Tanguy. Whether this is true or not, it does indicate that Picasso had passed beyond his Cubist
pablo picasso Four Children viewing a Monster, c. 1933
pablo picasso Farmer's Wife on a Stepladder. 1933
and neo-Classical styles where the images are personal and had now entered a realm of fantasy where the images are archetypal or generic. The presentation of such images is still highly individual—line and colour are still the signature of the man himself. But the symbols are projected from that psychic depth which C. G. Jung has called the collective unconscious and their collectivity guarantees their validity. From this point of view the Surrealists were right to insist on the autonomous and anonymous content of this new kind of art. .
From 1926 onwards Picasso did not cease to cultivate his unconscious—to watch objectively, as Jung has put it, the
6 O
pablo picasso Woman in a Blue Dress, iqji
160 Guernica
development of any clement offantasy. It would not he appropriate to discuss on this occasion the psychological significance of the imagery proliferated hy Picasso in this phase of his work. Picasso himself is not necessarily aware of its significance, though he is hy no means ignorant of the role of symbolism in the history of art. But one may say quite briefly that the imagery is archetypal that it is an iconography of sex and fertility, of birth and death, of love and violence, such as we find in all great epochs of art. To reveal the significance of the symbols is not a useful activity: they remain most potent in their secret integrity. 1 hey come from the unconscious and speak to the unconscious. We unrobe them at our peril.
This caution applies to a masterpiece like Guernica no less than to the minor works in this mode. Guernica is a proof, il one were needed, that Picasso is a socially conscious artist painting, he has said, ‘is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy’. His statement on this subject, written for Simone Tory and first published in Lettres franfaises (Paris), 24 March 19415, cannot be too often recalled: ‘What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he’s a painter, or ears il lie’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he s a poet, or even if he’s a boxer, just his muscles? Ou the contrary, lie’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heartrending, fiery or happy events, to which he responds in every way. How would it be possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach yourself from the life which they so copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.’ The enemy, as he has made clear on several occasions, is the man who exploits his fellow human beings from motives of self-interest and profit. More generally, one must fight everything that threatens the freedom of the imagination, and in this respect Picasso has always subscribed to the political programme of the Surrealists. But Guernica is, of course, more than a document of the Spanish Civil War. It was painted as an immediate reaction to the news of the destruction by Herman
I* a iti.o picasso 7 hr Mail, iitf'j
bombers of the Basque town of Guernica (aB April i7). It was painted with passion and with conviction (a fact more obvious in the many preparatory drawings and studies); nevertheless, it is not wholly unrelated to previous works of Picasso’s, notably the Minotauromachy etching of 1935, But this similarity may be explained by unconscious factors rather than as a deliberate use of t he same symbols (the bull, the horse, the figure holding up a light). Either the same archetypal symbols emerge automatically from tinunconscious, or they are part of a necessary language of symbols. But the symbols, as has often been pointed out, are not wholly free from ambiguity 5 - does the bull represent the concept of violence, or the dictator Franco and his military caste, and how can the
miserable disembowelled horse worthily represent suffering humanity? Picasso himself is reported to have said that ‘the bull is not fascism, but it is brutality and darkness . . . the horse represents the people . . . the Guernica mural is symbolic . . . allegoric. That’s the reason I use the bull, the horse, and so on. The mural is for the definite expression and solution of a problem and that is why I used symbolism.’ 6 One must defer to the artist’s interpretation of his own work, but it will be noted that he insists on the generic nature of the symbolism. At the time of its first exhibition I called these symbols used in Guernica ‘commonplace’, but added ‘it is only when the widest commonplace is infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born’. 7 Guernica, twenty years later, has not lost its monumental significance.
It is impossible within the scope of this volume to detail all the icons present in Picasso’s symbolic discourse. At its most legible in works like Guernica or Minotauromachy, or the War and Peace allegories of 1952, symbolism is still present when he paints a Girl with a Cock (1938) or Lajoie de vivre (1946). Most of his portraits have symbolic elements in them, for he seeks the man behind the mask, or rather the unconscious forces that mould the mask. He paints one of his own children, but it is as symbolic as a child in a medieval painting of the Virgin and Child. But these smaller symbolic works merge imperceptibly into those paintings, equally numerous, that are innocent and gay, happy discoveries of some aspect of the infinite variety of nature, in landscape, fruit, flowers or the human body, and that together constitute the third category of Picasso’s work. It is not only his incomparable innate talent that establishes Picasso’s greatness, but also the all-inclusive range of his sensibility and vision, and an inexhaustible power of transformation, receiving all and giving all in endless and engrossing interchange.
Very few of his contemporaries have been able to resist the impact of such a creative force, and indeed why should they? In many cases the influence has led to imitation, but plagiary is not the most profound effect of a genius like Picasso. This is to be
pablo picasso Portrait of Vollard I. c. ig 137
Georges braque Mandolin, Glass, Pot and Fruit. 1927
found in the inspiration of his method and the example of his courage. Sculptors like Jacques Lipchitz or Henry Moore may at first have been influenced in the superficial sense: they may have transformed the forms of Picasso’s invention. But this apprenticeship released the doors of their own perceptions and intuitions, and once they had discovered the method, they could (indeed, by virtue of the reality of the process, had to) establish their own manner. It was the older painters, Picasso s own contcmpoiaries such as Braque and Leger, who from their established strength could best resist his innovations. It is true that from about 1929 to 1931 Braque is conscious of Picasso’s new trend, and introduces double-profiles and other organic distortions, but without conviction. He adopted the ‘curvilinear cubism’ of 1923-4, but with a decorative intention; and henceforth this artist, shading himself from the sun in Picasso’s belly, cultivated his own perfect but restricted plot.
wassily kandinsky Composition No. 2. igio
Wassily Kandinsky has already been mentioned in connexion with the origins of both Cubism and Expressionism (see pages 94 and 56), but only in retrospect does his contribution to the history of modern painting acquire its full significance. As a painter, as a creative genius, he may seem far more limited than Picasso; but he was more than a painter—he was a philosopher and even a visionary. After a period of experiment he made his decisions and pursued his precise aims. His work has a coherence comparable only to Leger’s or Klee’s; his influence has been far greater than is often acknowledged. It is more active today than it was in his lifetime.
Kandinsky was born on 4 December 1866, which is fifteen years before Picasso, and we should perhaps note for whatever significance it may have that his father’s family came from Siberia, and that his father was actually born at Kjachta near the Chinese frontier. One of his great-grandmothers was an Asiatic
166 Kandinsky
princess. His mother’s family, however, came from Moscow, where Kandinsky himself was born.
Kandinsky’s first intention was to be a musician—another significant fact, to be repeated in Klee’s life. But at the age of twenty he went to Moscow University to study law and economics, and during this period made his first contact with the ancient art of Russia. He used to insist that the profound impression made on him by the medieval icons of Russia influenced the whole of his artistic development. Another early influence was the folk-art of Russia, with which he became familiar in the course of an ethnographic survey which he made in the northern provinces in 1889. In this same year he studied the old masters in Moscow and St Petersburg and made a first visit to Paris. He returned to the French capital again in 1892. In 1893 he took his degree in law at Moscow University.
In 1895, in his twenty-ninth year, he saw for the first time an exhibition of the French Impressionists, and that experience was decisive. He abandoned his legal career and the next year went to Munich to study painting. Three years later, in 1900, he received his diploma from the Royal Academy in Munich.
Some of his subsequent activities have already been recorded in connexion with the origins of Expressionism (see page 64). One should note as significant that he spent the autumn of 1902 in Paris, the winter of 1902-3 in Tunisia, and then settled in Rapallo (Italy) for more than a year. He next moved to Dresden, but was again in Paris early the following year (1906), and there (or rather at Sevres near Paris) he remained for a year. In 1907 he went to Berlin for some months and finally in 1908 returned to Munich where he was to settle for the next six decisive years.
Kandinsky had packed a lot of experience into these twelve years of wandering apprenticeship, and by the time he reached Munich in 1908 his painting had already gone through several stylistic phases, from the academicism he learned at the Academy under Franz Stuck, through successive degrees of eclecticism (folk-art, impressionism, post-impressionism) until now, at the age of thirty-four, he felt that the time had come to consolidate his
wassily kandinsky Composition, ign
experiences and to formulate his intuitions of the possibilities of the art of painting, possibilities which had entered his mind and vision that day, twelve years earlier, when he had first seen a painting by Monet.
What else had he seen in those twelve years? Cezanne, of course, and the Fauves—whatever there was to see in the Paris of 1902-6. In that period he became a Fauve himself, but once back in Munich he began to follow his own instincts and the result was a complete emancipation from the influences that had hitherto dominated him. In his book, which we will presently consider in more detail, he refers to Matisse as ‘the greatest of the young Frenchmen’, and to Picasso as ‘another great young artist in Paris’, in whose work ‘there is never any suspicion of conventional beauty’. ‘Matisse—colour. Picasso—form. Two great signposts pointing towards a great end.’
When the war broke out in August 1914, Kandinsky fled from Munich and made his way back to Moscow via Switzerland. He
wassily kandinsky Accompanied Contrast. 1335
170 Kandinsky's Theory of Art
left behind him a collection of experimental work which by chance was preserved intact, and it is now in the Stiidtische Galerie of Munich. This material shows that Kandinsky for about two years after his return to Munich was still anchored to the motif, usually a landscape, and that his extremist variations were still organic in feeling. Then, according to Lorenz Eitner who has published an interesting study of this material, 8 there occurred a sudden break-through to non-objective painting, that is to say, to an art emancipated from the motif. ‘The increasing abstraction in Kandinsky’s landscapes and figure compositions does not lead to it directly, nor is it the gradual emancipation of colour from descriptive meaning that brings it about. Totally non-objective shapes are found first in studies of primarily graphic character rather than in colour compositions. The Mtinter Collection includes several such drawings in pen and ink or in pencil. Their criss-crossing lines, some spidery and sharp, some softly blurred, shoot across the paper singly or in tangles, like the traces of sudden energy discharges, suggestive only of motion or tension, not of body.’ 9 This may sound like mere doodling, but the evidence shows that all these seemingly fortuitous strokes or blotches were painstakingly formulated, repeated, and perfected. It was a calculated informality.
Kandinsky’s historic treatise, which has already been mentioned, was written during the year 1910 (though it was not published until January 1912) and is the first tentative justification of a non-objective art. I call it ‘tentative’ because Kandinsky did not at the time seem fully aware of the possible consequences of his theory, though he does state his conviction that mankind was moving towards a completely new epoch in the history of art. Nevertheless, the originality and prophetic vision of this treatise should be fully appreciated. It was the first revelation of a new artistic faith.
To understand Kandinsky’s theory of art it is essential to understand first his conception of the work of art. In an article which appeared in Der Sturm (Berlin) in 1913, he gives a definition which, if a little clumsy, is nevertheless clear:
Kandinsky's Theory of Art 171
‘A work of art consists of two elements, the inner and the outer. The inner is the emotion in the soul of the artist; this emotion has the capacity to evoke a similar emotion in the observer.
‘Being connected with the body, the soul is affected through the medium of the senses—the felt. Emotions are aroused and stirred by what is sensed. Thus the sensed is the bridge, i.e. the physical relation between the immaterial (which is the artist’s emotion) and the material, which results in a work of art. And again, what is sensed is the bridge from the material (the artist and his work) to the immaterial (the emotion in the soul of the observer).
‘The sequence is: emotion (in the artist)->the sensed—>the art work->the sensed^-emotion (in the observer).
‘The two emotions will be like and equivalent to the extent that the work of art is successful. In this respect painting is in no way different from a song: each is communication. . . .
‘The inner element, i.e. the emotion, must exist; otherwise the work of art is a sham. The inner element determines the form of the work of art.’ 10
This definition of ‘the work of art’ is probably based on a comparison, more or less unconscious, of painting and sculpture to music, which had been Kandinsky’s own first art. Concerning the Spiritual in Art has many references to music, including the then modern composers Debussy and Schonberg (‘almost alone in abandoning conventional beauty and in sanctioning every means of expression’).
On the basis of such a definition of the work of art Kandinsky proceeds to argue that form and colour in themselves constitute the elements of a language adequate to express emotion; that just as musical sound acts directly on the soul, so do form and colour. The only necessity is to compose form and colour in a configuration that adequately expresses the inner emotion and adequately communicates it to the observer. It is not essential to give form and colour ‘an appearance of materiality’, that is to say, of natural
172 Kandinsky's Theory of Art
objects. Form itself is the expression of inner meaning, intense in the degree that it is presented in harmonic relations of colour. Beauty is the successful achievement of this correspondence between inner necessity and expressive significance. In his final summary Kandinsky does not hesitate to take up the musical analogy: great works of plastic art are symphonic compositions, in which the melodic element ‘plays an infrequent and subordinate part’. The essential element is one of ‘poise and the systematic arrangement of parts’.
Kandinsky ends his treatise with a distinction between three different sources of inspiration:
(1) A direct impression of outward nature. This I call an Impression.
(2) A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, of non-material (i.e. spiritual) nature. This I call an Improvisation.
(3) An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, worked over repeatedly and almost pedantically. This I call a Composition. In this reason, consciousness, purpose play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, only the feeling.
From the first of these sources flowed Kandinsky’s own work up to 1910—his ‘fauvist’ paintings.
From the second of these sources flowed the expressionistic abstractions of 1910-21.
From the third of these sources flowed the constructive abstractions of 1921 and later.
The Improvisations of Kandinsky arc the forerunners of the informal art of the present day (1945 and onwards); the Compositions are the forerunners of the Constructivist art whose intricate development I shall try to trace in the next chapter.
Kandinsky remained in Russia until 1921, preoccupied after the Revolution with the reorganization of the Academy of Fine Arts, the art schools and museums. When the cultural reaction came in 1921, he left for Berlin, arriving there at the end of the
wassily kandinsky Yellow Accompaniment. 1924
year. Six months later he accepted an invitation from Walter Gropius to join in the formation of a Bauhaus (school of design) at Weimar, and out of his pedagogical experiences came his second important treatise, Point and Line to Plane, written in 1925 and published in Munich the following year. In this book the tendency merely announced at the end of Concerning the Spiritual in Art is made quite clear. As Dr Carola Giedion-Welcker has said, ‘the book no longer stresses the gospel of a new inner universe with the same almost religious fervour; it expounds, often with a
minute and quite scientific rigor, a new formal theory of the elements of drawing, the base of which, however, is always the same notion of an “irrational and mystical” spiritual unity. “Modern art can be born only where signs become symbols.” Point and line are here detached from all explanatory and utilitarian purpose and transposed to the realm of the a-logical. They are advanced to the rank of autonomous, expressive essences, as colours had been earlier.’ 11
The later paintings (1925-44) serve to illustrate this final phase of his work, in which his symbolic language has become wholly concrete or objective, and at the same time transcendental. That is to say, there is no longer, and deliberately so, an organic continuity between the feeling and the symbol which ‘stands for’ it; there is rather a correspondence, a correlation. In liberating the symbol in this way, Kandinsky created an entirely new form of art, and in this respect was more revolutionary than Klee, whose symbols are an organic development of his feelings, flowers which have stems and roots in his individual psyche. To a certain degree sensibility itself became suspect to Kandinsky; at least, he insisted on the distinction that exists between the emotion in the artist to be expressed, which is personal, and the symbolic values of line, point and colour, which are impersonal. In painting, he might have said, one is using a universal language, as precise as mathematics, to express, to the best of one’s technical abilities, feelings that must be freed from what is personal and imprecise. It is in this sense that works of art would in the future be ‘concrete’.
In 1924 Kandinsky formed a group with Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky, which was called Die Blaue Vier (the blue four), and exhibitions of their work were held in Dresden and Wiesbaden, but in general he exhibited alone. He had no considerable exhibition in Paris until 1929, but when the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazi government in 1932, after a few months in Berlin, he went to Paris to remain there for the rest of his life. There he became a French citizen and found sympathetic fellow-artists in Alberto Magnelli, Miro, Delaunay, Arp, and Antoine Pevsner, and his influence, too long confined to Eastern Europe, began to penetrate
LYONEL FEININGER Mellingcn. l ( JI <)
far and wide. But an art so transcendental as Kandinsky’s, so ‘calculated’ and objective, is not easily assimilated. Who are the disciples of Kandinsky? They are those artists, and they are now numberless, who believe that there exists a psychic or spiritual reality that can only be apprehended and communicated by means of a visual language, the elements of which are non-figurative plastic symbols.
lyonel feininger East Choir of Halle Cathedral. 1931
Paul Klee 177
Paul Klee (1879-1940), the third of the great individualists of the modern epoch, was even more undeviating in his development than Kandinsky. Born in Switzerland (at Miinchenbuchsee, near Berne), his talent was formed in the stillness of the countryside. This talent was at first manifested in music, and all his life Klee remained an accomplished violinist. But at the age of nineteen he went to Munich and after a short period of preliminary training under Erwin Knirr, followed Kandinsky’s example and joined the class of Franz Stuck at the Academy. He does not seem to have met either Kandinsky or Jawlensky (who was also there) until much later (1911). In the autumn of 1901 he went to Italy, where he travelled widely for several months, and was instinctively attracted to Leonardo, Michelangelo, Pinturicchio (the frescoes in the Vatican), and Botticelli. But more significant, perhaps, was his perception that the frescoes of Hans von Marees in the Aquarium at Naples were ‘very close to my heart’; and he was equally fascinated by the marine animals there.
Klee returned to Berne in May 1902, already conscious of his purpose and his limitations: ‘I have to disappoint at first,’ he
paul klee Heads. 1913
wrote at this time. ‘I am expected to do things a clever fellow could easily make. But my consolation must be that I am much more handicapped by my sincerity than by any lack of talent or ability. I have a feeling that sooner or later I’ll arrive at something valid, only I must begin, not with hypotheses, but with specific instances, no matter how minute. For me it is very necessary to begin with minutiae, but it is also a handicap. I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe; ignoring facts and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest, to work out by myself a tiny formal motif, one that my pencil will be able to encompass without any technique. ... So far as I can see, pictures will more than fill the whole of my lifetime ... it is less a matter of will than of fate.’ 12
The whole character of Klee’s work is foreshadowed in this modest statement, but one should realize that to be as if newborn is not a modest ambition: it is the essential mark of genius. Klee’s self-awareness did not prevent him from absorbing certain influences, notably (according to Grohmann) Blake, Goya, and Corot. In 1905 he made his first journey to Paris, where once again it was the old masters, Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Goya, who impressed him most. It was not until his second visit to Paris, in 1912, that he made any effective contact with the work of contemporary French painters such as Braque and Picasso. But meanwhile two exhibitions of Van Gogh’s work which he saw in 1908 came as a revelation to him; and in the same year or the next he became acquainted with the work of James Ensor, so close to his own visionary fantasy, and made his first approach to the work of Cezanne, who throughout many years was to be for Klee, in technical matters, un point de repere.
It was in 1911 that Klee made his most fruitful contacts with his contemporaries. In this year he met, not only Kandinsky and Jawlensky, but also Franz Marc, Heinrich Campendonk, Gabriele Mtinter (who was to preserve Kandinsky’s work of this time), and Hans Arp. He immediately perceived that Kandinsky and Marc were working in the same direction, and when these two artists issued a publication, Der Blaue Reiter, and began to organize
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