Page 22 - Studio International - January 1967

Some notes on Kandinsky's development

towards non-figurative art

Frank Whitford

Those who knew him say that Kandinsky looked more before the age of forty, and in a letter to his old Bauhaus
scientist than artist. His dark suit, white shirt, bow-tie, student Hans Thiemann, Kandinsky says that the same
brown shoes, cold blue eyes gazing from behind rimless is probably equally true of artists.2 His scientific bent and
spectacles gave him an impersonal, calculated elegance, legal training are naturally related. He was dogmatic,
quite out of keeping with the conventional image of the making rules rather than tenuously putting forward
artist at that time.' In many ways there was as much theories. At the Bauhaus he was nicknamed Herrgott;
science in him as art. His writings, statements and rela- what he said was not open to question, it was indisput-
tions with his contemporaries mark him as an intellectual able fact.3
in an age of anti-intellectual expressionists. He had come As a lawyer he had the ability to formulate in a logical
to painting late, after studying national economy and way all his insights and intuition, to give a new and
law at Moscow University and he had been eminent reasoned vocabulary to things which had never been
enough as a student to have been appointed to a lecture- expressed before. He may in the process have been
ship in 1893 and then offered a professorship in juris- responsible for coining a good deal of modern art jargon
prudence three years later. He had also studied music but the new painting was transformed by him into a
and had a wide knowledge of the physical sciences. discipline which combined the approach of science and
When he came to painting it was with a shrewd idea of that of the intuitive artist.
what he wanted to do. His economics professor had said Science had a profound effect on his thinking. Planck's
to him that the true scientist does not begin to develop Quantum Theory and the whole idea of Relativity