Page 25 - Studio International - January 1967

decoration. Certainly Kandinsky kept the memory of it Kandinsky was born
in Moscow on
throughout his life. He filled his house in Murnau with
December 4, 1866.
similar decorations, some of which still exist. He arrived in Munich
As a lawyer he was fascinated by Russian peasant law. in 1896 where he
helped found and
Its form, in contrast to the ius strictum of classical Roman
lead the Blaue Reiter.
law, was considerably more liberal, determined not by From 1922 to 1933 he
external but by internal forms . . .`the basis for the verdict was an influential
teacher at the
is not sought for in the official physical action of the crime
Bauhaus.
alone, but also in the quality of inner motivation, arising To commemorate the
in the soul and spirit of the accused. How close this anniversary of his
birth Marlborough
comes to the very foundation of art !'
Fine Art has organized
It was in any case easier for a Russian to conceive of an an exhibition
abstract art than for someone rooted in the European Kandinsky and His
tradition. The idea of perspective and illusionistic art in Friends
—until February 24.
general was something foreign to the Russian artist. It (photo Bauhaus-Archiv)
was adopted rather late, was taken consciously as an
influence from the West, and was still regarded as some-
thing very Western even at the turn of the century.
Kandinsky had in fact grown up understanding the world
of icons, believing that a painted picture was in the
first place a magic object and did not have primarily an in fact no more than an Expressionist paraphrase of
imitative significance. In Europe artists created facts, in Goethe's investigation into the spiritual effects of colour.
Russia mysteries, and in 1918 in the German version of At the turn of the century Munich was certainly the
his autobiography Kandinsky adds the footnote: 'the most important of all the cultural centres of Germany.
long Russian word for creation, proisvedenie, so different Rilke was there in Schwabing, as were Thomas Mann,
from its shorter counterparts in English, French and Wedekind and Schoenberg. August Endell, the architect
German, expresses for me the whole history and process who had designed the abstract facade for the Atelier
of creation : lengthy, mysterious, infinitely complex and Elvira, since destroyed, stated in 1898 that he was in at
foreshadowed by divine predestination'. Earlier he had the start of the development of a new form of art, an art
once defined art as the 'mysterious expression of the which would consist of forms 'which meant nothing,
mysterious'.11 represented nothing and were reminiscent of nothing,
`It was a great period of artistic renewal,' wrote which would excite our souls so deeply and so strongly
Gabriele Münter, 'as I came to Munich to study in in a way which was previously only the domain of
1901. jugendstil had begun in its way to overthrow music'.16
naturalism and to be aware of the virtues of the pure Actually some experiments in non-figurative art had
line.'12 Certainly it was wise of Kandinsky to decide in been carried out in Munich since the turn of the century.
1896 to go to Munich to study. Having decided that One of Olbrich's students, Schmidt-Hals, did a series of
there was nothing for him in Russia (painting at the abstract ornamental paintings as early as 1904. In 1906
time was at a low ebb; only later did the situation change Adolf Hoelzel, whose writings had already suggested the
because of artists like Bakst and Vrubel) he made up possibility of an abstract art, experimented with abstract
his mind to go to the one city in Europe where discussion ornament even though he never went as far as to create
about non-objective art was at its most advanced. an entirely non-objective picture. Macke, who was later
Kandinsky already spoke German—one of his grand- to become a close friend of Kandinsky and exhibited
mothers came from the Baltic states—and this perhaps with him in the Blaue Reiter exhibitions, said in a letter
helped him make up his mind. how he tried to compose colours on a board without
On a purely theoretical level, German writers had been thinking of a real object.17 In 1906 a look through a
aware throughout the nineteenth century of the basic microscope convinced Kubin,18 another artist who was to
problems which would later concern non-figurative exhibit with the Blaue Reiter, that the existence of the
artists. The theoretician Fiedler,13 for example, took visible world was by no means as self-evident as he sup-
strong issue with the idea of art as the imitation of posed. He then proceeded to paint a series of abstract
nature, and the concept of empathy, or Einfühlung, as pictures, an experiment which he did not repeat.
described by Lipps and Vischer, is based on the idea that Kandinsky also became friends with Arnold Schoenberg
the personal identity and the artistic object disappear, so who, apart from his musical activities, thought of himself
that the object itself becomes a direct reflection of the as a painter (he exhibited with the Blaue Reiter), and
personality.14 On a more specific level the association of had begun to think of a new form of music more in keep-
painting and music which is central to Kandinsky's ing with the modern spirit. His Harmonielehre was pub-
Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst was a favourite idea of the lished in the same year as Kandinsky's Ueber das Geistige
German Romantics from Wackenroder to Tieck, Runge in der Kunst.19
and Novalis. Goethe's Farbenlehre, particularly in the There is no doubt that both musician and painter had
version of Rudolf Steiner,15 the theosophist in whom profound effects on each other. Both propounded a
Kandinsky was deeply interested, also had a profound revised conception of traditional artistic means and both
effect on Kandinsky's thought. Much of his writing is demanded a revision of the entire idea of reality and it is