| Artist: | Kandinsky, Wassily |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | First Abstraction | |
| Date of Work: | 1910 | |
| Nationality: | Russian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | German Expressionism | |
| Medium: | Watercolor | |
| Subject: this little watercolor is considered the first non-objective painting. All elements of representation and association have disappeared. Just because there is no subject matter, however, does not mean the work lacks content or meaning. The drama here is played out purely by the formal dynamics. Colors are not descriptive because they have no associative connection back to nature; color has its own autonomy and freedom. Line is sketchy and animated without being defining; it has a life of its own. Kandinsky works from intuition rather than logic and rational design, keeping the image improvisational and avoiding the hard-edge boundaries of a rigid geometry. Consciousness, not consciousness of something, but consciousness itself is his subject; what he expresses is his pure sensations and feelings, divorced from any object or specific subject. He did want his abstractions to be emotional through the intuitive, outward expression of the artist's inner needs. Kandinsky, thus, paints from the inside out, cutting all ties to the world of matter and particularities in the process. The space he creates, thus, is not one bounded by gravity, but one radically open-ended and boundless. The canvas surface is no longer measured in terms of a horizon line and a grounding at the bottom; he conceives of the surface plane as an allover energy field. A believer in "synestehsia" (where one sensory stimulus evokes another, like seeing colors and hearing music), Kandinsky wanted the viewer to listen for the "inner sound" of a color. He wanted painting to be abstract like music is; he is seeking a metaphysical art that transcends the material, objective world. What he did not want was for his art to be mistaken merely for decoration. In the spiritual crisis of Germany before the war, pure aesthetic formalism did not address the artist's inner necessity. Abstraction, thus, had to address the spiritual. For Kandinsky, it is the spirit that rules over matter, and thus he turns away from material reality. Style: opposed to the orderly construction and restricted color range of Cubism and other hard-edge geometric abstraction; did not trust an art that evolved out of logic or the rationale; trusted only internal feelings and intuition. His art, thus, has a mystical core that takes form at this time in dreamy improvisations that are not earthbound. Space is conceived of as an unbounded, energy field; he has no interest in illusionistic one-point perspective. Line, shape, and color all have their own autonomy and function freely within the unbounded field. The picture is conceived of as a vibrant arrangement of rapidly moving color areas that make no reference to a storyline or object in external reality. The picture has its own reality. Context: Germany in the years leading up to WWI where "joie de vivre" (joy of life) was not the atmosphere. In his desire to make abstraction spiritual, Kandinsky expresses the growing spiritual crisis of Germany, which moved abruptly from an agricultural society (close to nature) to a technological society (factories and German efficiency) due to the Industrial Revolution. German Expressionist artists picked up on the apocalypse to come in the tense years leading up to war (1910-1914); the theme that they continually express or try to overcome is angst: an alienated anxiety. What they want to do is give visual form to inner life; they are, thus, against Mimesis. The art is highly subjective and they do not hesitate to exaggerate or abstract to express internal, felt reality. It is an art born out of inner necessity. There are two groups of German Expressionists: Die Brucke (the bridge) and Der Blaue Rieter (the Blue Rider). Kandinsky belongs to Der Blaue Reiter, which is an art that stresses intuition and a metaphysical projection beyond the world of matter through color and forms that push away from description and towards non-objectivity. The movement is more lyrical and romantic than the sharpened tensions and jagged edges of Die Brucke. Kandinsky had trouble letting go of the object in the beginning for fear people would mistake his abstractions for formal decoration. In 1910, the year of this watercolor breakthrough, he began work on his book, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," which he published in 1912. During these years he gradually made a complete break with the objective world, realizing that "the object harms my painting." Kandinsky, who had been trained in the logic of law, wants only to be guided by creative intuition. In a scientific age, intuition is often looked on as fuzzy thinking; Kandinsky's book is an important theoretical text for making an argument that the intuitive is a valid position of knowledge in its own right. Kandinsky would return to Russia, his homeland, during the war. When Russia has its own revolution in 1917, Kandinsky becomes the director of the Russian museum system; during this short-lived period--the Heroic Period of Communism--Russia will emerge as the most progressive country for abstract art in all the world. In the 1920s, Kandinsky returns to Germany and joins the faculty at the Bauhaus, where his work begins to take on more of a geometric hard-edge; the book he writes in 1926, "Point and Line to Plane," clearly suggests a different logic than the earlier "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," but Kandinsky's art will remain mystical and abstractly directed his whole career. He ends up in Paris where he dies in 1944. | ||
