| Artist: | Kandinsky, Wassily |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Improvisation #30 ( Cannon) | |
| Date of Work: | 1913 | |
| Nationality: | Russian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | German Expressionism | |
| Medium: | oil paint on canvas | |
| Subject: one of Kandinsky's Improvisations, which carries a subtitle (unusual for him at this period, especially because the subtitle does make an association with external reality). The only way to account for this is to realize the time period: one year before the outbreak of WWI. This image, perhapps more than any others by Kandinsky, expresses the theme of impending apocalypse. A reference to a firing cannon and buildings toppling over foreshadow the war and destruction to come. The drama here is backed up by the explosive formal dynamics, which act out his theme. 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. Note how the color bleeds here and suggests a slippage beyond any boundaries that would attempt to contain it. 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, though this image does make reference to an external reality. Significantly, though, that external world is being destroyed; for Kandinsky it is the spirit that will rule in the end. 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 typically 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. This canvas was painted one year after he published his book, "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" and one year before the outbreak of WWI. In its reference to a cannon and the destruction of cities, Kandinsky is perhaps expressing the "apocalyptic enthusiasm" that showed up in Franz Marc's work of 1913, as well (see "Fate of the Animals"). From 1910-12, Kandinsky had struggled to make a complete break with the objective world, realizing in the end that "the object harms my painting." Though trained in the logic of law, Kandinsky 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," 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. | ||
