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THE BAUHAUS GROUP: SIX MASTERS OF MODERNISM COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
Colors affected Kandinsky profoundly, like pure emotions. Even at an early age,
bright hues made him rapturous; black induced fear. Above, Dunaberg, 1909.
PHOTOS: ABOVE, © CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS; RIGHT, COURTESY GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM/
© BETTMANN/CORBIS
dinsky himself was a very unusual, original type, uncommonly
stimulating to every artist who came in contact with him. There
was something uniquely mystical, highly imaginative about him,
linked with rare pathos and dogmatism.” It was impossible not
to respond to him and his work.
In 1910, Kandinsky painted a watercolor that went one step
further than his previous work by eliminating any reference
whatsoever to known subject matter. This is possibly the first
entirely abstract painting — as opposed to objects with abstract
decoration — by anyone, ever. That same year, he wrote
On the Spiritual in Art. This book, which declared painting “a
spiritual act,” embraced the supernatural and irrational as valid
components of art. In advocating what was sensory and intuitive
and opposing materialism, On the Spiritual in Art liberated many
readers; following its initial publication at Christmastime of 1911,
it went through two more printings within a year.
Observing Kandinsky firsthand, Grohmann had the opinion
that the artist’s beliefs derived directly from his own mental
state.
According to all who knew him, his was a complex
mind, given to violent contrasts, and his deep-rooted
mistrust of rationalism drove him in the direction of
the irrational, that which is not logically graspable. We
know that he suffered from periodic states of depression,
imagining that he was a victim of persecution, and
that he had to run away. He felt that part of his being
was closely tied to the invisible; life here and now and
in the hereafter, the outer world and the inner soul, did
not seem to him opposed.
Although the stated goals of the Bauhaus stressed the practicality
of objects and the utilization of modern technology for
aesthetically worthy results, Kandinsky’s presence there would
cause many people to explore mystical realms and to accept the
inevitability of neuroses as an aspect of creativity. Kandinsky
declared his purpose to be the creation of “purely pictorial beings”
with their own souls and religious spirit. He believed that
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such art would have major ramifications. At the same time that
he bravely accepted the reality of the mind’s tortures, Kandinsky
had “an absolute faith in the onset of a new era, in which
the spirit will move mountains” and in which painting would
defeat materialism “by asserting the primacy of inner values,
and by directly appealing to what is good in man.”
In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky conceives of a “spiritual
triangle” divided into three tiers, with atheists in the lower segment,
and, in the layers above, “positivists, naturalists, men of
science, and art students.” This middle category does not have
an easy time; “they are dominated by fear,” for they grapple
with “the inexplicable” while remaining unable to accept it, and
thus suffer great “confusion.” He writes of the plight of these
people as if he were narrating the plight of the damned at the
Last Judgment: “The abandoned churchyard quakes, the forgotten
grave yawns open. . . . All the artificially contrived suns
have exploded into so many specks of dust.”
Denizens of this middle tier suffer from their illusion that it
is possible to create or live in an “impregnable fortress.” The occupants
of the highest realms of Kandinsky’s triangle recognize
the fallacy of that assumption. Among this select group of “seers”
and “prophets,” creative geniuses who have entered the realm of
“light” and “the spiritual,” Kandinsky names Robert Schumann,
Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Cézanne,
Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, explaining how each
eschewed superficial beauty in preference for a true representation
of “inner life” as well as “the divine.”
Kandinsky considered music the ultimate art form, which is
why he included more composers than painters in his pantheon.
But he attributes to color some of the same transformative effects
he cherishes in music. To chart the process of the impact of color
on the viewer, he draws an analogy to the workings of a piano:
“Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a
piano of many strings.”
From the book: THE BAUHAUS GROUP: Six Masters of Modernism by
Nicholas Fox Weber. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas Fox Weber. Published
by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.