Kandinsky: Cause and Effect

Kandinsky and Heidegger

Abstract painting came very late to Australia. Non geometric pure abstraction has been particularly late to develop here. Even now, almost all Australian abstract painters continue to refer to their work in relationship to landscape, light or nature, as if abstract painting is merely a reduction from, or an extension of, a motif from Nature. Such an approach is related to the kind of 19th and 20th century Symbolist practices from which abstraction initially arose, but such practices are quite distinct from those of the abstract painter.

Writing in 1936, Wassily Kandinsky explained that a more correct term for abstract painting would be “real art”, because “this kind of art puts a new artistic world, spiritual in nature, alongside the external world. A world that can be brought about only through art. A real world.”¹ In the same article, Kandinsky referred to the “life-force” of this pure created world, opposing such a life force (or spirit) to the prevailing materialism of our culture.² Towards the end of his account, Kandinsky said this:

The abstract painter derives his “stimulus” not from some part or other of nature, but from nature as a whole, from its multiplicity of manifestations, which accumulate within him and lead to the work of art. This synthetic basis seeks its most appropriate form of expression, which is called “nonobjective”.³

I would add the following: in pure abstraction, it is the processes of painting themselves that give rise to the painting. Such painting is not representation of something else, it is the arising of itself. This is why Kandinsky called the created abstraction “a real world”. This real world, the painting, is embodiment of that which arises within the artist.

In a lecture given the same year that Kandinsky was writing the above, the philosopher Martin Heidegger said that “Art is real in the art work. Hence we first seek the reality of the work”.⁴ In this lecture, Heidegger described the artist’s role as being almost like getting out of the way, so that the thing which arises can take form as the art work.⁵ Heidegger was not speaking of abstract painting in particular, he mentions the Aegina Sculptures in Munich, for example, but his words resonate deeply with those of Kandinsky. The sense that Heidegger is describing the same conditions that Kandinsky has described is very strong in the following passage:

Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance – as this being of truth in the work and as work – is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is.⁶

I note that Heidegger shares Kandinsky’s view that the materialistic basis of our culture is anathema to creation of the true work of art, and refer the interested reader to Kandinsky’s important text, On the Spiritual in Art.⁷

Kandinsky’s Language of Forms

If the practice of abstract painting is a bringing forth of that which arises, the abstract painter must be deeply concerned with the means by which this is accomplished, that is, with technique. Technique is the means by which the artist “gets out of the way”. In the case of Kandinsky, a deep concern with technique enabled the artist to develop a whole new language of artistic forms.

Kandinsky was based in Munich from 1896 to 1914. The breadth of the famous Munich collections provided the basis for his research into forms, which came to maturity in his paintings of the 1920s. The language he developed in these paintings is broader and more complex than Kandinsky’s own statements (which focus on colour and resonance) sometimes suggest. It is a language whose roots are located in ancient Greece.

The Munich Antiken Sammlungen holds one of the largest collections of painted ancient Greek wine cups in the world (and includes the well known cup depicting Dionysos with dolphins). Careful comparison of these classical paintings to paintings and woodcuts of Kandinsky reveals the parallel use of many forms, even in Kandinsky’s early practice. Likewise, classical sculptures in the Glyptothek, including the 5th century Aegina figures referred to by Heidegger, directly influenced Kandinsky’s drawing and compositional methods, and helped him to find the pure and bold means of expression which he was seeking. Another obvious debt, in Kandinsky’s mature work, is to Byzantium. Conventions derived from classical Greek painting and sculpture, combined with Middle Eastern decorative forms, were the basis for Byzantine forms, and also for much in Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s work is thereby also related to the Neo Platonic light philosophers.

Paintings of the Northern Gothic School (the work of Dirk Bouts and Adriaen Isenbrandt, for example, as represented in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich), are another seminal influence on Kandinsky, directly shaping his use of colour. Kandinsky’s whole colour world seems to emanate from this late Gothic moment, and from the related colour world of Raphael (whose Canigiani Holy Family from the Alte Pinakothek was reproduced in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art).

Kandinsky’s modern sources are the German Romantics (such as Heinrich Maria Von Hess) and the 19th century Symbolist painters (not only Hans Von Marees and Ferdinand Hodler, for example, but also Van Gogh), whose paintings were already in the Munich collections by Kandinsky’s time.

Kandinsky’s genius was that he was able, intuitively, to comprehend the inner principles pertaining to the models outlined above. This bestowed his paintings with power to invoke what Kandinsky himself would have called the internal world. Although there have been numerous other influences on the development of abstract painting, Kandinsky’s language of forms became the basis of all non-geometric abstract practice in the 20th century.