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The sun is melting Moscow down to a mere speck which, like a tuba gone
mad, is making the whole inner being, the whole soul vibrate.... It is
only the final chord of the symphony that heightens colours to their most
vivid.... Pink, purple, yellow, white, pistachio-green, flaming red
houses, churches - each a song unto itself - the shrill green lawn, the
deep drone of the trees.... Painting this hour, I thought, would represent
the artist's most unlikely and loftiest happiness.
Wassily Kandinsky, 1912, in Collected Writings 1,1980
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One evening in 1910
Vasily Kandinsky entered his Munich studio,
noticed a canvas that had been accidentally hung upside down and was
enraptured. He had suddenly comprehended that this was a picture "of
extraordinary beauty, glowing with an inner radiance". At that time, as
the Russian emigre would say later, he had, in a flash of insight,
understood what abstraction really meant. In connection with art,
"abstraction" did not mean "anything that could be perceived by the
senses; it meant trying to represent the intellectual content of
something".This did not mean depicting a couple embracing, for instance,
but instead expressing their feelings of joy, love and security solely by
means of a non-representational approach.
The discussion waxed loud and long as to who had been the first to
paint an abstract picture and who should therefore be regarded as the
founder of abstract painting. All his life,
Kandinsky would remain
convinced that the honour should have gone to him. Today it is a
well-known fact that other artists, such as Hans Schmithals, painted
abstract pictures before
Kandinsky did. Nevertheless,
Kandinsky deserves
full credit for the pioneering way he allowed colour and form to become autonomous in his compositions.
Kandinsky had refused a university chair in law to become a painter.
His progress towards abstraction was long and arduous. At the beginning of
his artistic career, any type of
painting that did not correspond to reality left him bewildered. At the
age of thirty he saw an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow and
stood for hours before
Monet's Haystack, jotting down notes: "It
was only when I read the catalogue that I realised it was a haystack. I
couldn't pick it out. I was embarrassed about not being able to do so. I
also felt
that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I numbly sensed
that the real subject of the painting was missing." Then
Kandinsky became
more familiar with the painting and noted happily "that the picture not
only seizes one, it imprints itself indelibly on one's memory to hover,
always unexpectedly, before one's eyes in all its detail.... Painting has
assumed magic-al power and magnificence. Unconsciously, however, the
subject has been discredited as an unavoidable element of the picture. I
had the general impression that a tiny particle of my sundrenched
fairy-tale Moscow already had an existence of its own on canvas." Despite
his allegiance to abstraction,
Kandinsky drew his inspiration solely from
the visible world, starting with carvings on Russian peasants' houses and
extending to African masks and Upper Bavarian votive tablets. It was not
his aim to represent nothingness with his abstract renderings; he
endeavoured to reveal the primal chaos from which the creative force
emerged, the force that once formed the world.
Composition Vll,
Kandinsky's most important work from the period before the First World
War, does not attest to destruction, but carries the message of a creative
beginning.
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