Concerning the German Spiritual in Russian Art: Vasilii Kandinskii
Identifieur interne : 002683 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 002682; suivant : 002684Concerning the German Spiritual in Russian Art: Vasilii Kandinskii
Auteurs : Robert C. WilliamsSource :
- Journal of european studies [ 0047-2441 ] ; 1971-03.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Abstract painting, Andrei belyi, Annie besant, Anthroposophical society, Blaue reiter, Colours, Composer scriabin, Cosmic painting, Esoteric elite, First world, German romanticism, Inner necessity, Kandinskii, Kandinsky, Material reality, Material world, Munich, Mysticism, Nineteenth century, Other writings, Physical reality, Russian culture, Russian intellectuals, Russian revolution, Scriabin, Spiritual reality, Spiritual revolution, Stefan george, Steiner, Study painting, Theosophical, Theosophy, Urban life, Western civilization, Wyndham lewis, Young artists, Young russians.
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DOI: 10.1177/004724417100100188
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ISTEX:BCDC33AD714B25B2CF52AD2C69F90E60E495FC3FLe document en format XML
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<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>03</month><year>1971</year></pub-date><volume>1</volume><issue>1</issue><fpage>325</fpage><lpage>336</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value>325 Concerning the German Spiritual in Russian Art: Vasilii Kandinskii SAGE Publications, Inc.1971DOI: 10.1177/004724417100100188 Robert C.Williams Washington University, St Louis In the early days of the Russian Revolution Bolshevism co-existed with Bohemia. Hundreds of artists and intellectuals rushed to help build a new society in which they might play a role, painting Agitprop trains, erecting monuments, composing symphonies for conductorless orchestras, reading Futurist poetry, filming the storming of the Winter Palace, directing workers' plays, and designing skyscrapers. Much of their art, however, was neither new nor Russian, but a development of pre- 1 9 I"¡' avant garde tendencies which many Russians had encountered in Europe. Munich was especially important as a transmitter of such tendencies. A number of young Russians studied art there before the First World War and returned to Russia with not only technical training but also ideas of a 'new age' for an artistic elite. The Munich cartoonist for Simplicissimus, Olaf Gulbrandson, inspired the revolutionary poster art of D. 1\100r; the director of the Munich Art Theater, Georg Fuchs, had a major impact on Meierhold; and the mystic Rudolf Steiner made a great impression on the painter Vasilii Kandinskii. Indeed, it was while living in Munich before i g i q. that Kandinskii developed both the abstract art and mystical language which later helped make early Russian revolutionary art appear to to be a radical departure from bourgeois precedents. Vasilii Kandinskii must be counted among the leading revolutionaries in this cultural upheaval. As much a product of European as of Russian culture, Kandinskii lived most of his life in exile in Germany, where he was a major figure in the expressionist movement and at the Bauhaus of Walter Gropius. Between 1910 and 1 9 I 4, while living in Munich, he helped create a revolution in art that seemed no less dramatic than the contemporary movements in Cubism and Futurism: he removed the physical object from his paintings, and thereby attempted through pure form and colour to affect the viewer's emotions in a new way. He also theorized about his work in a book entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which he began to write in 1910 and which was published by the Piper-Verlag in Munich in 1912. Yet in both his painting and his aesthetics, Kandinskii remained very much a product of his time and of his Munich environment. In this case, at least, the Russian revolution in art developed in the West before 1 g t ~, to which it later returned nurtured by the revolution in politics inside Russia. I The prevailing opinion among many artists and art historians has been that 330326 Kandinskii's breakthrough to abstract painting before 19 q was something radically new. His wife Nina called him 'perhaps the greatest revolutionist in the field of plastic art'; the surrealist Andrei Breton referred to him as 'one of the first and one of the greatest revolutionaries of vision'; the Hungarian artist Moholy-Nagy considered Kandinskii 'the great initiator of abstract painting, whose theoretical work represents the beginning of a new art history'. Yet both Iiandinskii', `Russianness' and his 'revolution' are open to question. The painter Ernst Kirchner reflected confusion on his nationality when he named Kandinskii as 'the finest in color of all the Germans'; a more recent art historian has questioned his originality in describing Kandinskii's work as 'the culmination of an historical process which could not be averted'.1 The claim to both Russianness and new-ness was that of Kandinskii himself. It appeared in his autobiographical Rzickbli(kl', published in Nlunicli il 19 13, as well as in other writings and remarks made throughout his life. Kandinskii often mentioned his Mongol ancestors, the city of Moscow, his ethnographic work among the peasants of Vologda province, and the flat space of religious icons. He also recalled his love for horses, great sensitivity to colours, early exposure to the German language and fairy tales through a Baltic German grandmother, and the Rembrandt collection at the Hermitage. Kandinskii described these experiences as always personal and without mediation: His early training in law and economics helped him to think abstractly; in 1895 he saw an exhibit of T\Ionet's haystack paintings in Russia and had a 'dull feeling that the object was missing'; the Moslem art he encountered on a trip to Tunisia in 1904 devalued the visual element too; one of his own paintings lying on its side at dusk in his Munich apartment on the Ailemillerstrasse was also objectless but attractive; the breakdown of Newtonian physics and the idea of matter seemed to Kandinskii like 'the destruction of the whole world'. These intense personal experiences were undoubtedly important for Kandinsky. and he also made clcar his debt to other people's ideas in both art and religion in his work. But there is a key element in his makeup which remained Kandinskii's secret and which reflected his exposure to European thought in Munich, namely, mysticism in general and theosophy in particular. It is in this sense that Kandinskii could say that Conremillg the Spiritual in .1rt `wrote itself more than I wrote it'.2 ' II The movement toward abstraction was common to all the arts in Russia around 1010. As early as I 907 the Lithuanian painter Curlionis tried eliminating physical objects from his pictures, and the Rayonnist painters Larionov and Goncharova were working in this direction on the eve of the war. The 1 W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York, 1947, p. 10; P. Overy, Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye, New York, Washington, D.C., 1969, p. 11; D. E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 132; F. Whitford, 'Some Notes on Kandinsky's Develop ment toward Non-Figurative Art', Studio, 173 (January 1967), p. 16; see also L. D. Ettinger, Kandinsky's 'At Rest', London, 1961, which relates Kandinskii's work to the ideas of Gestalt psychology, showing similarity but not direct influence. 2 W. Kandinsky, Rückblicke, Munich, 1913. pp. 15—17, 21, 25, 34; Overy, Kandinsky, pp. 35-6. 331327 same urge toward non-representation was visible in the `pul-e word' and 'trans- sense language' ( ~aumnyi i'azyk) of the Futurist poets, who sought to emancipate words from any external correspondence or meaning. 'Art is not a copy of nature', wrote Maiakovskii, 'but the determination to distort nature in accordance with its reflections in the individual consciousness'. The same tendency appeared in the theatre, in the black squares and abstract shapes ofMalevich's sets for Kruchenykh's Ijictory over the Sun (1913) and in :Nleierhold's attempts to portray 'inner dialogue', mystery, and the 'world of the soul' in his sets and wordless pantomimes. The object was becoming neither reality nor symbol, but a thing-in-itself.3 The turn to religious mysticism after the 1905 Revolution was another characteristic of Russian intellectual life, revealed in the cult of Vladimir Solov'ev, the Dionysian ecstasy of the symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov and the composer Scriabin, and the discovery of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. In 1005 the Russians had a preview of the epoch of war and revolution which would sweep over Europe in 1 g 1 ~., and thus felt the insecurity of modern life which they frequently compared with life on a volcano. 'The youth of our generation', recalled the writer Marietta Shaginian, 'used to refer to the first fifteen years of our century as timeless. Time seemed to have stopped, seemed to have moved outside of history. In the very air, in the mood of the people there was an expectation-the seemingly passionate desire for something to happen so that the rhythm and movement of history might again become perceptible'.~ The Third Kingdom of Solov'ev, Scriabin's great mystery play scheduled for the end of the world in India, and talk of the timeless moment of ecstasy all reflected this apocalyptic mentality. Not surprisingly Steiner's prophecy of a coming age of spirituality had a great appeal for some Russian intellectuals after 1905, and it was in Munich that they encountered Steiner. For intellectuals Munich meant Schwabing, the Bohemia located around the university and the Alte Pinakothek museum to the north of the city centre. Kandinskii himself described Schwabing at the turn of the century as not a part of Munich but a state of mind. 'Everyone painted-or wrote poetry, or composed music, or began to dance', he wrote. 'In every house one could find at least two studios under the roof where people often discussed, disputed, philosophized, and got thoroughly drunk (depending more on how much money they had than on any moral compunctions) more than they painted.'5 Both Franz von Stuck and the Slovak painter Anton Azbe had their art schools there, and art was as much a part of Munich life under King Ludwig III as Fasching and Oktobnjèst. Between 1 goo and 1914 Schwabing was the home of Lenin, Hitler, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, Franz Marc, 3 V. Erlich, 'Russian Poets in Search of a Poetics', Comparative Literature, IV, 1952, p. 69; Iu. Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh ustrech, Vol. II, New York, 1966, pp. 213-14; V. Markov, Russian Futurism: A History, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1968; E. Braun (Ed.), Meyerhold on Theater, New York, 1969; H. Rischbieter (Ed.), Art and the Stage in the Twentieth Century, Greenwich, Conn., 1968, p. 137. 4 V. Serov, Rachmanninoff, New York, 1950, p. 131. 5 W. Kandinsky, 'Der Blaue Reiter', Das Kunstblatt, 14, 1930, p. 57. 332328 Paul Klee, Giorgio Chirico, the poet Karl Wolfskehl, Stefan George, and the `uncrowned king' of Schwabing-the American-born playwright Frank Wedekind, whose approach to sex in plays such as Lulu was as shocking to good burghers as the art of handinskii, or the cartoons and satire of the journals _7iigend and Sinr~licissimus. The fact that so many radical intellectuals were not Bavarians, nor even Germans, was not lost on the Munich public, which not only spat on some of the paintings of the Neziekiiiistlerz,ereinigling exhibit of 1909 but described them as both 'anarchist' and 'Russian'.6 In I8g6 a group of young Russians arrived in Munich to study painting with Azbe. They included Aleksei Iavlenskii, a 32-year-old former army officers, the painter Igor Grabar, Marianna Verevkina, 36, the daughter of the governor of the Peter and Paul Fortress and a student of~ Repin, and Dmitrii Kardovskii. It was in Verevkina's rooms on the Giselastrasse that they began to gather after the arrival a year later of Kandinskii, then a 3i-year-old lawyer who had just turned down a professorship in law at the University of Dorpat. Between tool I and r gog they were joined by three more Russians-Vladimir Bekhteev, another army oflicer in his mid-twenties, and two brothers from Odessa, David and Vladimir Burliuk, who went on to Paris in i go4. It was this group of Russians who were to fertilize German expressionist painting over the next decade, culminating in the Blaue Reiter exhibit of 19 12. Like most Russian intellectuals, Verevkina and Iavlenskii were under the spell of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev and of mysticism in general. They opposed to realism in art and materialism in philosophy a Nietzschean hope for some sort of 'transvaluation of values' and a new epoch for mankind. For Verevkina, art tvas transcendence, a creative fantasy that substituted for reality. 'To love, to believe, to create', she wrote, 'means to deny the world and its absurd and cruel Gods.' Art was simply 'that which makes life disappear'. 'Art, thought, love-out of these I will make a religion, a cult. I am its temple, its priest, its God. And the life under my feet is small and hateful.' The artist himself is 'a person who has made beauty a God and seeks forms to make this God visible'. He should strive to express emotions, not to portray the visible world, to express out of his 'inner necessity' artistic laws accessible only to geniuses. It was this theme of art as esoteric religion which dominated the mood of Verevkina's Schwabing salon, frequented by both Russians and Germans, including Kandinskii and Iavlenskii.7 In Munich at the turn of the century the decorative curved lines and artifacts of ~Jugend.stil, or Art .Nouveau, were giving way among young artists to the sharper colours and deformed shapes of what would later be called 'expressionism'. Expressionism was a movement in art, literature, and drama characterized by an emphasis on the vision of the individual artist, the childlike simplicity of primitive art, a distaste for urban life and bourgeois standards, and a desire to express emotions rather than to portray external reality. Its aesthetics had 6 L. Hollbeck (Ed.), Unser München, Munich, 1967; R. Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, Munich, 1964, pp. 297-9. 7 J. Hahl-Koch, Marianne Werefkin und der russischer Symbolismus, Munich, 1967, pp. 53-4, 62, 70. On the Azbe school see M. Dobuzhinskii, 'Iz vospominanii'. Novyi zhurnal, 52, 1958, pp. 109-39. 333329 deep roots in the nineteenth century, however. Conrad Fiedler (r8~.t-g5), Theodor Lipps ( i 85 r-r g i ~), C. G. Carus ( i 78g-i 86g) and Alois Riegl (1838- 1905), were all German art theorists who had argued that the artist should not strive to imitate reality but to express his 'inner necessity', linking the observer's soul with the spiritual forces of nature through a process of empathy (Ein- fiihhing). Colours should be used according to their emotional or even musical associations, as Goethe pointed out in his Farbenlehre of 1810. 'For every lovely painting', wrote the romantic poet Ludwig Tieck, 'there is without doubt a complementary piece of music and the two together have but one soul'.8 The idea that the emotion mattered far more than the object in a painting was a popular one among Munich artists after 1000. August Endell, a student of Lipps, as early as 1898 envisaged new art forms which 'meant nothing, which would excite our souls so deeply and so strongly in a way which was previously only the domain of music'. In igo6 the painter Alfred Kubin tried drawing the patterns of biological organisms he saw through a microscope, and a year later August Macke formed colours on a board without thinking of any particular object. Throughout the nineteenth century there had been sporadic attempts at objectless painting, but only after i goo was there a conscious movement in this direction, best expressed in the popular book by a young art historian ~1'ilhelm Worringer entitled Abstraction and Empatkv, published in Munich in i go8. In it he noted that every new phase in art began with an 'urge to abstraction' which reflected a 'psychic attitude toward the cosmos' and a 'great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world' ; he agreed with Lipps' statement that 'geometrically uniform figures are an object of pleasure because the apprehension of them, as of a whole, is natural to the soul' and criticized a 'narrowly European outlook' in art which emphasized the portrayal of physical reality. 'Abstract forms, liberated from all finiteness', concluded Worringer, 'are the only ones, and the highest, in which man can find rest from the confusion of the world picture.'9 The removal of the object from the painting was thus intimately bound up with religious seeking. Removing reference to physical reality was in fact a means of reaching spiritual reality, of expressing the artist's soul, or of linking the viewer's soul with the cosmos. `Between nature and ourselves, nay between ourselves and our own consciousness', wrote Bergson in i goo, 'a veil is interposed, a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd-thin, almost transparent for the artist and poet.' Bergson's view was echoed in England before World War I by the philosopher T. E. Hulme, whose influence on the Imagist movement of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis was considerable. In poetry as in painting the reduction of art to its hard essentials-form and colour, words and letters-seemed to promise a new way of communicating the artist's vision. 'I hardly see an object', wrote Hulme, 'but merely notice what class it belongs to-what ticket I ought to apply to it.' A follower of Worringer in 8 O. Walzel, German Romanticism, New York, 1932, pp. 121, 125, 128; P. Selz, German Expressionist Painting, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1957, pp. 5, 7, 8. 9 Whitford, 'Notes', p. 15; O. Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der Abstrakten Kunst, Munich, 1964, p. 115; W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, London, 1963, pp. 15, 65, 134. 334330 aesthetics, Hulme saw a new 'geometrical art' as the sign of a coming 'breakup of the Renaissance humanistic attitude.'10 In London, as in Munich, a number of intellectuals were seeking a new art form after about 1010 which would he precise and abstract in its style and religious in its desire for an elitist vision of reality beyond that offered by science and the material world. It was this search which led to the immersion of a number of artists and writers in the waters of theosophy. III Carl Jung has notcd thc 'unbelievable rise of occultism in every form in all cultured parts of the western world' since the late nineteenth century, and has argued that people have flocked to such movements 'because such modern gnostic systems meet the need for expressing and formulating wordless occurrences going on within ourselves better than any of the existing forms of Christianity, not excepting Catholicism'.11 In England the appeal of mysterious 'eastern' religious truths was revealed in the Theosophical Society of the Russian mystic, 1\1adam Blavatskaia, whose book Isis Unneiled ( 187~) and other writings borrowed liberally from mid-nineteenth century English novels while claiming to be the secret wisdom handed down by Tibetan mahatmas to an esoteric elite. Commanded by Annie Besant and the Reverend C. `1~'. Leadbeater before 1914, the Society oflered solace in spiritualism, table-tipping, ghosts, seances, and secret doctrine for those disoriented by rapid changes and uncertainties in science, technology, and urban life. Theosophists claimed clairvoyance and a key to the spiritual reality which lay hidden behind the veil of material appearances. Around 1 goo, they predicted, a new age would arrive, a new cycle of world history that would usher in a new type of human being, esoterically defined only as the sixth sub-race of the fifth root-race. A numler of intellectuals were dabblers in this doctrine on the eve of the war, a doctrine which provided pre-war Europe with a new mood of anti-intellectualism and spiritual hope.12 Such mystical doctrines were plentiful in Munich. The circle of Stefan George spoke of an elite of poets and seers which would save the Gcrmal soul from the perils of urbanism and material civilization, an order of knight- templars bound together by Eros. One of his followers, the Munich philosopher Ludwig Klages, told the great gathering of German youth at the Hohen Meissner mountain in 1g13 that western civilization was 'drowning' the soul of man, and that a reunion with earth and soil was needed. Another follower, Alfred Schuler, gave lectures in Munich on the dangers of the city and 10 H. Bergson, Laughter, Paris, 1900, cited in T. Hanna (Ed.), The Bergsonian Heritage, New York, London, 1962, p. 88; T. E. Hulme, Speculations, London, 1924, pp. 75-109; A. R. Jones, The Life and Opinions of T. E. Hulme, Boston, 1960, pp. 43, 45, 60. 11 C. G, Jung, The Collected Works: IV. Freud and Psychoanalysis (1932), Princeton, 1961. p. 326; VII. Two Essays on Analytic Psychology, Princeton, 1953, p. 77; X. Civilization in Transition, Princeton, 1964, p. 90. 12 W. Martin, The New Age under Orage, New York, 1967, p. 162; on Orage, see also P. Mairet, A. R. Orage, New Hyde Park, New York, 1966 and P. Solver, Orage and the New Age Circle, London, 1959. 335331 materialism, while praising the 'idealism' of an elite whose inner life-forces could be manipulated through spiritualism. Others, including most of the young artists, rejected the Volkisch cult of the national soul in favour of the individual one, as emphasized in theosophy. The artist Karl Hoppner, known as Fidus, did theosophical 'temple art' which made visible the invisible by painting in symbols such as the sphinx or the sun higher worlds transmitted through him by a cosmic life force. What all these intellectuals shared was a common belief in the primacy of the inner spiritual world over the outer material world, and the accessibility of that spiritual world to an elite of initiates.13 The central figure in Munich theosophy in these years was the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner. A scholar specializing in Goethe and Nietzsche, Steiner claimed to have had spiritual visions since childhood although it was only in 1 goo that he began attending theosophical lectures in Berlin at the age of 39. Critical of organized Christianity Steiner nonetheless accepted the mystery of Golgotha as the pivotal fact in history, and found the English theosophical emphasis on esoteric eastern wisdom somewhat distasteful. His hope was to reconcile science and religion through a 'spiritual science'. In 1902 Steiner was asked by the London Theosophical Society to form a German branch in Berlin, which he did together with his future wife, the Baltic German Marie von Sievers. In 1907 an international Theosophical Congress was held in Munich, where a rift began to emerge between the Christ-centered mysticism of Steiner and the Buddhist and Indian leanings of Annie Besant. When Besant presented the Indian boy Krishnamurti as Christ reincarnate in igio, the breach widened and in the winter of i g I 2-I g Steiner organized his own Anthroposophical Society which subsequently established its headquarters in the village of Dornach near Basle on the eve of the war.14 According to Steiner, man had once in the Age of Atlantis lived a spiritual life guided bv a group of Initiates who expressed their truth through various mystery centres and oracles. After a great flood, the surviving Initiates moved to Central Asia where they had maintained their methods for training successively higher levels of consciousness in order to perceive true reality in the spiritual, astral or ethero-physical world. For the rest of mankind, these ancient truths had been lost, and were only now beginning to be rediscovered. Through these truths the facade of material reality could be penetrated by the elite to which the Initiates had passed on their wisdom. In March 1910 Steiner gave a cycle of lectures in Vienna which revealed the implications of his doctrine for art. 'There are definite methods', Steiner maintained, 'which a man may apply to his life of soul and which enable him to awaken certain inner faculties slumbering in normal daily life, so that he is finally able to experience the moment of Initiation.' Like Bergson, he maintained that physical reality was merely a veil 'drawn over everything that man would behold were he able spiritually to see through the spectacle presented to 13 G. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, New York, 1964, pp. 84-6, 210-12; 'The Mystical Origins of National Socialism', Journal of the History of Ideas, XXII, January-March 1961, pp. 83-5. 14 On Steiner, see A. P. Shepherd, A Scientist of the Invisible, London, 1954. 336332 him in space'. The 'vibrations' which produce colours, for example, represent a world beyond that from which our 'Sentient Body' receives sensations; it is our 'Sentient Soul' which determines what we 'experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet or yellow colour'. This deeper 'soul-and-spiritual reality' is accessible only to the 'seer', a man of vision who 'directs his gaze into the Imaginative world; there he has the impression, let us say, of something blue or violet, or he hears a sound or has a feeling of warmth or cold. He knows through the thinking of the heart that the impression was not a mere vision, a figment of the mind, but that the fleeting blue or violet was the expression of a soul-spiritual reality, just as the rcd of the rose is the expression of a material reality. '15 Not surprisingly, theosophy was popular among a number of Russians before the First World War. Iavlenskii was a follower of Steiner, read books on yoga, and sought treatment at an anthroposophical clinic in Stuttgart when he fell ill in 1929. Steiner's wife Marie Sievers, an actress who became interested in mysticism through the French Wagnerian Eduard Schuré in Paris, was well versed in the writings of Solov'ev, which she translated into German in the i g2o's. When the composer Scriabin first read Madame Blavatskaia's Kev to TheosophJ' in Ig05, he found it very close to his own thinking. Scriabin hoped for a coming spiritual revolution directed by the 'consciousness of geniuses' which would render the masses 'more perceptive of finer vibrations than usual' and would 'shake the souls of peoples and force them to perceive the idea hidden behind the outer event'.16 Similar ideas were popular in the 'tower', the poet Viacheslav Ivanov's apartment in St Petersburg, between 1905 and 1910. Like Scriabin, Ivanov spoke of 'ecstacy', the moment of 'self-forgetting' in which the unconscious unity of a primal world was recovered. The poet was the keeper of the word, Logos, the 'microcosm' which reflected the universal 'macrocosm' of occult truth. Andrei Belyi later succumbed to the teachings of Steiner himself, whom he met in Cologne in 1912 and followed to Munich that summer. 'In 1912- 1913', recalled Belyi's wife. 'our entire life was under the sign of Rudolf Steiner's lectures.' Belyi, like the Russian painter Trapetsnikov, even followed Steiner to Dornach at the outbreak of the war. 17 The attraction of Steiner for Russians before I9 I4 is best illustrated by the case of Margarita Voloshina, the daughter of a Moscow tea merchant and a student of Repin, who came to Paris in 1902 at the age of twenty to study painting. 'Through Solov'ev', she recalled, 'I had found my way to Christianity, but I did not see in its ascetic ideal any method for transforming our modern culture.' Nor did the intuitionism of Bergson satisfy her. 'Where are those who 15 R. Steiner, Macrocosm and Microcosm, London, 1968, pp. 11, 36, 57, 163. A translation of eleven lectures given by Steiner in Vienna, March 21-31, 1910. 16 C. Weiler, Alexei Jawlensky, Cologne, 1959, p. 125; H. Weisberger, Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Dornach, 1956; F. Bowers, Scriabin, Tokyo and Palo Alto, 1969, II, pp. 52, 63, 266. 17 A. Turgeneva, 'Andrei Belyi i Rudol'f Shteiner', Mosty, 1968, p. 245; Belyi himself does not mention Steiner in connection with his 1906 Munich visit, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, Leningrad, 1934, pp. 103-40. On Trapetsnikov, see A. Steffen, Auf Geisteswegen, Dornach, 1942, p. 65. 337333 know how to extricate mankind from the dead-end in which it finds itself?' she asked. In Paris she met Trapetsnikov, another seeker, and Anna Mintslova, a Russian theosophist attending a congress there. Mintslova was a heavy-set woman of about forty-five with blue eyes, red-blonde hair, a large nose, and lips, who wore black dresses, practised palmistry and graphology and claimed to be clairvoyant. In 1905 Voloshina decided to follow her to Berlin to join the circle of Steiner, who had impressed her by his lectures in Switzerland. For Voloshina Steiner provided long-awaited answers. He defined a meaningful spiritual reality behind the material world, spoke of a coming catastrophic war of all against all, considered the Slavonic peoples as destined to solve the 'social question' and predicted a great future for Russian culture in creating a universal brotherhood of man such as that anticipated by Tolstoi. And his teachings seemed relevant to her painting. When she moved to Munich in January 1909 she was already considering the possibility of a 'new landscape painting' which would express 'cosmic reality'. By the spring of 1910, as Kandinskii was beginning to write Concernina the Spiritual in Art, a number of her Woscow friends were also returning from Soloviev to Steiner and anthroposophy. Not only did Steiner offer a new religion, but he counterposed the `young soul of the Russian people' to the materialism of Western civilization. Having joincd the Munich Steinerites, Voloshina helped establish a branch of the Anthroposophical Society in Moscow in September 1912, and then met Belyi and Trapetsnikov at Dornach during the war.18 The mood of many Russian middle-class intellectuals after the defeats of the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution was thus one of pessimism and desperation. Many escaped into art and mysticism and among those for whom the search for esoteric truths ended in theosophy was Vasilii Kandinsky. ' IV As early as 1915 Wyndham Lewis drew attention to the theosophical sources of Kandinskii's art, characterizing him as a 'medium-like' artist with a 'Blavatskyish soul' who was 'the only PURELY abstract painter in Europe'. An English visitor to Kandinskii's home in Murnau in August 1912 also recalled that Kandinskii 'was inclined (though not at all obtrusively) to talk about religious things, and is much interested in mystical books and the lives of saints. He has had strange experiences of healing by faith'. A more recent art historian has noted that as early as i 8gg Besant and Leadbeater had tried to have an artist paint their thoughts, an experiment described in their book Thought Forms (1905), and concluded with regard to Kandinskii that 'non- objective art began with Annie Besant and Leadbeater in the early i goo's. It is a by-product of astral manfestations as revealed by theosophy, spiritualism, and occultism'. What is the evidence for such a claim ?19 18 M. Woloschin, Die Crune Schlange, Stuttgart, 1954, pp. 143-8, 158, 212. 19 Blast, 2 (July 1915), p. 40; M. Sadlcir, M. E. Sadler, London, 1949, p. 238; A. Nethercot, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant, Chicago, 1963, pp. 52-3, 89-90; T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Mona Lisa's Mustache, New York, 1947, pp. 85-7, 130, 151-2, 161. 338334 Until 1910 Kandinskii was essentially a landscape painter, whose early works revealed the attraction of old Russian life, a Fauve-like use of bright colours and free lines, and the churches, hills and railroad trains of Bavaria, visible in such paintings as Troika ( 1 go6) or Landscape with C'hurch ( 1 gog). Then in 1 g r o he slowly began painting a series of 'improvizations' in which there was no recognizable object, a wild, swirling mass of colours without apparent shape, form, or object. Later he continued on occasion to paint using visual objects and Russian themes, as in Painting witla Troika ( 1 g t 1 ) or the Chagallesque Moscow Lady (1912). Only in revolutionary Russia and at the Bauhaus under the influence of Russian Constructivism did he move to the pure geometric shapes of ll'hite Line ( 1 g2o) and C'hessboard ( 1 g? 1 ) and the cold lines of C'ircles within Circles ( 1 g23) or Arror.o Forms ( 1 g23). It is clear from Kandinskii's writings between 1910 ancl 1 g 12 that his apparently non-representational painting had religious and theosophical overtones. At the very beginning of Co?ict,riiiii'a the Spiritual in Art Kandinskii criticizes pre-war Europe as a 'nightmare of materialism' and calls for a new art which will give to 'those observers capable of feeling them ... emotions subtle beyond words' by establishing 'vibrations' in the soul of the observer. An aesthetic elite with a 'secretly implanted power of "vision" ' must drag along a `heavy weight of resisting humanity' with 'cold hearts and souls asleep' to a new vision capable of striking down the enemy-atheists in religion, socialists in economics. leftists in politics, positivists in science, and realists in art. While criticizing their `excessive anticipation of definite answers', Kandinskii admires theosopl1\- as 'one of the most important spiritual movements' which seeks to 'approach the problem of the spirit by way of inncr knowledge' .20 But theosophy is only part of a much broader 'spiritual revolution' going on in literature, art, and music, in the plays of Maeterlinck, the painting of Picasso and C6zanne, and the compositions of Scriabin and Schonberg. Maeterlinck uses words as 'inner sound', received by the listener not in any relation to some material object but as an 'abstract impression' which sets up a vibration in the heart, and even the simple repetition of words may bring out `unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself'. Like the leitmotif of a Wagnerian opera or a Debussy tone poem, the `pure sound' of words without external of symbolic reference may produce a 'direct impression on the soul'. Matisse in colour and Picasso in form have fragmented and juxtaposed visual reality; Scriabin and Schonberg have abandoned conventional tonality. All the arts have 'never been closer to each other than in this recent hour of spiritual crisis', concludes Kandinskii. All of them are moving toward a 'non-representational, abstract and internal structure' which breaks down the barriers between sound, sight, temperature, and touch for those 'sensitive souls' endowed with synaesthesia, the ability to hear colours or see sounds.21 The function of the artist is to develop a new language, a 'grammar of painting' 20 W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, New York, 1947, pp. 24-6, 29-31. 21 Kandinskii himself was synaesthetic, and the subject of 'colour-hearing' was also of great interest to various nineteenth-century writers and artists. Overy, Kandinsky, p. 45; Kandinsky, Rückblicke, p. 15; Walzel, German Romanticism, p. 125; Stelzer, Vorgeschichte, pp. 130-6; A. W. Rimington, Colour-Music, New York, 1911? 339335 capable of expressing out of the artist's 'inner necessity' an art which is eternal and indepcndent of the artist's nationality, age or surroundings.22 For Kandinskii the artist would be the high priest of a new religion which, by the use of abstraction, would develop a 'power which must be directed to the development and refinement of the human soul', transforming society by transforming individuals. 'We have before us', he predicted, 'a new age of conscious creation, and this new spirit in painting is going hand in hand with thought towards an epoch of great spiritualitf. Like Bergson he felt that 'the veiling of the spirit in the material is often so dense that there are generally few people who can see through to the spirit'. It would be the function of this elite of artists to crcate a revolution, the 'breaking-up of the soulless-material life of the 19thc century' and the 'building-up of the psychic-spiritual life of the 20th century'.23 Kandinskii's friends were well aware of his predilection for theosophy. We know that from I goo on he engaged in Yoga contemplation, and that in r go8 he began to attend some of Steiner's lectures. There is also evidence that he was familiar with Steiner's book Goethe as the Father of tlie New Aesthetics (1()og), which argued that the artist sees beyond the philosopher or scientist to the 'secret laws' of the cosmos and called for an `aesthetics of the future' in which the artist would raise the world to a new spiritual level. Steiner also developed the Besant-Leadbeater theory of thought forms, noting that every human body is surrounded by an aura of vibrations produced by thoughts and emotions of the inner life and revealed in the aura's free-floating lines and colors. Finally, the library of Kandinskii and his mistress, Gabrielle Munter, made public in rg57, reveals not only some of Steiner's writings annotated by Kandinskii, but a number of other works on the occult, spiritualism, yoga, vegetarianism, and hypnosis.24 Like a number of other Russian artists in Munich, Kandinskii was thus deeply involved with mysticism and anthroposophy. It was Steiner's movement, in fact, which appears to have stimulated his search for both a spiritual faith and an abstract art to express that faith. Unlike the contemporary Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian, Kandinskii did not actually join a theosophical group, but like him he may well have thought of himself not as a 'non-representational' painter but as an artist painting spiritual, rather than material, reality. Theosophy, of course, did not necessarily imply abstraction, as evidenced by the symbolic canvases of Fidus. Given the independent tendency toward object-less or cosmic painting on the part of his Russian and German fi-iends in Munich, however, it seems unlikely that Kandinskii would have turned to symbols in his works. 2S 22 Kandinsky, Concerning, pp. 33-5, 39-40, 50. 23 Ibid., p. 77; W. Kandinsky, 'Über die Formfrage', Der Blaue Reiter, 1912, as cited and translated in H. B. Chipp (Ed.), Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1968, pp. 155, 164, 170. 24 S. Ringbohm, 'Art in "The epoch of the great spiritual": occult elements in the early theory of abstract painting', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29, 1966, pp. 338, 392, 394, 398-9, 406. 25 On Mondrian see F. Elgar, Mondrian, New York, 1968. 340336 V Like Worringer in aesthetics, Kandinskii's greatness lies not in his personal genius, independence, or Russian background, but in his sensitivity to the intellectual and artistic currents which swirled around him in pre-war Munich and his ability to synthesize them into a coherent painting style and aesthetic theory. He owed a good deal to the 'abstraction' and 'empathy' of Worringer, the veiled reality of Bergson, the African and Oceanic primitivism of Gauguin, Picasso, and the Trocadero Museum in Paris, the 'soul' of German romanticism, the colour-organ of Scriabin, the 'inner necessity' of Verevkina, the 'cosmic painting' of Voloshina, and the emotional 'vibrations' of Steiner and anthroposophy. Some of these influences are cited by Kandinskii himself in his written portrait of the intellectual revolution of his age; others revcal themselves through his language and metaphors; still others may only be surmised by the historian fi-om what we know of prewar Munich. To the German art critics of 1912 the work of Kandinskii and the Blaue Reiter group appeared to be 'a repetition of the anarchist movement in art', madness, ultra-painting, the destruction of painting by the intellect.26 Yet the importance of theosophy in Kandinskii's work indicates that his art involved the creation of a new world as much as the destruction of an old, and that this urge toward art as a new religion was common to Europeans and Russians alike. It was this mood which he brought back to Russia. Kandinskii himself remained tied to his native land in many ways, visiting Moscow and Odessa frequently before the war, attending Orthodox church services in exile, and returning to Russia to live and paint between I g i 4 and 1 g22. Yet in later years Kandinskii realized that he was as much a product of German as of Russian culture. ``·'e are not leaving Germany for good', he wrote optimistically upon his departure for Paris in lg3g; 'I couldn't do that; my roots are too deep in German soil For several years after 1 g 1 ~ Kandinskii was active in the artistic development of the Russian Revolution, joining the Department of Fine Arts of Anatol Lunacharskii's Commissariat for Public Enlightenment, founding a Museum for Pictorial Culture, and joining the art faculty of the University of ~.Zoscow. For a time the Bolsheviks seemed to share not only his distaste for academic art which had developed in Munich but also his mystical anticipation of a new era of spiritualism. Kandinskii had come to Munich simply to study painting with Azbe; he rcturned to Russia with a mystical view of the artist as a member of an esoteric elite which would guide mankind toward a new age. Only in 1921 1 would he finally realize that Lenin was not the architect of that age, and return as an exile to the Germany which had helped nurture both his art and his mysticism. 26 O. Bic, 'Die Verwirrungen der Malerei', Neue Rundschau, XXIII, 1912, pp. 878-83; Munchener Allgemeine Zeitung, 30, 1912, p. 549; Der Kunstwart, 5, 1912, pp. 308-12. 27 W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky, New York, 1958, p. 221. Letter to Will Grohmann, Paris, December 1933.</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes>
<p>1 W. Kandinsky, <italic>Concerning the Spiritual in Art,</italic> New York, 1947, p. 10; P. Overy, <italic>Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye,</italic> New York, Washington, D.C., 1969, p. 11; D. E. Gordon, <italic>Ernst</italic> Ludwig <italic>Kirchner,</italic> Cambridge, Mass., 1968, p. 132; F. Whitford, 'Some Notes on Kandinsky's Develop ment toward Non-Figurative Art', <italic>Studio,</italic>
<bold> 173</bold> (January 1967), p. 16; see also L. D. Ettinger, <italic>Kandinsky's 'At Rest',</italic> London, 1961, which relates Kandinskii's work to the ideas of Gestalt psychology, showing similarity but not direct influence.</p>
<p>2 W. Kandinsky, <italic>Rückblicke,</italic> Munich, 1913. pp. 15—17, 21, 25, 34; Overy, <italic>Kandinsky,</italic> pp. 35-6.</p>
<p>3 V. Erlich, 'Russian Poets in Search of a Poetics', <italic>Comparative Literature,</italic> IV, 1952, p. 69; Iu. Annenkov, <italic>Dnevnik moikh ustrech,</italic> Vol. II, New York, 1966, pp. 213-14; V. Markov, Russian <italic>Futurism: A History,</italic> Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1968; E. Braun (Ed.), <italic>Meyerhold on Theater,</italic> New York, 1969; H. Rischbieter (Ed.), <italic>Art and the Stage in the Twentieth Century,</italic> Greenwich, Conn., 1968, p. 137.</p>
<p>4 V. Serov, <italic>Rachmanninoff,</italic> New York, 1950, p. 131.</p>
<p>5 W. Kandinsky, 'Der Blaue Reiter', <italic>Das Kunstblatt,</italic>
<bold>14</bold>, 1930, p. 57.</p>
<p><sup>6</sup> L. Hollbeck (Ed.), <italic>Unser München,</italic> Munich, 1967; R. Piper, <italic>Mein Leben als Verleger,</italic> Munich, 1964, pp. 297-9.</p>
<p>7 J. Hahl-Koch, <italic>Marianne Werefkin und</italic> der <italic>russischer Symbolismus,</italic> Munich, 1967, pp. 53-4, 62, 70. On the Azbe school see M. Dobuzhinskii, 'Iz vospominanii'. <italic>Novyi zhurnal,</italic>
<bold>52</bold>, 1958, pp. 109-39.</p>
<p><sup>8</sup> O. Walzel, <italic> German Romanticism,</italic> New York, 1932, pp. 121, 125, 128; P. Selz, German <italic>Expressionist Painting,</italic> Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1957, pp. 5, 7, 8.</p>
<p><sup>9</sup> Whitford, 'Notes', p. 15; O. Stelzer, Die <italic>Vorgeschichte</italic> der <italic>Abstrakten Kunst,</italic> Munich, 1964, p. 115; W. Worringer, <italic>Abstraction and Empathy,</italic> London, 1963, pp. 15, 65, 134.</p>
<p>10 H. Bergson, <italic>Laughter,</italic> Paris, 1900, cited in T. Hanna (Ed.), <italic>The Bergsonian Heritage,</italic> New York, London, 1962, p. 88; T. E. Hulme, <italic>Speculations,</italic> London, 1924, pp. 75-109; A. R. Jones, The <italic>Life and Opinions</italic> of T. E. <italic> Hulme,</italic> Boston, 1960, pp. 43, 45, 60.</p>
<p>11 C. G, Jung, <italic>The Collected Works:</italic> IV. <italic>Freud and Psychoanalysis</italic> (1932), Princeton, 1961. p. 326; VII. <italic>Two Essays</italic> on <italic>Analytic Psychology,</italic> Princeton, 1953, p. 77; X. <italic>Civilization in Transition,</italic> Princeton, 1964, p. 90.</p>
<p>12 W. Martin, <italic>The New Age under Orage,</italic> New York, 1967, p. 162; on Orage, see also P. Mairet, <italic>A. R. Orage,</italic> New Hyde Park, New York, 1966 and P. Solver, <italic>Orage and the New Age Circle,</italic> London, 1959.</p>
<p><sup>13</sup> G. Mosse, The Crisis of <italic>German Ideology,</italic> New York, 1964, pp. 84-6, 210-12; 'The Mystical Origins of National Socialism', <italic>Journal</italic> of the History of Ideas, XXII, January-March 1961, pp. 83-5.</p>
<p><sup>14</sup> On Steiner, see A. P. Shepherd, <italic>A Scientist</italic> of <italic>the Invisible,</italic> London, 1954.</p>
<p><sup>15</sup> R. Steiner, <italic> Macrocosm</italic> and <italic>Microcosm,</italic> London, 1968, pp. 11, 36, 57, 163. A translation of eleven lectures given by Steiner in Vienna, March 21-31, 1910.</p>
<p><sup>16</sup> C. Weiler, Alexei <italic>Jawlensky,</italic> Cologne, 1959, p. 125; H. Weisberger, <italic>Aus</italic> dem Leben <italic>von Marie Steiner-von Sivers,</italic> Dornach, 1956; F. Bowers, Scriabin, Tokyo and Palo Alto, 1969, II, pp. 52, 63, 266.</p>
<p>17 A. Turgeneva, 'Andrei Belyi i Rudol'f Shteiner', <italic>Mosty,</italic> 1968, p. 245; Belyi himself does not mention Steiner in connection with his 1906 Munich visit, <italic>Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii,</italic> Leningrad, 1934, pp. 103-40. On Trapetsnikov, see A. Steffen, <italic> Auf Geisteswegen,</italic> Dornach, 1942, p. 65.</p>
<p>18 M. Woloschin, <italic>Die Crune Schlange,</italic> Stuttgart, 1954, pp. 143-8, 158, 212.</p>
<p><sup>19</sup> Blast, 2 (July 1915), p. 40; M. Sadlcir, <italic>M.</italic> E. Sadler, London, 1949, p. 238; A. Nethercot, The <italic>Last</italic> Four <italic>Lives</italic> of <italic>Annie</italic> Besant, Chicago, 1963, pp. 52-3, 89-90; T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, <italic>Mona Lisa's Mustache,</italic> New York, 1947, pp. 85-7, 130, 151-2, 161.</p>
<p>20 W. Kandinsky, <italic>Concerning</italic> the <italic>Spiritual</italic> in Art, New York, 1947, pp. 24-6, 29-31.</p>
<p>21 Kandinskii himself was synaesthetic, and the subject of 'colour-hearing' was also of great interest to various nineteenth-century writers and artists. Overy, <italic>Kandinsky,</italic> p. 45; Kandinsky, <italic>Rückblicke,</italic> p. 15; Walzel, German <italic>Romanticism,</italic> p. 125; Stelzer, <italic>Vorgeschichte,</italic> pp. 130-6; A. W. Rimington, <italic> Colour-Music,</italic> New York, 1911?</p>
<p>22 Kandinsky, <italic>Concerning,</italic> pp. 33-5, 39-40, 50.</p>
<p><sup>23</sup>
<italic>Ibid.,</italic> p. 77; W. Kandinsky, 'Über die Formfrage', Der Blaue Reiter, 1912, as cited and translated in H. B. Chipp (Ed.), Theories of <italic>Modern Art,</italic> Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1968, pp. 155, 164, 170.</p>
<p><sup>24</sup> S. Ringbohm, 'Art in "The epoch of the great spiritual": occult elements in the early theory of abstract painting', <italic>Journal</italic> of the <italic>Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,</italic>
<bold>29,</bold> 1966, pp. 338, 392, 394, 398-9, 406.</p>
<p>25 On Mondrian see F. Elgar, <italic> Mondrian,</italic> New York, 1968.</p>
<p>26 O. Bic, 'Die Verwirrungen der Malerei', <italic>Neue Rundschau,</italic> XXIII, 1912, pp. 878-83; <italic>Munchener Allgemeine Zeitung,</italic>
<bold>30</bold>, 1912, p. 549; Der <italic>Kunstwart,</italic>
<bold> 5</bold>, 1912, pp. 308-12.</p>
<p>27 W. Grohmann, <italic>Wassily Kandinsky,</italic> New York, 1958, p. 221. Letter to Will Grohmann, Paris, December 1933.</p>
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