Wassily Kandinsky As A Pioneer Of Abstract Art

Wassily Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art not only because of his seminal works of the genre, but also due to his influence on the subject at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture starting in 1922. During his time there, Kandinsky augmented his color theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on points and line forms, and their influence in nature, the arts, and humans, culminated in his 1926 book Point and Line to Plane. This paper investigates some of Kandinsky’s pieces from this period and connects them to the theories he developed. Works like Delicate Tension, Yellow-Red-Blue and Composition VIII are expositions of the inner dynamics of non-objective painting on which Kandinsky focused. With profound artistic insight, Kandinsky pointed out the organic relationship of the elements of painting, touching on the role of texture, the element of time, and the relationship of all these elements to the basic material plane. Decrying literal representation, Kandinsky emphasized instead the importance of form, color, rhythm, and the artist’s inner need for expression. As an influential member of the Bauhaus school and a leading theoretician of abstract expressionism, Kandinsky helped formulate the modern artistic temperament, while also stressing the importance of viewer perception. This paper intends to examine his theories and evaluate the importance of his contribution within the context of the Bauhaus movement.

In the early days of modernism, avant-garde art had not yet been widely taken for granted, instead having the need to be legitimized, interpreted and taught. Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1911, was his first step toward the interpretation of abstract avant-garde theory. Concerning the Spiritual in Art propounds the commonalities of art production, art theory, and art teaching, its ultimate goal being to render art “rational and scientific in order to establish it as an academic discipline.” This goal set the course of the later part of Kandinsky’s artistic career, wherein he made various attempts to give an institutional form to his ideas. None was more significant that his time at the Bauhaus, where from his appointment in 1922 until its closure in 1933, he further pursued his analysis of art as a science and academic discipline. This was reflected in Point and Line to Plane, his revised theoretical exposition.

Unfortunately, the rigour and determination with which Kandinsky pursued the academicization of art has often been overlooked due to “misunderstandings caused by his choice of words.” One of the most prominent examples is his repeated use of “the spiritual,” since it “implies certain religious themes and attitudes” that Kandinsky did not necessarily share. The connotation of spirituality was unenlightened and unscientific, which was entirely contradictory to the fundamentals of design that the Bauhaus and modern gestalt psychologists were espousing. Rather than “the spiritual”, it would have been more accurate for Kandinsky to substitute “the affective”, the definition of which is “relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes.” Concerning the Spiritual in Art begins with a distinction between art as the representation of external reality and art as a means of conveying emotions and moods.

“With cold eyes and indifferent mind, the spectators regard the work. Connoisseurs admire the ‘skill’ (as one admires a tightrope walker), enjoy the ‘quality of painting’ (as one enjoys a pasty). But hungry souls go hungry away.

The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures ‘nice’ or ‘splendid.’ Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. This condition of art is called ‘art for art’s sake.’ This neglect of inner meanings, which is the life of colors, this vain squandering of artistic power is called ‘art for art’s sake.’

This description revelas that what Kandinsky found irritating about most paintings were their formalism. When the motif is dictated from outside, all that matters is ‘how’ it is executed – the formal skill of the artist.

For Kandinsky then, even though art can be entirely abstract and must not necessarily convey reality, it still serves is a medium for conveying affects. Rather than portraying external facts, art should “visualize and transport inner states of mind.” Consequently, Kandinsky focuses on inner necessity as the criterion for evaluating art, and states that “a picture is successful if it adequately expresses specific emotions and moods. And if a picture does this, it is of no consequence whether it is a faithful rendering of external reality. A picture may be figurative or abstract – what matters is that it uses only those forms and colors needed for the visualization and efficient transmission of certain emotions.”

What was particularly groundbreaking about Kandinsky’s perspective was how he defined inner necessity. Inner necessity is often understood as an inner urge “supposedly compelling the artist to paint this picture and not that one.” For Kandinsky, the emotions and moods reside not in the person but in the picture. The ability of a work of art to express and evoke certain moods often has little to do with whether the artist’s own experiences. To that end, Kandinsky later spoke of inner necessity in more functional terms: “it is purely a question of which means an artist considers necessary to infect viewers with a mood, to create an emotion in them. The artist is a specialist in the production and transmission of emotions, not their subject.” After understanding this, it is clear how Kandinsky connected art to art theory, and was keen to develop a visual rhetoric. Rhetoric is defined as “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques” or more broadly, “how particular beliefs, views, emotions and moods can be transmitted to others.” It was simply the rules of art, understood as a visual rhetoric, that Kandinsky sought to reveal through his own art and his writing. This endeavor was indeed both artistic and scientific. Kandinsky surmised that “if an artistic portrayal of affects can be ‘calculated’, then it can also be taught and learned.” Kandinsky’s paintings from this period can thus largely be understood as experimental examples of how visual rhetoric works. This is also the significance of the remarks on the psychological effects of colors and forms that make up the greater part of Point and Line to Plane.

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky claims that the effect of the picture on the viewer does not depend on the artist’s ability to truthfully portray the external world. Later, Kandinsky was confronted with another, far more radical movement: both examples of art of the Russian avant-garde such as Kazimir Malevich and geometric abstraction in the West such as Piet Mondrian once more laid claim to pictorial truth. But this time it was not the truth of referencing reality, but that the picture was to “explicitly manifest both itself and its medium.” Kandinsky’s response was not unlike the strategy he had already developed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, writing Point and Line to Plane as a critique of the new avant-garde. Instead of accepting the simplistic constructions of the radical avant-garde as entities that are immediately self-evident (art for art’s sake), Kandinsky analyzed the geometrical elements which make up every painting – the point and the line, and their interplay with the basic plane. Kandinsky did not examine them objectively, but rather based on the inner effect on an observer.

Kandinsky called the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints the basic plane. The basic plane is generally rectangular or square and therefore, it is composed of horizontal and vertical lines which delimit it and define it as an entity which supports the painting, communicating its affective tonality. Kandinsky believed that this tonality is determined by the relative prominence of horizontal and vertical lines: the horizontals giving a calm, cold tonality to the basic plane while the verticals impart a calm, warm tonality. The artist must evaluate the inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he or she chooses according to the tonality he or she wants to give to their work. Kandinsky also believed that each part of the basic plane possesses an affective coloration, which additionally influences the tonality of the pictorial elements which will be drawn on it, and “contributes to the richness of the composition resulting from their juxtaposition on the canvas.” The upper region of the basic plane corresponds with looseness and to lightness, while the lower region evokes condensation and heaviness.

Kandinsky defines a point as a bit of color put by the artist on the canvas. It is not simply a geometric point (although a literal point is the most concise), but in extension: form and color. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, a star or something more complex. A point can stand alone, but according to its placement on the basic plane, it will take a different tonality. It can be isolated or resonate with other points or lines. The point in all of its variations is thus interpreted not as an “elementary, self-contained form,” but as an “element removed from its usual context in writing where it marks a moment of interruption: like silence in the middle of speech.”

Kandinsky interpreted the straight line, as the manifestation of a specific, constant force which has been applied in a given direction (the force exerted on the pencil or paintbrush by the artist). The linear forms may be of several basic types: a straight line, which results from a unique force applied in a single direction; an angular “zig-zag” line, resulting from the alternation of two forces in different directions, or a curved “wavy” line, produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. In Kandinsky’s theory, the subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: a horizontal line corresponds “with the ground on which man rests and moves” and possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar to black or blue. A vertical line corresponds with “height, and offers no support” and possesses a luminous, warm tonality akin to white and yellow. Congruently, a diagonal line occupies a spectrum of warm to cold tonality, according to its inclination toward the horizontal or the vertical.

A long, strong force such as the one which produces a straight line corresponds with lyricism, and the forces which confront each other form drama. Similarly to the tonality of the plane, the angle formed by the angular line is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (such as in a triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (such as in a circle), and similar to red for a right angle (a square). Kandinsky wrote: “the entire field of straight lines is lyric, a fact which can be explained by the effect of a single force from the outside.”

In Kandinsky’s view, it is the duty of artists to study these effects to produce paintings which are not just the result of a random process, but the fruit of authentic work and the an effort toward evoking emotion. This related to Gestalt psychology, which emerged in primarily in Austria and Germany in the early 1900s. Gestalt psychologists emphasized that humans perceive entire patterns or configurations, not merely their individual components, a view sometimes summarized as “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Gestalt psychology was confirmed to play a role in the theoretical teachings at the Bauhaus, when Karlfried Graf von Dürkheim came from Leipzig to hold a series of lectures on Gestalt, with the intention of exposing students to connections between “the psychic and the social.” Many of these theories are evident in Kandinsky’s paintings of the time period as well.

Yellow-Red-Blue was created by Wassily Kandinsky in 1925. The two-meter wide piece consists of several primary forms: a vertically oriented yellow rectangle, an inclined red cross and a large dark-blue circle. These are complemented by a multitude of straight and curved black lines, circular arcs, monochromatic circles which contribute to its delicate complexity. The left side of the artwork primarily contains rectangles, squares and straight lines in bright colors while the right side features darker colors in various more abstract shapes. How these two practically divided sides are organized on the create varied emotions in the viewer. Much like within Kandinsky’s theories, this simple visual prominence of forms and the main colored masses present on the canvas is only a first glimpse of the work, whose appreciation necessitates deeper observation. Attention should be paid to not only the forms and colors involved in the painting but their relationship, their absolute and relative positions on the canvas and their harmonic interplay with each other.

Delicate Tension #85, painted in 1923, belongs to a large series of watercolors dated between 1922 and 1923. In many of the works, color is relegated to filling in certain forms and takes on colder and more bold hues than in Kandinsky’s previous periods. It was during this time that Kandinsky delved more deeply the scientific side of his investigation of the correspondences between forms and colors. The geometric shapes found in his works from this period, which are sometimes described as “cold” and “sterile” mainly consist of the circle and the triangle, which Kandinsky considered to be “the two primary, most strongly contrasting plane figures.” Furthermore, the notably geometric compositions have been drawn with a ruler and compasses, which enhances their clinical nature. The influence of Russian constructivism and its influence in the Bauhaus laid the foundation for Kandinsky’s further theoretical developments in abstract art.