Recently, I saw a small but excellent exhibition of Kandinsky’s work at the Centro Pompidou Málaga. It made me reflect, again, on how we all evolve as artists as the years go by, either by pushing out new frontiers and changing or by electing to stay more or less faithful to our original way of depicting the world.
What makes us select one path or the other? In the case of an artist finding early success financially, there is a very insistent siren call, from the public and from gallerists and agents, to stick with the successful style and subject matter. Entirely understandable. However, repeating the same type of art over and over again must be rather hard in my optic!
The other path – endless experimentation and evolution – is a path that is frequently more risky from a financial point of view, as reception of new and different pieces of art is often less than encouraging, at least for a while until slowly, slowly, the public comes around to understanding and liking that approach.
I had never before been able to see Kandinsky’s earliest paintings. In their realistic, often lyrical style, they are often very lovely. Small (plein air?) landscapes and seascapes were a delight of freshness and colour sensitivity.
Schwabing, Winter Sun , 1901, oil on canvas board, Wassily Kandinsky (photo J. Cook)
Tunis, Coastal Landscape I, 1905, oil on canvas board., W. Kandinsky (photo J. Cook)
On the Shore, 1902-03, oil on canvas board, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
Kochel, Old Kesselbert Street, 1902, oil on canvas board, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
Rapallo, Stormy Sea, 1906, oil on canvas board, W. Kndinsky (J. Cook photo)
Another room introduced me to his 1889 investigations for the Natural Sciences, Ethnographical and Anthropological Society in Moscow – decorative studies of Russian country cultural life with dances, processions, etc. Of this work, Kandinsky wrote that he wanted the viewer to be able to move through the painting, obliging him or her to ‘dissolve’ into the scene and become absorbed and lost in it.
A Russian Scene, 1904, oil on canvas board, W. Kandinsky, image courtesy of Centre Pompidou Paris
A radical change in Kandinsky’s work came about when he moved to Munich, aged thirty, and, despite not enjoying the exercice, put himself through the discipline of life drawing. But his growing friendship with Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin pushed him in a very different direction. They had been in Paris and absorbed the latest trends in French painting; these echoed Kandinsky’s increasingly revolutionary ideas on creating art, thus a perfect match. Soon he was part of a group of artists exhibiting art that functioned at the fringes of academia, finding stimuli in all directions, not only in paintings and engraving, but also in writing art criticism for Russian publications. His deepening friendship with Gabriele Munter helped validate his investigations and evolution, as they travelled widely through Europe and North Africa.
But yet again, Kandinsky was pushing out boundaries to such a degree that he began to find Munich too provincial and conservative. More and more interested in abstraction, by February 1914, he had produced his major investigation of abstraction, Painting with Red Spot, entirely based on the play of colour and featuring red, which he considered imbued with power and irresistible light that works on the viewer’s ‘interior’.
Painting with Red Spot, 25 February 1914, oil on canvas, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
Meanwhile, he had been maintaining close contact with the art scene in Russia, through his writing, his theories of the links between music and art and changes in the Russian art world. Kandinsky was clearly omnivorous in his interests, be it for the occult or religion in its widest spiritual sense. In turn, that influenced his art and eventually played against him in post-revolutionary Russia to which he had returned. An emblematic and almost troublingly exuberant work of 1919, En Gris, showed the fruit of many of these investigations and influences of geometrical forms, allied to the analysis of colour per se.
In Grey, 1919, oil on canvas, W. Kandinsky, (J. Cook photo)
The rupture with Russia came in 1921 when his investigations and creations met with increasing opposition from the suprematists. He moved to Berlin to join the Bauhaus. Henceforth, his path was set – geometrical forms in innumerable compositions. Ironically, however, he still showed influences of the suprematist Kazmir Malevich in his 1923 Sur Blanc II.
On White II, 1923. oil on canvas, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
A Circle (A), January 1928, oil on canvas, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
On the Points, 1928, oil on canvas, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
Still later, in Paris, he was experimenting ever further with the effects of Ripolin enamel paint. His swan song, in essence, would be his 1942 cold and grandiose Reciprocal Accord, in which Kandinsky seemed to affirm his unique voice and way, using Ripolin and oils in a precarious balance between geometrical abstraction and a natural organic inflection.
Light, 1930, Ripolin on cardboard
Reciprocal Accord, 1942, oil and Ripolin on canvas, W. Kandinsky (J. Cook photo)
I left the Pompidou exhibition of Kandinsky’s work with renewed conviction that experimenting, questing and investigating enrich an artist’s life to an enormous degree, despite financial risks and possible art world indifference or rejection. In essence, if one can, ‘be true unto oneself’.