Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (detail) 191011 Tate ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

KANDINSKY
THE PATH TO ABSTRACTION
22 JUNE 1 OCTOBER 2006
Information
and activity pack
for teachers

Introduction
This teachers pack accompanies Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction
19081922 at Tate Modern. It focuses on three key works by Kandinsky,
providing information, discussion points and classroom activities about each
one. A theoretical and historical context for Kandinskys abstraction is
illustrated with 4 further works. The pack has been designed to both support
a visit to the exhibition and to link with work you are doing in the classroom.

For more
information

Becks-Malorny, Ulrike (2003) Wassily Kandinsky 18661944 The Journey to

Abstraction, Taschen
Behr, Shulamith (1999) Movements in Modern Art: Expressionism, Tate
Gallery Publishing
Dube, Wolf-Dieter (1998) The Expressionists, Thames and Hudson
Harrison, Charles and Frascina, and Perry, Gill (eds.) (1993) Modern Art
Practices and Debates: Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, Yale University
Press in association with The Open University Press
Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul (eds.) (1995) Art Theory 19001990 An
Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing (for excerpts from Wassily
Kandinskys Concerning The Spiritual in Art)
Lankheit, Klaus (2006) Documentary Edition of The Blaue Reiter Almanac,
Tate Publishing
Robinson, Michael (2006) Kandinsky, Flame Tree Publishing
www.tate.org.uk/collection (This pack links to work by Luc Tuymans, Dan
Flavin and Tomoko Takahashi. Further information about their work, and
details of its location on display at Tate Modern, can be found on the Tate
website.)

QCA
schemes
of work

Viewpoints
A sense of place
Shared view
Objects and viewpoints
Life events
Personal places, public spaces

@ Tate 2006. All rights reserved

www.tate.org.uk

Written by Dr Jackie Steven

Designed by Martin Parker at

www.silbercow.co.uk

Theory and History: Inner Necessity

Our starting-point is the belief that the artist is constantly
engaged in collecting experiences in an inner world, in
addition to the impressions he receives from the external
world, from nature. The search for artistic forms in which to
express the mutual interpenetration of these two kinds of
experience, for forms which must be free of every kind of
irrelevancy in order to express nothing but the essentials...
this seems to us to be a watchword which is uniting more
and more artists at this present time. KANDINSKY,
Statement as president of The New Artists Association of
Munich
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866, and he trained in law,
economics and ethnography. However, by the age of 30, he had abandoned
law and was working as the director of a print shop, making reproductions
of artworks. In 1896 he turned down a university teaching post and decided
to give more serious attention to his love of painting. He moved to Munich,
with is wife Anya, to pursue a career as an artist.
Munich was a magnet for artists at the time. The visual arts had featured
prominently in the cultural life of the city for many years, a result of the
patronage of the Catholic Church and the Bavarian monarchy, who
sponsored the first public museums in Germany. There were also highly
rated teaching institutions, workshops for painters and spaces for exhibition.
The Glaspalast (built to emulate Londons Crystal Palace) was a venue for
popular quadrennial salons that exhibited international art.
By the time Kandinsky arrived in Munich, the Munich Secession had been
founded, exhibiting a wide range of progressive art such as Impressionism
and Symbolism. The Secession group played a central role in the
development of Jugendstil, which was a German equivalent to Art Nouveau.
The fluid lines and highly decorative embellishments of Jugendstil were a
significant departure from the naturalistic detail of nineteenth-century
realism.
As a student in the painting classes of Franz von Stuck, who had cofounded the Munich Secession, Kandinsky made contact with artists and
performers, founding and then becoming leader of the Phalanx group, in
1901, through which he organised exhibitions, exhibited his own work and
began teaching. His poster design for the first Phalanx exhibition is in the
Jugendstil style, and it depicts ornamental soldiers as an advancing (or
avant-garde) force, lances raised against traditional art. With this poster,
Kandinsky entered the avant-garde of the Munich art world. His contribution
to the European avant-garde, through exhibitions, publications and as an

organiser, would prove immense.

The key concept explored through Kandindkys commitment to the avantgarde was that art should grow out of inner necessity and not depend on
external impressions for guidance. Rather, the inner voice of the artist
would provide the authority in deciding upon essentials in art. Kandinskys
reason for believing in the importance of this reorganisation of priorities from
naturalism to what was ultimately to from the first abstract art, was his
belief that art served a spiritual role. On The Spiritual In Art, his most
important and influential essay, describes not only the artistic means to
serve this purpose, but the purpose itself, observing that culture had
become dominated by materialistic thinking, and that humankinds spiritual
potential was under threat.
On The Spiritual In Art was first published in 1911, and together with Franz
Marc, Kandinsky made plans for the compilation of an almanac of articles by
painters and musicians to be printed along side reproductions of folk art, art
from Asia and Africa, art by children, ethnographic artefacts and illustrations
of artwork by painters such as Van Gogh, Czanne and Rousseau. This was
ultimately published as the Blue Rider Almanac, an attempt to push the
existing limits of artistic expression by juxtaposing diverse cultural sources,
and through a new spiritual language in art. As editors of the Blue Rider
Almanac, Kandinsky and Marc also organised exhibitions, becoming the
nucleus of the avant-garde art group called the Blue Rider.
Kandinsky later gave an account of how the title came about for the Blue
Rider Almanac, stating that it was simply because both he and Marc loved
blue, and that Marc loved horses, and he riders. But there was more than
this to the motif of a blue rider. The rider often appears in Kandinskys
woodcuts and paintings in various guises, such as a romantic fairytale figure,
mediaeval knight, messenger or herald. Lyrically (1911) features a horse and
Lyrically 1911
Museum Boijmans
Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

Sketch for
Composition II 1910
Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum,
New York
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

rider, and the free, dynamic treatment of the subject shows his familiarity
with the calligraphic style of Asian art and his skill with the medium. The
fluidity of this print, gives the image an appropriate dynamism as the rider
rushes forward. It is a symbol of change, of conflict, and of engagement.
Sketch for Composition II (1910) shows the motif of the rider on a white horse
leaping from left to right. Just below and to the right, a white rider rears up
on a purple/blue horse, amid what is ostensibly a landscape. The
recognisable elements of this painting, such as the scene and the figures, no
longer serve illustrative purposes, but have sprung from the inner necessity
of Kandinskys imagination. Kandinsky made many preparatory sketches for
the cover of the Blue Rider Almanac, and finally chose to produce a print
referring to St George, the dragon-vanquishing Patron Saint of Russia. In On
The Spiritual In Art Kandinsky described blue as a spiritual colour, and the
Blue Rider Almanac is a symbol of the avant-gardes battle with the
traditional limits of artistic expression, while it also represents the battle
between spiritual values and the materialism of contemporary life.
Sociology was developing as a new discipline at the time, with theorists
such as Georg Simmel analysing Germanys recent transition from a rural to
an urban society. Urban centres appeared to be entirely governed by
industrial production and material consumption. Germanys first department
store was built in 1896, but slums emerged at the same time. The rate of
change was startling. Mystical philosophies and religions, which questioned
the validity of the outer world and promoted a search for hidden truths,
were fashionable. Kandinskys conviction that abstract art had a role to play
in developing humankinds capacity for spiritual experience was buoyed by
the sociological and mystical issues of his time.

Composition VI 1913
State Hermitage, St Petersburg
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Composition VI 1913
In general, colour is a means of exerting a direct influence
upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the
hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings. The
artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by
means of this or that key. KANDINSKY
While still living in Russia, Kandinsky found an important connection between
colour and music. Kandinsky is believed to have had synaesthia, a condition
that makes people perceive colour not only as a visual property of objects,
but with sounds of different qualities and intensities. As he looked out over
the rooftops of Moscow, he felt that what was profound about the scene
before him could not be represented in graphic and realistic detail although
he had a desire to capture the scene on canvas. In Kandinskys words: The
sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild
tuba, set all of ones soul vibrating... To paint this hour, I thought, must be for
an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy. It was sometime later, at a
musical performance of Wagners Lohengrin, that Kandinsky believed his
sunset hour had been realised in art, in all of its emotional intensity.
In his book On The Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky associated properties of
shape and colour with certain emotional effects. Kandinsky further
suggested that the artist should not seek a strictly harmonious abstract art,
but that the current social and spiritual conditions demanded opposition
and contradiction.
These effects can be seen in Composition VI. The surface of this large
canvas is teeming with energy, and even though the individual elements are
balanced, the composition is very complex, and does not have a central
point of focus. Kandinsky described this painting as having two centres. One,
to the left, comprised delicate, indefinite lines over a rosy and blurred centre,
and a second focal point is to the right, and is a crude, red-blue, rather
discordant area with strong and precise lines. Less obvious is a third focal
point, seething with red and white, closer to the centre of the canvas.
Kandinskys initial idea for this composition developed from an earlier work
on the theme of the Deluge and Composition VI retains an effect of
immersion. Kandinsky compared the indefinite effects of this canvas to being
in a Russian steam bath.

Links with
other works
in exhibition

Improvisation 30
(Cannons) 1913
The Art Institute of
Chicago, Arthur
Jerome Eddy Memorial
Collection
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

Kandinsky had started referring to musical protocols, in 1909, henceforth

titling some of his works Impressions, Improvisations or Compositions,
depending on his method of working and his inspiration. Compositions were
the most complex and researched works, which is true of Composition VI,
where Kandinsky had made numerous studies and sketches before he could
begin the final canvas. An Impression, as the title indicates, was the result of
an engagement with an external source of inspiration, while an
Improvisation was drawn more from internal nature, and was more
spontaneous. Improvisation 30 (Cannons) painted during the same year as
Composition VI, is certainly less complex, and is also smaller in scale and
freer in handling. There are more recognisable elements, such as the group
of figures in the bottom left corner, and mountains with dome-topped
castles. For the most part, the linear elements float freely within the picture
and colour does not serve a descriptive function. However, the cannons of
the title have a solid physical appearance, with shading on the barrels and
they seem to be affected by gravity. Yet Kandinsky explained to his dealer in
a letter that his subtitles were mostly for his own use and not intended as a
guide to the content of his work. He acknowledged that he could not
remove objects from his paintings until 1914. The cannons, Kandinsky
explained, may have arisen unconsciously as a result of the imminent war.

Discussion
and further
development
in the
classroom

Significant Experiences
Discussion Do any of your students identify with Kandinskys experience of
Moscow at sunset? Discuss their own significant experiences (what emotions
were involved?) Would they be willing to put their personal experiences into
art? Is this what art is for?
Activity Compare the experiences discussed. Divide students into groups
of similar experience. What art forms might best capture their experiences?
Consider ways to combine art forms into one artwork per group. Wagners
idea of a gestamtkunstwerk, being a total work of art for the stage (music,
backdrops etc.) was influential for Kandinsky as a way to enhance the
emotional effect of art.

Music
Discussion What music do your students listen to? Why what effect does
it have? What other kinds of music are they familiar with? Is music abstract,
or does it involve imitation, representation, or the inclusion of actual sounds?
Activity Ask your students to bring music into the classroom (an example
of abstraction in music, and a counter example) or (music to match/create a
particular mood.) Some members of Kandinskys Phalanx art group were
cabaret performers. He was fascinated by their performance of musical
drawings where a drawing was made in the rhythm of music being played.
Try it.

Abstract language of form and colour

Discussion Do your students associate meanings with any colours or
shapes? Black, red, green? Circle, zigzag? Do they all agree? Where do these
meanings come from?
Activity Compile, and then use, a colour/form vocabulary with your
students. Is there a vocabulary like this at use in a wider context, such as
advertising? In small groups, look at or discuss an advert, and try to isolate a
formal vocabulary at work. In what way do adverts convince us to buy?

Links to
other works

Dan Flavins sculptural materials were familiar fluorescent light tubes of

varying lengths and colours. The colours, and colour combinations he used
created intense and emotional installations. Monument 4 for those who
have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death) was
made in response to the Vietnam War, and consisted simply of an otherwise
darkened room, with a small pile of intense blood red fluorescent light tubes
arranged on the floor jutting out from a wall.

Cossacks 19101911
Tate. Presented by Mrs Hazel McKinley, 1938
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Cossacks 19101911
It took a long time before this question What should
replace the object? received a proper answer from within
me. KANDINSKY

11

While still a law student in Moscow, Kandinsky encountered abstraction in

painting. He saw a work from Monets Haystacks series, but failed to
recognise the subject. After reading in the catalogue that this was a
haystack, Kandinsky could still not perceive the subject, and later wrote that
he had the dull sensation that the pictures subject was missing. And I was
amazed and confused to realise that the picture did not merely fascinate but
impressed itself indelibly on my memory and constantly floated before my
eyes, quite unexpectedly, complete in every detail. He had a similar
experience with one of his own paintings some years later when, on
returning home to his studio, he was surprised to find a beautiful canvas
with no recognisable subject. It was, in fact, his own work that was on its
side. Undoubtedly, these experiences were instructive for Kandinsky, but he
did not discover abstraction accidentally. Although these experiences
illustrated that colour could impress itself on the viewer with considerable
power, and that a painting with no reference to recognisable forms could be
beautiful, this would not help Kandinsky determine the forms he would use
in his own paintings.
While Kandinsky prioritised inner necessity, his move towards painting
that made no reference to the objects of the world was far from impulsive or
dogmatic. Kandinsky recognised the authority of the inner voice above
external impressions, but this emphasis on spirituality did not initially
necessitate a complete rejection of recognisable motifs. Prior to, and
following his breakthrough to painting free of external references, objects
are to be found in his paintings, often dissolving into the composition, and
barely recognisable. They have not been drawn from nature but have welled
up from his emotional imagination, and Kandinsky maintained that they
therefore had a spiritual resonance. Motifs are also dissolved into his
paintings to varying degrees so that the viewer would uncover by stages,
what references he was making in his work so that the emotional
overtones would be experienced gradually.
Many of the motifs in Kandinskys paintings are of Russian origin, and
their spiritual resonance is bound up with Kandinskys own emotional
mythology. In his painting Cossacks, the landscape and figurative elements
have been abstracted into familiar but cryptic motifs that can be easier to
recognise for a viewer with access to other works by Kandinsky. Cossacks
depicts a mountainous landscape with zigzag birds, and to the right, a
fortress, where three Cossacks are to be found, with red hats and lances,
while two more riders clash on horseback waving sabres, above a central

rainbow. Cossacks were a romantic motif, legendary soldiers with free reign
to exercise military power throughout Imperial Russia. They had helped
thwart Napoleons advance on Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.

Links with
other works
in exhibition

Song 1906
Centre Pompidou,
Paris. Muse national
dart moderne/centre
de cration
industrielle. Bequest of
Nina Kandinsky, 1981
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

12

Much of Kandinskys early work shows nostalgia for Russia, a quality

emphasised by being painted in tempera on board, and varnished to give
the paintings a mosaic-like quality. Song is an example of this kind of
painting, and it is similar to other works with Russian themes, with subjects
that have a fairytale quality. The title refers to a Volga River boatmens song,
which they sang to help them endure backbreaking work, pulling barges
against the tide. Russian artists such as Ilya Repin, whose work Kandinsky
had seen exhibited while still living in Russia, depicted this theme with
meticulous realism to highlight the harsh conditions of the boatmens life. As
Kandinsky has painted this scene, it is closer to his memory of Moscow
dissolved by sunlight, and its emotional resonance for him may well have
been as a generalised signifier of Russia as his spiritual homeland.

Discussion
and further
development
in the
classroom

Abstraction
Discussion What are your students opinions about abstraction? What
makes a painting abstract? Is abstract art only found in galleries? Is graffiti
abstract?
Activity the art historian Charles Harrison distinguished between weak
abstraction and strong abstraction. Weak abstraction applies to paintings
where the subject is simply difficult to see, and strong applies to paintings
that are presented simply as a composition, and are not the result of a
process of distortion. Ask your students to collect examples of abstract
images postcards, magazine images, images from the Internet and
determine whether or not they are weak or strong.

Personal Subjects
Discussion Do your students have favourite subjects to see or to create in
paintings/drawings/sculpture? What subjects do they consider important?
Does it matter if a painting has a subject, which the viewer doesnt
recognise?
Activity Individually, ask your students to develop a set of motifs (such as
Kandinskys memories and myths of Russia) that have personal meaning.
Begin with a scrapbook of images and work towards a set of simplified
cryptic line drawings to use in larger compositions.

Accident in art
Discussion Have any of your students had a similar experience to
Kandinsky, and accidentally seen abstraction because they did not recognise
the subject of a painting? Has any artwork they were making ever been
improved by an accident?
Activity Ask your students to work on a large-scale drawing/painting, in
small groups. Think of ways to introduce chance into the group artwork
such as with eyes closed, working from all sides at once etc. Introduce a
subject to the group drawing half way through (a theme or a current
newspaper image.) How does this alter your students experience of
painting/drawing?

Links to
other works

13

Luc Tuymans paints profound historical events, such the Holocaust, but rather
than selecting recognisable scenes, he uses banal details and he paints in an
almost abstract style, making the content of his paintings difficult to see. His
motifs are all the more striking for being obscurely painted. His triptych
Investigations appears to depict ordinary objects (a lampshade, a tooth, a
window) painted in thin washes with little attention to naturalistic detail, but
they are all objects from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald museums.

Murnau Staffelsee I 1908

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2006

Murnau Staffelsee I 1908

I had little thought for houses and trees, drawing coloured
lines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife,
making them sing just as powerfully as I knew how.
KANDINSKY

15

While teaching at the Phalanx art School in 1903, Kandinsky formed a

relationship with one of his students, Gabriele Mnter, and she became his
intimate companion during his years in Munich. Having separated from his
wife Anya, he embarked on frequent extensive trips abroad, often
accompanied by Mnter, before they settled together in Munich in 1908.
They travelled regularly to the Staffel Lake near Murnau in the Bavarian
Alps. Murnau was a popular tourist destination, easily accessible by train,
but it had represented an entirely different way of life. A small market town
with a predominantly agrarian, Catholic population, Murnau captured the
groups imagination as an example of untainted rustic piety. Mnter bought
a property there in 1909, which became known as the Russian House, and
which they decorated in the style of local folk art. Kandinsky designed a
stencil of stylised flowers and riders for the banisters. He even wore
traditional Bavarian costume. After several unsettled and often distressing
years of travelling, Kandinsky was very happy in Murnau. He became a keen
gardener, and even though trains thundered past the Murnau garden, the
apparent authenticity and spiritual values of the pre-industrialised Murnau
village remained compelling.
The dramatic landscape round Murnau, combined with the creative
energy of his fellow artists, including the Russians Werefkin and Jawlensky,
would prove a very fertile environment for Kandinsky. His painting underwent
a profound transformation during his long summers away from Munich.
Kandinskys use of colour in his Murnau landscapes is gradually released
from its descriptive role and develops a rich intensity, while the shapes of
discernible landscape features such as mountains, trees, and buildings, are
subordinated to the picture as a whole, eventually informing the landscape
symbols of his later work.
While Kandinsky found a welcome spirituality in the rural environment,
the theme of landscape provided a pretext for modernist experimentation.
His landscape paintings, such as Murnau Staffelsee I, show an intensely
emotional response to the beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Clouds merge
into the general looseness of the scene. Kandinskys inner voice dominates
his sensual impressions of a landscape.
He admired Matisse, Picasso and the work of the Fauves, who had
exhibited in Paris as group for the first time in the Salon d Automne in 1905,
along with Kandinsky and Jawlenksy. Jawlenksy was active as part of the
French art scene, and would have made Kandinsky aware of European

theories of abstraction. He also suggested to Kandinsky that he paint with a

short-haired brush rather than a palette knife, which contributed to the
further loosening of forms in Kandinskys painting.
The Russian House proved a productive environment for Kandinskys
development of abstract painting, and experiments with abstraction in other
forms, such as theatre and text. He began writing poems, published with
the title Sounds, and illustrated with woodcuts, using a method, common to
childhood, where through constant repetition, a word is emptied of all
meaning and becomes pure sound to set the soul vibrating in the same
way that he believed painting freed from recognizable objects, would bring
him closer to the spiritual in art.

Link to
another
work in the
exhibition

Two Girls 1917

Private Collection,
London
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

16

Alongside the influences of progressive French art, Kandinsky was also

influenced by the forms and graphic style of Bavarian folk art, which in spite
of the growing tourist trade in folk objects, appeared to Kandinsky and
Munter to be authentically unaffected by the economic values of
modernisation. It was Jawlensky who first drew their attention to Bavarian
hinterglasmalerei (glass painting) which had been developed during the
medieval period, but which was used during the nineteenth century for
decorative panels. The local brewer in Murnau had a collection, and both
Munter and Kandinsky learned the technique from a Murnau glass painter.
He returned to glass painting periodically, but the influence of these Bavarian
folk images had a more subtle resonance in his paintings, particularly the
use of simplified forms, flat patchwork areas and prominent black outlines.

Discussion
and further
development
in the
classroom

Sharing Ideas
Discussion Throughout his life, Kandinsky was actively involved with several
art groups and benefited from sharing ideas with other artists. Does this
come as a surprise to your students? Who/where do they get ideas from?
How do they exchange ideas?
Activity Divide your students into small groups, and using a newspaper,
select a topic/issue for each group to investigate collectively to produce a
group sketchbook representing their responses to the issue. In the style of
the Blue Rider Almanac, the sketchbook could contain opinions, pooled
knowledge, images and cuttings, and ideas for art projects addressing there
given topic/issue.

A better way of life

Discussion Murnau represented a better, more spiritual way of life, to
Kandinsky and his friends. What do your students think/know about urban
life now, and rural life now? What makes one place or way of life better than
another? What are the good things in your students local area?
Activity Kandinsky chose to paint the landscape around Murnau as more
and more abstract during his time there, which to him, was a way to focus
on its spiritual qualities. How would your students represent the best in their
local environment? Through collage or assemblage, create work that
emphasises the good in their environment (people, places, values.) Is there a
local/environmental project that your students could get involved with?

Inspiration from folk art

Discussion What do your students think of as folk art? What contemporary
forms of expression exist outside of art galleries? How is their everyday
environment decorated or made more interesting? Could this be an
inspiration for a work of art in the same way that Bavarian Glass painting
was inspirational for Kandinsky?
Activity Individually, ask your students to find examples of objects, images,
hobbies that make the texture of life interesting. Use these as a basis for
individual art projects. It could be sweet wrappers, knitting, comics, films, etc.

Links to
other works

17

Tomoko Takahashi creates installations from ordinary objects. Her installation

My Playstation at the Serpentine Gallery was an arrangement of 6000 pieces
of stuff that viewers wandered through like an enchanted maze. Her affection
for lifes ephemera goes hand-in-hand with an environmental conscience and
casts a critical eye over consumption in contemporary culture.

Theory and Politics: Politics and Abstraction

So this is it! Isnt it terrible? Ive been roused out of a
dream. Ive been living in an inner world where things are
completely impossible. I have been stripped of my illusions.
Mountains of corpses, dreadful suffering of all kinds, inner
culture put on hold for an indefinite period... KANDINSKY

Black Spot 1921

Kunsthaus Zrich
ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006

18

In 1914, Kandinsky was unprepared for the outbreak of War. As a Russian, he

was now classified as an alien in Germany, and two days after war was
declared, he and Mnter left Germany for Switzerland, where they spent 3
months in the hope of an end to hostilities. Ultimately, their relationship
ended as, accepting that the end to conflict was not in sight, Kandinsky
retuned to Russia and Mnter returned to Munich. During 1915 Kandinsky
painted nothing, and between 1916 and 1921, although his mood was much
improved by meeting Nina Andreevsky, who he was to marry in 1917 to
become his intimate companion for the rest of his life, he only produced 41
oil paintings. Even considered in combination with various etchings, glass
paintings and watercolours, this does not compare to his productive
experimentation during his years travelling between Munich and Murnau.
Although Kandinsky had been aware of the formal experiments of the
Parisian avant-garde, the majority of avant-garde developments towards
abstraction took place in Germany, Austria, Holland and Russia where the
theoretical basis for a pure non-objective art was given a distinct
formulation. By 1915, Mondrian was composing paintings entirely from short
straight black lines set at either the horizontal or vertical Axis, and Malevich
had painted Black Square, which consists of a black square on a white
ground. Kandinskys paintings and publications were already well known in
Russia when he arrived there, and he had maintained an involvement with
the developments of the Russian avant-garde, some of whom were in turn
involved with Blue Rider exhibitions and publications. On The Spiritual In Art
had been published in Russia in 1914 and Kandinskys proposal of abstraction
as the elimination of representational and
associative forms in favour of inner
emotional content had been interpreted
by Malevich in particular in a rigorously
geometric style, which he called
Suprematism the supremacy of pure
feeling.
Kandinskys painting of this Russian
period is varied, but the pictorial
language of his abstraction is clearly
influenced by such developments.
Malevich used the diagonal as a

compositional device, with simple identifiable geometric forms moving

across a plain background. In Black Spot of 1921, there are far fewer marks
than his earlier Munich abstractions, arranged into a more readily
identifiable diagonal composition. The forms of his earlier work, some of
which can be traced back to stylised ciphers for mountains and figures, (such
as the wavy lines and arc which had once described landscape and sabres
among other things) have begun to develop a life of their own and have
settled into a pictorial vocabulary that Kandinsky is using more sparingly at
this time, and in simpler compositions.
Circles on Black 1921
Circles on Black, of the same
Solomon R.
year, shows the impact of geometry
Guggenheim Museum,
on his work. The ambiguous
New York
painterly quality of his Munich
ADAGP, Paris and
abstraction has all but gone, and
DACS, London 2006
identifiable geometric shapes, such
as rectangles, spots and points,
combine with his own repertoire of
shapes. This new geometry would
continue to play a significant role his
work form this time onwards and
he was later to accord the circle in
particular the status which the rider
motif had held during his time in
Munich, explaining that the circle is
a synthesis of the greatest oppositions, bringing together eccentric and
concentric forces into equilibrium. However, Kandinskys abstraction
remained distinct from Suprematism as he was wary that geometry in his
work would result in rigid schematic compositions. He retained an
expressive freedom in the combination of elements in his work. These
differences were to prove artistically and politically significant.
Kandinsky had been independently wealthy, the son of a rich tea
merchant, but as a consequence of revolution in Russia, where Tsarist rule
was replaced by a Communist system, he lost his property during a
redistribution of land. Consequently his plans to build a large studio had to
take second place to financial concerns such as selling work and finding
employment. Having remained distant from politics prior to this time in his
life, he was to find himself involved with the formulation of cultural policy in
the newly reorganised Russia. Alongside various academic appointments, as
head of the state commission for acquisitions he was also responsible for
opening new museums across Russia. In 1919 he founded the Moscow
Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK.)
Kandinskys particular interpretation of abstraction brought him into
conflict with faculty members at INKhUK. They insisted on the rigorous
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rejection of subjective and atmospheric elements in painting, complaining of

Kandinskys work as harmonious, painterly and based on spiritualistic
malformations. Abstraction and the forms it should take had acquired
ideological significance, as artists had sought to engage with the same
struggles as the rest of the Russian people, and to use a utilitarian and
accessible vocabulary that was appropriate to this end which unfortunately
for Kandinsky involved the rejection of individualism.
However, the political situation in Russia was about to place such
theoretical considerations in the hands of the state rather than the avantgarde, and in 1921 the Communist Partys new economic policy required that
art, literature and film were to be employed for propaganda purposes, which
would result in social realism. Abstraction was considered damaging and
subversive.
Fortunately for Kandinsky, he was offered a teaching post at the Bauhaus
in Berlin, and he left Moscow, taking 12 of his paintings from the period 1919
to 1921 with him. Before taking up his post in the Bauhaus mural workshop,
Kandinsky exhibited these 12 paintings, plus two more. The critical response
to his new developments in abstraction was nostalgia for the colour and
exuberance of his Murnau work, in preference to the cool and intellectual
quality that these later works display. Kandinskys response was that People
only want what they know.
In 1933 the Bauhaus came under pressure from the Nazi party in
Germany and the faculty agreed to dissolve the institution, from which
Kandinsky had been recently dismissed by orders of the Gestapo. He once
more became an exile, this time in Paris where he continued to work as an
artist, although the conditions were not originally favourable. Cubism and
Surrealism were fashionable in Paris, but Kandinsky continued to paint
abstractions and to contribute defences of abstraction to journals. Among
other smaller works, he painted two more large Compositions (IX and X) that
show the geometric influences of his Russian work, and the marks of his
Murnau period, but inflected now with some of the whimsical elements of
Surrealism. The first of these Compositions was purchased by the Jeu de
Paume museum, and became the first large abstract painting to enter the
collection of a French Museum in 1939.
In 1937 several of his earlier works had also been included in the
Degenerate Art exhibition in Germany, along side other works of modern art
to have been removed from German museums by Nazis. The confiscated
work was installed with defamatory slogans in order to present it as
evidence of cultural decline. One such curatorial intervention incorporated a
copy of Kandinskys Black Spot crudely painted onto the display wall
incorporating graffiti style slogans and exclamations.
Kandinsky died in Paris, aged 78, in 1944.
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