Music on Canvas

When Wassily Kandinsky died in Paris seven years ago, his passing was little noted. Yet no one, not even Matisse or Picasso, has had a greater influence on modern art. This week Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art is honoring Kandinsky's memory with a big, retrospective show of his works, drawn partly from Manhattan's Museum of Non-Objective Painting and partly from his widow's Paris collection.

Spring Showers. The exhibition looks like a historical survey of abstract painting. Kandinsky, whose basic idea was that painting, like music and mathematics, can be purely abstract, sowed the seeds of the movement and cultivated its growth throughout his life. He painted the 20th century's first all-out abstraction in 1911, and kept on experimenting in abstract art until his death.

The early Kandinskys, such as Light Form, were fresh and fructifying as spring thundershowers. Scores of lesser abstractionists sprouted under their spell. Kandinsky called his first, free-wheeling abstractions "improvisations." Subsequent, elaborately thought-out paintings such as Le Bon Contact and One Center he called "compositions."

Kandinsky's followers have generally reversed the trend of his life work, progressing from geometrical arrangements of colored shapes to the confused "advance guard" abstractions which are now the latest thing in U.S. art. But none seriously rivals Kandinsky's talent.

The Inner Life. An artist's duties, Kandinsky believed, "are precise, great, and holy." He came to those duties late. Born of a well-to-do Moscow family, he spent six years of research on the wages of Russian workmen, then at 30 went to study painting in Germany. He learned slowly, and had no success whatever until the publication of his book, On the Spiritual in Art, in 1912, which remains the Bible of the abstractionist movement.

But Kandinsky never meant to lay down the law. He maintained that new discoveries in art are only "the organic development and growth of older truths [which] are not destroyed." There is no "must" in art, he added. "From this 'must,' art flees as day shuns the night." He wrote that "clinging to a 'school' . . . can only lead to misunderstanding, misconception, obscurity and mutilation. The artist should be blind to the importance of 'recognition' or 'nonrecognition' and deaf to the teachings and demands of the time. His eye should be directed to his inner life and his ear should harken to the words of the inner necessity."

White Silence. The color white Kandinsky described as having "the absoluteness of a great silence. It sounds inwardly and corresponds to some pauses in music . . . Thus, probably, did the earth resound during the . . . Ice Age." Black he thought of as "something extinguished like a burned pyre . . . Outwardly it is the least harmonious color, yet . . . any other color, even the weakest, will appear stronger and more precise in front of it . . ." Vermilion was "like a relentlessly glowing passion, a solid power within itself, which cannot easily be surpassed but which can be extinguished by blue, as glowing iron is put out by water."

Kandinsky's abstractions never fell into showoff coldness. There was passion enough in his pictures to overwhelm even so anti-abstract a social-realist painter as Mexico's Diego Rivera. "I know of nothing more real than the painting of Kandinsky," Rivera once wrote, "not anything more true and nothing more beautiful. A painting of Kandinsky gives no image of earthly life--it is life itself."

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