Endowed with Life

By R.H.

Who was the first abstract artist?

There are many claimants, from Picabia to the obscure Lithuanian Ciurlionis. But if one angles the question a little and asks who was the first painter to produce a major life's work from systematic abstraction, there is only one answer: Wassily Kandinsky, who was born in Moscow more than a century ago, in 1866, and died in France in 1944.

"I really believe," Kandinsky wrote toward the end of his life, "that I am the first and only artist to throw not just the 'subject' out of my paintings, but every 'object' as well."

Thanks to the Guggenheim Museum, whose founder bought more than 100 Kandinskys during the 1930s, there has always been a special relationship between the artist and a city he never visited, New York. Next week a major Kandinsky retrospective opens at the Guggenheim, giving New Yorkers and others a further chance to assess this curious, prophetic and rather aloof figure and to see how close to the core of modernism his visions lay.

Influences. Kandinsky was a late starter. He painted nothing serious until he was 30, and his seminal work hardly began until he had turned his 40th year. But the influences were already being laid down. A student of law and political economy at the University of Moscow, he visited rural Russia on an ethnological survey in 1889 and there saw a lot of folk art. Its rigid iconography and flamboyant patterns made a vast impression on him; the ceremonious detail of his later abstractions, with their tiny squares, circles and triangles "tuning" each other like embroidery--as in Pink Sweet, No. 481, 1929--is very Russian. Even Kandinsky's subsequent color theory, his belief in the character and meaning of different colors and their use as a structured language, may well have stemmed from the symbolic use of color in Russian popular art.

When he decided to abandon his academic career and paint, Kandinsky moved to Munich and studied there. After the provincialism of Russia, the artists' colony of Schwabing absorbed him. He called it "a spiritual island in the great world." This was in 1897, at the height of the Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau, movement. What Kandinsky go from Art Nouveau was not so much its airy, sinuous quality as its decorative way of filling space: a painting like Landscape near Murnau, as late a; 1909, is full of references to the style with its slow, thick contour of white cloud, its carefully silhouetted forms ol green hill and pink road.

Secret Souls. Yet the crucial issue for Kandinsky was not style but vision There is something hallucinatory about the richness of Kandinsky's stock of inner images. Of his way of seeing, he wrote that "everything 'dead' trembled Not only the stars, moon, woods, flowers of which the poets sing, but also a cigarette butt lying in the ashtray, a patient white trouser button looking up from a puddle in the street, a submissive bit of bark that an ant drags through the high grass in its strong jaws to uncertain but important destinations. Everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, which is more often silent than heard."

For Kandinsky, all objects were endowed with life (an animistic idea that Miro later developed brilliantly). This aliveness, as English Critic Paul Overy put it in a recent study of Kandinsky, "interacted with our own aliveness, thus creating reality." One can feel its pressure, vivid and tremulous, in the darting lines and patches of color beneath which a landscape is forming in No. 160b. (Improvisation 28), 1912, no less than in the cooler, more architectural forms of the great demonstration pieces, like Composition 8, No. 260, 1923, painted after he moved to the Bauhaus in Weimar to teach.

Not the least of Kandinsky's achievements is that he worked out the first viable alternative to Cubist space --and did it as early as 1915. He was not concerned with what exercised the Cubists and later became an absolute fetish in American painting, the "problem" of filling the picture plane. In fact he strove to destroy the illusion of a unified, comprehensible surface, which representational art had gained by means of perspective and which Cubism achieved through its multiplicity of facets. The forms of Ribbon with Squares, No. 731, 1944, simply hover in an illimitable field of color, whose depth cannot be guessed; they evoke what Kandinsky called "floating sensations," whose only concern is with thrust and counterthrust, disembodied, in free fall.

Kandinsky's sensitivity to color was so extreme that, had he not been an artist, it might have been a neurosis; and the action of one color on its neighbor was the object of study in this weightless laboratory. He was sometimes too ridden with theory, sometimes tangled in the impossible web of his own tiny pictorial decisions. But there has never been a modern painter in whom idea, purpose and act ran more harmoniously than in Kandinsky at his best. Perhaps there never will be.

.R.H.

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