Preparing for Abstraction

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, the first of a Kandinsky trilogy

The Russian artist Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) casts a long shadow over modern art. His career took him to most of its centers: Munich before World War I, Russia, and next a long sojourn at the Bauhaus in Germany during the 1920s, then a last expatriation to Paris after the rise of Hitler. If ever a painter carried his culture in one portable labyrinth on his back, as if he were a rambling snail, it was Kandinsky. And while he did not invent abstract art on his own (as he and his admirers were given to claim), he certainly did more to promote the notion of ideal abstraction, in those distant years before World War I, than any other European artist.

Such a life, woven through so many cultural milieus, is not easily condensed into one retrospective show. The Guggenheim Museum in New York has set out to describe it in three parts, the first of which, "Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914," is now on view. It is focused, not exclusively on the text of Kandinsky's own paintings, but on their context as well. What did he see in Munich? What did he get from other artists' work? The exhibition, closely and intelligently curated by Art Historian Peg Weiss, is therefore largely about the Jugendstil, or youth-style--the art-nouveau porridge of medievalism, forest fantasies, greenery-yallery decor and arts-and-crafts utilitarianism that was cooking in the Munich studios when Kandinsky made his late start as a 30-year-old art student therein 1896.

Later exhibitions will deal with Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and in Paris. By 1985, presumably, the Guggenheim Museum will have fulfilled its destiny as the St. Peter's of Kandinsky studies. That is fitting enough, since the museum is (so to speak) built over the ruins of a shrine that housed his cult in the 1940s. This was the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, set up and run by Solomon Guggenheim's mistress, the Baroness Hilla Rebay, who--in her dottily hierophantic devotion to the Great Artist, not to mention her purported Nazi sympathies--was for a time the Winifred Wagner of the New York art world. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, complete with piped-in organ music, was devoted to the baroness's idea that Kandinsky was the messiah, sent to save all culture, with Paul Klee as his attendant apostle.

The idea that such a transcendent being might have had a context would have been anathema to the baroness, but her collection became the core of the Guggenheim Museum. Meanwhile, the blazing torch of devotion has turned into a curatorial flashlight, poking abruptly here and there amid the somewhat musty recesses of the Jugendstil. Such are the sorrows of no longer believing that art and religion are the same thing.

To Kandinsky, of course, they were. His life's work was based on the belief that art, like religion, must disclose a new order of experience; both could , describe exalted states and epiphianies of the Geist, the spirit. Anything less than that was not worth I having. Being a Russian, Kanmdinsky had been formed by the tradition of the religious icon. But he was also a Theosophist, an ardent follower of one of the most influential gurus of the day, Mme. Blavatsky, and the cultural centers of Europe, including Munich, were as full of odd parareligious cults then as California is now. It was Mme. Blavatsky's opinion that before long the material world would vanish, leaving behind its "essence," a world of spirit. Elect souls, the survivors of this benevolent burnout, would communicate with one another in an immaterial manner whose proper art was abstract and ideal, composed of "thought-forms."

Kandinsky spent his whole life waiting for this Theosophical heaven-on-earth and trying to work out its art language, in which colors would have the semantic exactness of words, and sounds the precision of things. The prospect of its imminent arrival was one of his favorite subjects as a painter: thus a pioneering near-abstract work like Small Pleasures, 1913, is actually about the apocalyptic disappearance of the material world, the vanishing of the "mere" delights of body and landscape. As this show repeatedly makes clear, the fantasy of evolution from matter into spirit was shared by other Munich artists before 1914, most strikingly by Hermann Obrist, whose unbuilt project for a monument --figures ascending a spiral, hauled up on top by a winged angel -- predicted the great unbuilt monument of the 20th century, Tallin's iron tower for the Third International in Russia.

But Kandinsky pressed all this to extremes, and such was the dogmatic rigidity of his character that he managed to live through some of the worst catastrophes of European history without doubting the Theosophical fairy tale for a moment. No doubt he saw the wars and coups and mass murders of his age as signs that he was right after all -- as preludes to the end of history itself, the millennium. What distinguished him from other mystagogic nuts, however, was his talent as an artist. On the evidence of this show, he was far and away the most gifted painter of his generation in prewar Munich. Even his student drawings of the nude have a wiry and controlled strength in their ink-brushed line. Others might, and did, imitate Monet, or Beardsley, or Seurat, or the bright, flat patterns of "primitive" Austrian folk art; only Kandinsky could bring such diverse strands successfully together in the mysterious speckling and blooming of color over flat decorative shapes that lit up a painting like Riding Couple, 1907.

Perhaps the most striking early examples of Kandinsky's power of assimilation were the paintings he did at Murnau in 1909 -- his jumping-off point into abstraction. In Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive, the ballooning shapes of cloud and hill and tree, with the train pulling its scarf of smoke along the valley, are still recognizable, as is their debt to the Fauvist paintings of Matisse and Derain. Color is just on the point of unhitching itself from description, but the world is still ebulliently there. One touch the wrong way, and we would be in Austrian toy land, but Kandinsky had too much taste to allow his fictions of innocence to turn into kitsch.

It is the exalted and often rather confused polemical severity of the later, abstract paintings that a modern eye has difficulty with. For abstraction did not, in the end, become the universal system Kandinsky believed it would. The Guggen heim's future Kandinsky shows will no doubt have much to tell us about why, from the eyeline of the 1980s, abstract art did not fulfill the hopes its founders had for it three generations ago.

-- By Robert Hughes

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