EXPRESSIONISM IN ART
|
Previous Page
|
|
In 1910, at the moment when his individuality was really finding itself, he wrote On the Spiritual in Art, a theoretical book which is essential to the understanding of his painting in its different phases. In it the idea that forms have a sense or content proper to them, an idea that comes more naturally to German thought than to the French conception of art, takes on an exceptional vigour: every form is considered to be the outward manifestation of a content; it must manifest in the most expressive manner 'the innermost content of the form.' In spite of appearances this is no longer Expressionism: Kandinsky's thought goes much further, and in this book of his we are able to follow his whole evolution in the direction of the abstract--an abstraction that remains, nonetheless, 'expressive' and strangely alive.
'Today the artist cannot progress exclusively with purely abstract forms, as these forms are not sufficiently precise. Limiting oneself to the unprecise, it deprives one of possibilities, excluding the purely human and, therefore, weakening the power of expression.'.
But at the same time the abstract form is felt as a clean, precise, welldefined form, and its apparent poverty changes into an inner enrichment. These abstract forms attracted and fascinated him more and more, and are to him 'beings' which, though purely abstract, possess their own life, their own influence, and make their own value felt. Such 'are a square, a circle, a triangle, a rhombus, a trapezoid, and innumerable other forms becoming more complicated with no mathematical designation. All these forms occupy space in the realm of the non-objective.'. Between the material and the abstract 'lies the endless number of forms in which both elements are contained and where either the material or non-objective predominates.'. Thus, in spite of his striving after cold logic, the artist reveals his secret tendencies, his exceptional gift for creating something alive. And Kandinsky was a great visionary.
After his youth as an Expressionist and a Fauve, this evolution of Kandinsky towards the abstract divides into two periods:
Between 1910 and 1920 his canvases exhibit forces which cross the picture obliquely, from left to right, about nuclei that suggest a world of nebulae, of galaxies--a kind of magma subjected to slow but violent impulses. Sometimes there are also strange beasts, quite unrelated to reality, which move about with the abruptness of slipper animalcules. These, clearly, are the beings that 'pullulate' and justify that word 'organic' which always came into Kandinsky's mind when he wished to suggest the concrete.
In about 1921 or 1922 the forms crystallize into rigid elements--circles, triangles, squares--but the translatory movement is maintained until about 1925 when, as the artist grew older, a more static quality, a striving for calm and equilibrium, became dominant.
Throughout this evolution Kandinsky was a deliberate artist who submitted exuberant gifts to the strict control of a mind with a bent for construction: the real man was already there in his analysis of Cézanne Bathers. Nothing in his tumultuous work is left to chance. Two preparatory sketches dating from the first period ( 1913) show us how far, even then, his impulses were subjected to a precise construction. Later on, by a sort of reaction against himself, he chose sharp, cutting, swordlike forms; and at other times the circle, which had become the field of a microscope, enclosed the agitated movement of his creatures within narrow bounds. 'Composition is twofold,' he tells us, composition of the whole, and composition of the various parts subordinated to the whole. The total composition is a form: the objects, whether real or abstract, will bend to that form, 'they will be that form'. At the same time the isolated elements are modified by combining with one another, or simply by their orientation.
Previous Page
|
