THE INVENTION OF ABSTRACTION helmut friedel Vasily Kandinsky was among the key pioneers of abstract art. Along with painters such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, he opened up an important new dimension of visual representation that explores another quality in pictures over and beyond portraying the directly apparent reality of the tangible world. The controversy about pictures was fundamentally influenced by the debate as to what painting could and should do. Mimetically speaking, the centre of interest is portrayal. But often something ‘sinful’ is seen in this effort to replicate the world as we see it that ultimately elicits a demand for visual representation to be banned. The Jewish, Islamic and even some Christian traditions base their rejection of portrayal on the same source, i.e. that man should not make images of God. In this context of denying images, representative forms of expression spring up which dispense with portrayal and make use of ornamental and symbolic, or at least not directly representative, forms of expression in their place. These forms of abstraction and reduction are based on a different line of thinking and imagination from the abstractions at the beginning of the twentieth century. As we know, in the West a culture of images developed, particularly from the late Middle Ages, that strove for as accurate a rendering of body and space as possible in terms of their external appearance. Thus at the end of the nineteenth century, when he decided to become a painter, Kandinsky found himself confronted with an academic tradition that was con- cerned with the refinements of rendering different types of materiality, variable light condi- tions and other phenomena of reality, and in this way sought to fabricate real and imagined life. On the other hand, the Impressionists at the time, above all Monet, had already allowed colour per se to have precedence over academic representational techniques and therewith discovered a wholly different kind of life in painting. It therefore seems a logical conse- quence that Kandinsky, when he was searching for his own vocation as an artist and had turned away from his ethnographic and legal studies, should recognize precisely in Monet’s Haystacks (c.1888–93) what would turn out to be a new challenge to painting (fig.2). Kandinsky had seen Monet’s painting in an exhibition in Moscow (1896).1 The encounter with these pictures, which depicted something as unspectacular, indeed as insignificant as a 1 | STUDY FOR haystack, had the effect of a key trigger in Kandinsky’s decision to become a painter. Ren- COMPOSITION VII (detail) 1913, watercolour, Indian ink and dering the fascinating variety of apparent colour in varying daylight conditions in successive pencil on paper, mounted on grey paintings of the same subject demonstrated the richness of an approach to painting that did paper, 18.5 x 27.1 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich not see objects as such in immutable reality. Real things were understood in relation to their 21 appearance. Henceforth it was the task of painting Infinite joy!” or: “...and not subordinate colours to express that fact with its own resources, namely but place everything at the feet of colour”, colour and form. It was not the ‘great theme’ that and then the critical sentence: counted but the power of colour. When Monet “If fate grants me sufficient time, I shall discover turned to painting pictures of Rouen Cathedral in a new international language that will be eter- his second series of pictures, he was indirectly nal, and will develop infinitely and is not called putting the haystacks on the same level as the Esperanto. It is called painting. An old word that Gothic cathedral – and vice versa (fig. 3). has been abused. It should be called copying Along with this encounter with the art of the in paint. Everything done so far is just copying. Impressionists, there were a series of scientific dis- Colour was rarely used for composition, and coveries in the period around 1900 that contributed then only unconsciously.”4 towards a changed image of reality. In Wilhelm Therewith Kandinsky sets out one of his great Conrad Roentgen’s X-rays, the solid bodies of artistic objectives. He believed he could achieve a living creatures appeared transparent; Einstein’s universal comprehensibility with the resources of discoveries undermined the space-time constant. colour. In the subsequent part of the text, he went That alone was enough to show that the familiar on to define the ‘characteristics’ of colours, their received concept of reality was becoming rather correspondences with the sounds of musical in - shaky. struments, the moods that they could produce and Thanks to the force of habits gained in his legal their innate qualities, for example: studies, Kandinsky conquered the new, unknown “light red – strength, energy, purpose, striving, territories of painting not so much through sundry resistance, resoluteness, violence, passion, joy, artistic works and experiments but essentially triumph, high sound, and the penetrating call of through the written word. By about 1904 he was fanfares mixed with tuba./Everything human.”5 writing a series of notes and draft texts2 in which Finally there followed observations on the relation- he sought to define the effect and quality of colour. ships between colours, where Kandinsky intro- In Defining Colour3 formulations appear that attrib- duced very vivid parallels: ute very particular meanings to colour: “There must be a reason that light blue, pink “Music and colour . the finest feelings that and yellow suit young girls . An old, wrinkled, future man will develop he will communicate to toothless woman with a brown face and muddy his fellow humans through colour. eyes in a light blue dress can only look like a lie.”6 2 | CLAUDE MONET: HAYSTACKS IN THE MORNING, SNOW EFFECT 1891, oil on canvas, 65 x 92 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 22 HELMUT FRIEDEL colour, this form has also to be clearly rendered. But where colour alone . has sufficient effect without the physical shape, this shape is not required at all . The ideal form is the absence of physical shape, as this limits the effect and as it were makes it too specialized and much too definite. But the indefinite has a greater wealth of results.”10 From these short extracts, but particularly in the revised texts of the Language of Colour of 1908–911, which largely formulates the content of On the Spiritual in Art, it is evident that Kandinsky at this stage had made greater and more radical progress with his theoretical deliberations than in his art. Statements such as “In order for colour to have an effect, it needs as such to be freed from real form”12 shows which way his thinking was heading. Abstraction was thus seen by Kandinsky more as 3 | CLAUDE MONET: an essential revival of art than something actually ROUEN CATHEDRAL FAÇADE, EVENING EFFECT translated into paintings. It was there as a discov- 1894, oil on canvas, 101 x 65 cm, The ery and postulate before it could be incorporated Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow into pictures. The thing was, for a long time he was reluctant Another manuscript from the same year (1904) to abandon the referential aspect of visual symbols already bears the decisive, programmatic title altogether in his great paintings.13 Among the The Language of Colour.7 There Kandinsky pro- predominant motifs were boats and riders, even claims on the very first page: though they are largely not recognizable as such “We painters of our time cannot suddenly and can only be interpreted as definable represen- abstract from the shapes that nature offers us.” And he therefore proposes: “We should not think of nature, we need to forget it when we have to make a colour composition.”8 In all these deliberations, which would later inform his important and (for abstract art) highly influential essay On the Spiritual in Art9 (fig. 4), there is often concern about the meaning of pure ‘colour thinking’: “Combining beautiful colours that have no further meaning, is nothing but ornamentation. This would be the result of emancipation if we entirely disregarded the inner value of colour. 4 | COVER DESIGN FOR But as soon as putting together colours awakens ‘ON THE SPIRITUAL IN ART’ c.1910, gouache and Indian ink on psychic echoes, that is composition.” white paper, mounted on dark grey/ “Where the object or the usual physical form brown paper, 17.5 x13.5 cm (sheet), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, intensifies or even causes the psychic effect of Munich THE INVENTION OF ABSTRACTION 23 tations because of the genesis of the work. In the audible and thereby visual. In a number of other layout of Composition VII, which is documented at ‘poems’,16 Kandinsky dispensed with the meaning critical phases in the photographs by Gabriele of words and found pleasure in the sensuality of Münter14, it is easy to see that Kandinsky saw the sound and the ring of the words and syllables. two motifs mentioned as two starting points for his Thus Kandinsky had found a form of abstraction pictorial composition (fig. 5). for his paintings through theoretical musings, Thus Kandinsky sought to capture and represent through the comparison with music and also in his painting a reality behind the visible world. through his handling of language, which aimed at How much painting and representation with colour preserving an ultimate reference to reality.17 In his mattered to him, is obvious when you look at his own account, he was aiming at a ‘universal lan- paintings. The whole musicality of his paintings guage of painting’, i.e. general comprehensibility.