Concerning the Spiritual in Art

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CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

BY WASSILY KANDINSKY [TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL T. H. SADLER]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS [NOT IN E-TEXT]
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

PART I. ABOUT GENERAL AESTHETIC

I. INTRODUCTION
II. THE MOVEMENT OF THE TRIANGLE
III. SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION
IV. THE PYRAMID

PART II. ABOUT PAINTING

V. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKING OF COLOUR
VI. THE LANGUAGE OF FORM AND COLOUR
VII. THEORY
VIII. ART AND ARTISTS
IX. CONCLUSION

LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS [NOT IN E-TEXT]

Mosaic in S. Vitale, Ravenna

Victor and Heinrich Dunwegge: "The Crucifixion" (in the Alte
Pinakothek, Munich)

Albrecht Durer: "The Descent from the Cross" (in the Alte
Pinakothek, Munich)

Raphael: "The Canigiani Holy Family" (in the Alte Pinakothek,
Munich)

Paul Cezanne: "Bathing Women" (by permission of Messrs.
Bernheim-Jeune, Paris)

Kandinsky: Impression No. 4, "Moscow" (1911)

"Improvisation No. 29 (1912)
"Composition No. 2 (1910)
"Kleine Freuden" (1913)

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

It is no common thing to find an artist who, even if he be
willing to try, is capable of expressing his aims and ideals with
any clearness and moderation. Some people will say that any such
capacity is a flaw in the perfect artist, who should find his
expression in line and colour, and leave the multitude to grope
its way unaided towards comprehension. This attitude is a relic
of the days when "l'art pour l'art" was the latest battle cry;
when eccentricity of manner and irregularity of life were more
important than any talent to the would-be artist; when every one
except oneself was bourgeois.

The last few years have in some measure removed this absurdity,
by destroying the old convention that it was middle-class to be
sane, and that between the artist and the outer-world yawned a
gulf which few could cross. Modern artists are beginning to
realize their social duties. They are the spiritual teachers of
the world, and for their teaching to have weight, it must be
comprehensible. Any attempt, therefore, to bring artist and
public into sympathy, to enable the latter to understand the
ideals of the former, should be thoroughly welcome; and such an
attempt is this book of Kandinsky's.

The author is one of the leaders of the new art movement in
Munich. The group of which he is a member includes painters,
poets, musicians, dramatists, critics, all working to the same
end--the expression of the SOUL of nature and humanity, or, as
Kandinsky terms it, the INNERER KLANG.

Perhaps the fault of this book of theory--or rather the
characteristic most likely to give cause for attack--is the
tendency to verbosity. Philosophy, especially in the hands of a
writer of German, presents inexhaustible opportunities for vague
and grandiloquent language. Partly for this reason, partly from
incompetence, I have not primarily attempted to deal with the
philosophical basis of Kandinsky's art. Some, probably, will find
in this aspect of the book its chief interest, but better service
will be done to the author's ideas by leaving them to the
reader's judgement than by even the most expert criticism.

The power of a book to excite argument is often the best proof of
its value, and my own experience has always been that those new
ideas are at once most challenging and most stimulating which
come direct from their author, with no intermediate discussion.

The task undertaken in this Introduction is a humbler but perhaps
a more necessary one. England, throughout her history, has shown
scant respect for sudden spasms of theory. Whether in politics,
religion, or art, she demands an historical foundation for every
belief, and when such a foundation is not forthcoming she may
smile indulgently, but serious interest is immediately withdrawn.
I am keenly anxious that Kandinsky's art should not suffer this
fate. My personal belief in his sincerity and the future of his
ideas will go for very little, but if it can be shown that he is
a reasonable development of what we regard as serious art, that
he is no adventurer striving for a momentary notoriety by the
strangeness of his beliefs, then there is a chance that some
people at least will give his art fair consideration, and that,
of these people, a few will come to love it as, in my opinion, it
deserves.

Post-Impressionism, that vague and much-abused term, is now
almost a household word. That the name of the movement is better
known than the names of its chief leaders is a sad misfortune,
largely caused by the over-rapidity of its introduction into
England. Within the space of two short years a mass of artists
from Manet to the most recent of Cubists were thrust on a public,
who had hardly realized Impressionism. The inevitable result has
been complete mental chaos. The tradition of which true Post-
Impressionism is the modern expression has been kept alive down
the ages of European art by scattered and, until lately,
neglected painters. But not since the time of the so-called
Byzantines, not since the period of which Giotto and his School
were the final splendid blossoming, has the "Symbolist" ideal in
art held general sway over the "Naturalist." The Primitive
Italians, like their predecessors the Primitive Greeks, and, in
turn, their predecessors the Egyptians, sought to express the
inner feeling rather than the outer reality.

This ideal tended to be lost to sight in the naturalistic revival
of the Renaissance, which derived its inspiration solely from
those periods of Greek and Roman art which were pre-occupied with
the expression of external reality. Although the all-embracing
genius of Michelangelo kept the "Symbolist" tradition alive, it
is the work of El Greco that merits the complete title of
"Symbolist." From El Greco springs Goya and the Spanish influence
on Daumier and Manet. When it is remembered that, in the
meantime, Rembrandt and his contemporaries, notably Brouwer, left
their mark on French art in the work of Delacroix, Decamps and
Courbet, the way will be seen clearly open to Cezanne and
Gauguin.

The phrase "symbolist tradition" is not used to express any
conscious affinity between the various generations of artists. As
Kandinsky says: "the relationships in art are not necessarily
ones of outward form, but are founded on inner sympathy of
meaning." Sometimes, perhaps frequently, a similarity of outward
form will appear. But in tracing spiritual relationship only
inner meaning must be taken into account.

There are, of course, many people who deny that Primitive Art had
an inner meaning or, rather, that what is called "archaic
expression" was dictated by anything but ignorance of
representative methods and defective materials. Such people are
numbered among the bitterest opponents of Post-Impressionism, and
indeed it is difficult to see how they could be otherwise.
"Painting," they say, "which seeks to learn from an age when art
was, however sincere, incompetent and uneducated, deliberately
rejects the knowledge and skill of centuries." It will be no easy
matter to conquer this assumption that Primitive art is merely
untrained Naturalism, but until it is conquered there seems
little hope for a sympathetic understanding of the symbolist
ideal.

The task is all the more difficult because of the analogy drawn
by friends of the new movement between the neo-primitive vision
and that of a child. That the analogy contains a grain of truth
does not make it the less mischievous. Freshness of vision the
child has, and freshness of vision is an important element in the
new movement. But beyond this a parallel is non-existent, must be
non-existent in any art other than pure artificiality. It is one
thing to ape ineptitude in technique and another to acquire
simplicity of vision. Simplicity--or rather discrimination of
vision--is the trademark of the true Post-Impressionist. He
OBSERVES and then SELECTS what is essential. The result is a
logical and very sophisticated synthesis. Such a synthesis will
find expression in simple and even harsh technique. But the
process can only come AFTER the naturalist process and not before
it. The child has a direct vision, because his mind is
unencumbered by association and because his power of
concentration is unimpaired by a multiplicity of interests. His
method of drawing is immature; its variations from the ordinary
result from lack of capacity.

Two examples will make my meaning clearer. The child draws a
landscape. His picture contains one or two objects only from the
number before his eyes. These are the objects which strike him as
important. So far, good. But there is no relation between them;
they stand isolated on his paper, mere lumpish shapes. The Post-
Impressionist, however, selects his objects with a view to
expressing by their means the whole feeling of the landscape. His
choice falls on elements which sum up the whole, not those which
first attract immediate attention.

Again, let us take the case of the definitely religious picture.

[Footnote: Religion, in the sense of awe, is present in all true
art. But here I use the term in the narrower sense to mean
pictures of which the subject is connected with Christian or
other worship.]

It is not often that children draw religious scenes. More often
battles and pageants attract them. But since the revival of the
religious picture is so noticeable a factor in the new movement,
since the Byzantines painted almost entirely religious subjects,
and finally, since a book of such drawings by a child of twelve
has recently been published, I prefer to take them as my example.
Daphne Alien's religious drawings have the graceful charm of
childhood, but they are mere childish echoes of conventional
prettiness. Her talent, when mature, will turn to the charming
rather than to the vigorous. There could be no greater contrast
between such drawing and that of--say--Cimabue. Cimabue's
Madonnas are not pretty women, but huge, solemn symbols. Their
heads droop stiffly; their tenderness is universal. In Gauguin's
"Agony in the Garden" the figure of Christ is haggard with pain
and grief. These artists have filled their pictures with a bitter
experience which no child can possibly possess. I repeat,
therefore, that the analogy between Post-Impressionism and child-
art is a false analogy, and that for a trained man or woman to
paint as a child paints is an impossibility. [Footnote: I am well
aware that this statement is at variance with Kandinsky, who has
contributed a long article--"Uber die Formfrage"--to Der Blaue
Reiter, in which he argues the parallel between Post-
Impressionism and child vision, as exemplified in the work of
Henri Rousseau. Certainly Rousseau's vision is childlike. He has
had no artistic training and pretends to none. But I consider
that his art suffers so greatly from his lack of training, that
beyond a sentimental interest it has little to recommend it.]

All this does not presume to say that the "symbolist" school of
art is necessarily nobler than the "naturalist." I am making no
comparison, only a distinction. When the difference in aim is
fully realized, the Primitives can no longer be condemned as
incompetent, nor the moderns as lunatics, for such a condemnation
is made from a wrong point of view. Judgement must be passed, not
on the failure to achieve "naturalism" but on the failure to
express the inner meaning.

The brief historical survey attempted above ended with the names
of Cezanne and Gauguin, and for the purposes of this
Introduction, for the purpose, that is to say, of tracing the
genealogy of the Cubists and of Kandinsky, these two names may be
taken to represent the modern expression of the "symbolist"
tradition.

The difference between them is subtle but goes very deep. For
both the ultimate and internal significance of what they painted
counted for more than the significance which is momentary and
external. Cezanne saw in a tree, a heap of apples, a human face,
a group of bathing men or women, something more abiding than
either photography or impressionist painting could present. He
painted the "treeness" of the tree, as a modern critic has
admirably expressed it. But in everything he did he showed the
architectural mind of the true Frenchman. His landscape studies
were based on a profound sense of the structure of rocks and
hills, and being structural, his art depends essentially on
reality. Though he did not scruple, and rightly, to sacrifice
accuracy of form to the inner need, the material of which his art
was composed was drawn from the huge stores of actual nature.

Gauguin has greater solemnity and fire than Cezanne. His pictures
are tragic or passionate poems. He also sacrifices conventional
form to inner expression, but his art tends ever towards the
spiritual, towards that profounder emphasis which cannot be
expressed in natural objects nor in words. True his abandonment
of representative methods did not lead him to an abandonment of
natural terms of expression--that is to say human figures, trees
and animals do appear in his pictures. But that he was much
nearer a complete rejection of representation than was Cezanne is
shown by the course followed by their respective disciples.

The generation immediately subsequent to Cezanne, Herbin,
Vlaminck, Friesz, Marquet, etc., do little more than exaggerate
Cezanne's technique, until there appear the first signs of
Cubism. These are seen very clearly in Herbin. Objects begin to
be treated in flat planes. A round vase is represented by a
series of planes set one into the other, which at a distance
blend into a curve. This is the first stage.

The real plunge into Cubism was taken by Picasso, who, nurtured
on Cezanne, carried to its perfectly logical conclusion the
master's structural treatment of nature. Representation
disappears. Starting from a single natural object, Picasso and
the Cubists produce lines and project angles till their canvases
are covered with intricate and often very beautiful series of
balanced lines and curves. They persist, however, in giving them
picture titles which recall the natural object from which their
minds first took flight.

With Gauguin the case is different. The generation of his
disciples which followed him--I put it thus to distinguish them
from his actual pupils at Pont Aven, Serusier and the rest--
carried the tendency further. One hesitates to mention Derain,
for his beginnings, full of vitality and promise, have given
place to a dreary compromise with Cubism, without visible future,
and above all without humour. But there is no better example of
the development of synthetic symbolism than his first book of
woodcuts.

[Footnote: L'Enchanteur pourrissant, par Guillaume Apollinaire,
avec illustrations gravees sur bois par Andre Derain. Paris,
Kahnweiler, 1910.]

Here is work which keeps the merest semblance of conventional
form, which gives its effect by startling masses of black and
white, by sudden curves, but more frequently by sudden angles.

[Footnote: The renaissance of the angle in art is an interesting
feature of the new movement. Not since Egyptian times has it been
used with such noble effect. There is a painting of Gauguin's at
Hagen, of a row of Tahitian women seated on a bench, that
consists entirely of a telling design in Egyptian angles. Cubism
is the result of this discovery of the angle, blended with the
influence of Cezanne.]

In the process of the gradual abandonment of natural form the
"angle" school is paralleled by the "curve" school, which also
descends wholly from Gauguin. The best known representative is
Maurice Denis. But he has become a slave to sentimentality, and
has been left behind. Matisse is the most prominent French artist
who has followed Gauguin with curves. In Germany a group of young
men, who form the Neue Kunstlevereinigung in Munich, work almost
entirely in sweeping curves, and have reduced natural objects
purely to flowing, decorative units.

But while they have followed Gauguin's lead in abandoning
representation both of these two groups of advance are lacking in
spiritual meaning. Their aim becomes more and more decorative,
with an undercurrent of suggestion of simplified form. Anyone who
has studied Gauguin will be aware of the intense spiritual value
of his work. The man is a preacher and a psychologist, universal
by his very unorthodoxy, fundamental because he goes deeper than
civilization. In his disciples this great element is wanting.
Kandinsky has supplied the need. He is not only on the track of
an art more purely spiritual than was conceived even by Gauguin,
but he has achieved the final abandonment of all representative
intention. In this way he combines in himself the spiritual and
technical tendencies of one great branch of Post-Impressionism.

The question most generally asked about Kandinsky's art is: "What
is he trying to do?" It is to be hoped that this book will do
something towards answering the question. But it will not do
everything. This--partly because it is impossible to put into
words the whole of Kandinsky's ideal, partly because in his
anxiety to state his case, to court criticism, the author has
been tempted to formulate more than is wise. His analysis of
colours and their effects on the spectator is not the real basis
of his art, because, if it were, one could, with the help of a
scientific manual, describe one's emotions before his pictures
with perfect accuracy. And this is impossible.

Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say, he has broken down
the barrier between music and painting, and has isolated the pure
emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the artistic
emotion. Anyone who has listened to good music with any enjoyment
will admit to an unmistakable but quite indefinable thrill. He
will not be able, with sincerity, to say that such a passage gave
him such visual impressions, or such a harmony roused in him such
emotions. The effect of music is too subtle for words. And the
same with this painting of Kandinsky's. Speaking for myself, to
stand in front of some of his drawings or pictures gives a keener
and more spiritual pleasure than any other kind of painting. But
I could not express in the least what gives the pleasure.
Presumably the lines and colours have the same effect as harmony
and rhythm in music have on the truly musical. That psychology
comes in no one can deny. Many people--perhaps at present the
very large majority of people--have their colour-music sense
dormant. It has never been exercised. In the same way many people
are unmusical--either wholly, by nature, or partly, for lack of
experience. Even when Kandinsky's idea is universally understood
there may be many who are not moved by his melody. For my part,
something within me answered to Kandinsky's art the first time I
met with it. There was no question of looking for representation;
a harmony had been set up, and that was enough.

Of course colour-music is no new idea. That is to say attempts
have been made to play compositions in colour, by flashes and
harmonies. [Footnote: Cf. "Colour Music," by A. Wallace
Rimington. Hutchinson. 6s. net.] Also music has been interpreted
in colour. But I do not know of any previous attempt to paint,
without any reference to music, compositions which shall have on
the spectator an effect wholly divorced from representative
association. Kandinsky refers to attempts to paint in colour-
counterpoint. But that is a different matter, in that it is the
borrowing from one art by another of purely technical methods,
without a previous impulse from spiritual sympathy.

One is faced then with the conflicting claims of Picasso and
Kandinsky to the position of true leader of non-representative
art. Picasso's admirers hail him, just as this Introduction hails
Kandinsky, as a visual musician. The methods and ideas of each
rival are so different that the title cannot be accorded to both.
In his book, Kandinsky states his opinion of Cubism and its fatal
weakness, and history goes to support his contention. The origin
of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very
existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem
untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting
pressures. Once abandon reality and the geometrical vision
becomes abstract mathematics. It seems to me that Picasso shares
a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of
reality--a number, a button, a few capital letters--with a
surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict
of impressions, which differ essentially in quality. One trend of
modern music is towards realism of sound. Children cry, dogs
bark, plates are broken. Picasso approaches the same goal from
the opposite direction. It is as though he were trying to work
from realism to music. The waste of time is, to my mind, equally
complete in both cases. The power of music to give expression
without the help of representation is its noblest possession. No
painting has ever had such a precious power. Kandinsky is
striving to give it that power, and prove what is at least the
logical analogy between colour and sound, between line and rhythm
of beat. Picasso makes little use of colour, and confines himself
only to one series of line effects--those caused by conflicting
angles. So his aim is smaller and more limited than Kandinsky's
even if it is as reasonable. But because it has not wholly
abandoned realism but uses for the painting of feeling a
structural vision dependent for its value on the association of
reality, because in so doing it tries to make the best of two
worlds, there seems little hope for it of redemption in either.

As has been said above, Picasso and Kandinsky make an interesting
parallel, in that they have developed the art respectively of
Cezanne and Gauguin, in a similar direction. On the decision of
Picasso's failure or success rests the distinction between
Cezanne and Gauguin, the realist and the symbolist, the painter
of externals and the painter of religious feeling. Unless a
spiritual value is accorded to Cezanne's work, unless he is
believed to be a religious painter (and religious painters need
not paint Madonnas), unless in fact he is paralleled closely with
Gauguin, his follower Picasso cannot claim to stand, with
Kandinsky, as a prophet of an art of spiritual harmony.

If Kandinsky ever attains his ideal--for he is the first to admit
that he has not yet reached his goal--if he ever succeeds in
finding a common language of colour and line which shall stand
alone as the language of sound and beat stands alone, without
recourse to natural form or representation, he will on all hands
be hailed as a great innovator, as a champion of the freedom of
art. Until such time, it is the duty of those to whom his work
has spoken, to bear their testimony. Otherwise he may be
condemned as one who has invented a shorthand of his own, and who
paints pictures which cannot be understood by those who have not
the key of the cipher. In the meantime also it is important that
his position should be recognized as a legitimate, almost
inevitable outcome of Post-Impressionist tendencies. Such is the
recognition this Introduction strives to secure.

MICHAEL T. H. SADLER

REFERENCE

Those interested in the ideas and work of Kandinsky and his
fellow artists would do well to consult:

DER BLAUE REITER, vol. i. Piper Verlag, Munich, 10 mk. This
sumptuous volume contains articles by Kandinsky, Franz Marc,
Arnold Schonberg, etc., together with some musical texts and
numerous reproductions--some in colour--of the work of the
primitive mosaicists, glass-painters, and sculptors, as well as
of more modern artists from Greco to Kandinsky, Marc, and their
friends. The choice of illustrations gives an admirable idea of
the continuity and steady growth of the new painting, sculpture,
and music.

KLANGE. By Wassily Kandinsky. Piper Verlag, Munich, 30 mk. A most
beautifully produced book of prose-poems, with a large number of
illustrations, many in colour. This is Kandinsky's most recent
work.

Also the back and current numbers of Der Sturm, a weekly paper
published in Berlin in the defence of the new art. Illustrations
by Marc, Pechstein, le Fauconnier, Delaunay, Kandinsky, etc. Also
poems and critical articles. Price per weekly number 25 pfg. Der
Sturm has in preparation an album of reproductions of pictures
and drawings by Kandinsky.

For Cubism cf. Gleizes et Metzinger, "du Cubisme," and Guillaume
Apollinaire, "Les Peintres Cubistes." Collection Les Arts. Paris,
Figuiere, per vol. 3 fr. 50 c.

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ELISABETH TICHEJEFF

PART 1: ABOUT GENERAL AESTHETIC

I. INTRODUCTION

Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the
mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture
produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts
to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an
art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel,
as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to
follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity
of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation
is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human
being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn
over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for
him no real meaning.

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