This article was written based on the talk “From Expressing to Abstracting” presented by Karina Erika Rojas Calderón last year, on Thursday, November 22, at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, as part of the exhibition Kandinsky, Small Worlds.
Although the painter and art theorist did not follow the rules of a particular movement of thought, the history of the vanguard can be narrated from the work of this Russian artist because Kandinsky was the key piece in the game of his context, placed on the chessboard at the beginning of the emergence of the phenomenon known as modern art.
In that moment, artists were interested in understanding the nature of things, reality, existence, and the world. Four elements that although they were external to them, were radically affected by an era of disenchantment, existential fractures and personal quests necessary to survive the uncertainty that preceded and crossed the World Wars. Artists then acquired the moral responsibility to show the world what was happening.
Through Kandinsky’s pictorial periods we set out to identify the vanguards, currents of thought and influences that were part of Kandinsky’s path to approach the infinite abyss of the human being and move away from the objective representation of reality.
The Tradition of a Russian Icon
First of all, Kandinsky’s processes of introspection cannot be separated from the elements of the culture that gives him identity as is the case of Kandinsky, because despite distinguishing himself as a nomadic artist, his production process is heir to the Russian icon, a concept that arose in the Middle Ages and is the most representative of Byzantine art.
The icons were direct representations of the Virgin, Christ, the history of the Saints, angels and archangels. The image in the icon has a cult purpose and can only be produced by those who have a spiritual preparation through constant processes of consecration and by the hand of an artist who demonstrates moral probity, and a particular sensitivity to be in contact with the divine.
But Kandinsky understood that the religious is not the same as spirituality, the spiritual in art resides for him in the conceptualization of the idea, not in the aesthetics.
“Kandinsky’s art is the direct and pure manifestation of the spirit.” Karina Erika Rojas Calderón.
The Language of Color: Fauvism
Kandinsky’s brush began a journey through the vanguards, starting from the port of expressionism -which in turn is nourished by the post-impressionists- going through a period with some paintings of fauvist tints, in compositions that seem unfinished, floating in the backgrounds in which the textures of the canvas produce the illusion of a living painting.
The Sensitivity of Expressionism
In what could be considered his expressionist stage, in his work the attachment to represent things as they are seen objectively disappeared, and he manifested the desire to portray things as they are perceived, felt and lived. This desire would give rise to what is known as abstract art.
Expressionism intensified with violent brushstrokes the emotions of a world on the verge of collapse, when the war provoked the breakdown of the known and the familiar, just as it must have felt to leave home. At the same time, Kandinsky was one of the founders of the expressionist group The Blue Rider, whose principles understood color as an essence and element in itself -just like the fauvists- which in connection with the spirit is capable of scrutinizing the most sensitive, intimate and pure of nature.
At this point of his career, the influence of expressionism appeared in his work, with subjectivity and context as the driving forces of art. But figurative representation continued to be present in this vanguard – unlike Kandinsky’s thinking – as something necessary in a “realistic” language that could connect and communicate directly with the viewer. Although it possessed a very powerful symbolic character that transcends the apparent.
A break in classical art: How do I manifest my existence, how do I show the world that I exist and feel?
In this transition, Kandinsky responded aesthetically to those questions with a detachment from figurative representation, and contributed to that artistic revolution by proposing a connection with an introspective path by daring to explore particular worlds and abysses. With how painful and dark it is to face those microcosms that seem like black holes inside, because the intimate is so deep that in order to reach it we have to go through ourselves, to pierce ourselves, to hurt ourselves.
That freedom of being able to look inside oneself is what caused the break with academia because since the artist is the only one who can look inside himself, who can limit him and say that he is wrong in choosing how to portray your fears and passions?
Kandinsky was not only an expressionist or an existentialist, he was a creator who poured his existence into each painting.
“Creator” as a term used in the twentieth century to describe the “new” artist, the one who produces in freedom. Because if the artist was not free, then he was only an artisan reproducing formulas. The rupture of the vanguards also provoked the farewell of the Academy as the only power and command in that legitimization, and this paradigm propelled a new path in art.
That is why Kandinsky and his contemporaries are so important, because they were the ones who opened the definition of art and allowed us to understand that an abstract painting has the same artistic value as the Sistine Chapel and La Gioconda.
“Now it turns out that I am an artist if I paint like Michelangelo. Now it turns out that I am an artist if I paint like Leonardo. Well, didn’t they tell us that the great artists of the Renaissance would never be surpassed, isn’t that the most terrible trap?”. Karina Erika Rojas Calderón
Heidegger’s Existentialism
“It seems that Kandinsky is observing an infinite space”. Karina Erika Rojas Calderón
And those floating elements and brushstrokes that seem to have no sense, are chaos and have to do with the sense of freedom: the artistic will. The need to create for the sake of creating because if he fails to do so, he dies. From that moment on, the artist will be the one who lives painting as a reflection of his existence.
Just as Kandinsky himself stated, “the effect of inner necessity and consequently the evolution of art are a progressive expression of the objective eternal in the subjective temporal”, yes, Kandinsky also allows himself as an influence of existentialism and the Heideggerian notion of the human being as a being meant for death. For all the existential fractures that a human goes through, repairs and heals in life are provoked when he remembers that he is going to die. Only then is he aware of the past and the future.
And how not to break down in the face of the atrocity and barbarity of World Wars? Before the extermination and the fear of the imminent bombs that threatened every second of the routine. But in those moments also arises the need to transcend the knowledge that we are finite.
Abstract Art
Abstraction is the graphic representation of finitude itself, the limited nature of life, existence itself suspended in time.
That chaotic succession of spots, colors and lines is the supreme structure of the universe for Kandinsky, it is life that cannot be limited to a preconceived or defined form. Not even to something we have seen before. That is why we do not recognize the forms in his paintings, for in contemplating them we are introduced to the “form” of the universe and of life, which is not seen as a human face, nor as a bouquet of flowers, nor even as architectural works. And in that instant, Kandinsky showed the world that art could not aspire to realistic representation.
Towards a Philosophy of Art
“Kandinsky painted to “write” philosophy”. Karina Erika Rojas Calderón
And he did it with elements of art that are infinite, because although he did not belong to the suprematists, he did influence them in the search for “pure non-objectivity”, the essence of art. With the theoretical and aesthetic affirmation in which everything arises from a superior structure.
But for Kandinsky’s abstractive process it did not matter that there was a perfect, timeless, infinite supreme element – “god”, “light” – he needed the sensory – Kandinsky’s own synesthesia – and the experience of the external senses responding to the stimuli of the context – touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste – and the internal senses: memory, imagination and common sense. All connected by intuition.
Only intuition allowed Kandinsky to leave analogies behind and overcome prejudices in order to return to the origin, to the abstract. In order to avoid repeating the formula of art and to break with the limiting structures of academic training.
The fundamental principle of Kandinsky’s work was freedom – the same freedom that did not allow him to be tied to any vanguard – and his driving force was the intuition that opposes figuration.
At the end of his pictorial journey, Kandinsky’s arrangements did not leave aside the golden composition and sacred geometry. But he contemplated the infinite in each canvas, that is why any point could be the beginning and the end, in his works the possibilities of locating the vanishing point are multiple and impossible to enclose in the manifesto of a single movement, capable of embracing everything to originate again.
The works that illustrate this article were displayed in Kandinsky’s exhibition. “Small Worlds” on January 27, 2019 at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes.
This story was originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva.
