Wassil Kandinsky
European, 1866-1944
Linie-Fleck (Line-Spot), 1927
oil on pressed pulp board
17 ¾ x 26 ¼ in.
SBMA, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ira Gershwin
1956.5.4
Portrait of Kandinsky, 1906 color woodcut, from Wassily Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter
"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." - Wassily Kandinsky
RESEARCH PAPER
An academically correct description of "Line-Spot" is: work of oil pigments on pressed pulp board; painted in 1927 by Wassily Kandinsky; dimensions - 18 1/16 inches high by 26 3/4 inches wide. This any eye can see. To know more requires a knowledge of Kandinsky - one of the fathers of modern painting.
Wassily Kandinsky was Russian, heart and soul, until he died, a French citizen, 1944. His pride in his Russianness and his Mongolian roots remained with him throughout. Kandinsky believed his art was Russian even while leading Western Europe into the new age of art.
Born in Moscow to a wealthy Russian family in 1866, he was reared in a privilaged atmosphere and educated in Law and Economics at the University of Moscow. He became a teacher-assistant there after his Law examinations. It is generally accepted that Kandinsky had two experiences in 1896 which turned him from the orderly progression of a life in law and education: at an exhibition of French works in Moscow he saw Claude Monet's "Haystacks"; during a professional tour in Northern Russia he became fascinated with peasant decoration. When he was offered a post as Professor of Law at the University of Dorpat, he rejected the post and instead went to Munich to study art.
In Munich he studied under Anton Azbe and Franz von Stuck. He became an independent painter in 1900. Those early years in Munich were seminal. It was then that he began to formulate and express his personal and artistic philosophies, ideas which he would never abandon. From 1908, he was a Theosophist, reading the works of Helen Blavatsky and attending Rudolph Steiner's lectures. Theosophy aspired to enhance the relationship between nature and spirit and thus to enable man to achieve direct, intuitive wisdom and spiritual experience. For Kandinsky, its meaning for art was that art should abandon realism and move toward abstractions which would communicate the aspirations of the artist's soul in ways that could affect the spirituality of the viewer. Kandinsky defined emotion as "vibrations", energies which pass from and to the human soul. Kandinsky wished to produce vibrations in viewers through his art.
Kandinsky expounded on these theories in his first book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Munich 1912, and in contemporary essays and papers. That book is still read by artists and critics for whom his groundbreaking theory has not been exceeded.
He was not alone in his pursuit of the new art. With Jawlensky, Erbsloh, Kubin and others, he formed the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen(German New Artists' Association). Their shows included works from schools which inspired Kandinsky in his own search for the new; Fauves and Cubists. The paintings were not well accepted: the gallery owner had to clean spittle off the paintings every night after closing.
After two years with the New Artist's Association, in 1911 they refused to hang Kandinsky's "Composition V", and he and his friend, Franz Marc resigned. They decided to form a new group. It was a joke between the two friends that elicited the name, Blaue Reiter. The Blaue Reiter was more than a group of exhibiting artists. The shows were multi-media and part of their effort was a permanent and continuous record of the work of all associated with the group.
Those were years of artistic revolution, and likewise of great world movements. In 1914 war broke out in Europe, and the apolitical Kandinsky left Germany for "Mother Russia." The war in Russia was cut short by revolution, and it was a new Russia in which Kandinsky, working with the new leaders, established art museums and schools. By 1921, discouraged by the lack of freedom, he returned to Germany, where he would reach the pinnacle of his carrer.
In 1922, he became a professor of painting at the Bauhaus, which may have been the greatest effort in history to concert all of the arts into one fine idea of beauty and utility. Kandinsky and his work became forever associated with that glittering international society of excellence, a company of artists, designers, craftsmen and architects, who shaped the world as we know it today. In the year "Line-Spot" was painted, modern aviation began with Lindburgh's flight across the Atlantic.
It was during the Bauhaus years that Kandinsky's art was refined into the non-objective, expressive use of space, line, color and symbol that became "Line-Spot."
He had passed from expressive-objective early work to what he had conceived to be the essence of true art -- geometric forms acting and reacting with equally important shallow space. He has said that he did not chose those forms, that they chose themselves through him. What has presented itself to us in "Line-Spot?"
"LineSpot" was painted in his mid-Bauhaus years, and like his other paintings of that time, it is smaller and less complex than his earlier works. These works relate less to the corners of the picture plane, and the forms do not extend beyond the plane. In "Line-Spot", weightless geometric forms soar and float unsupported in space, at most resting on an unsupported line. Simple structural forms occur against the uniform semi-gloss field, which is as important as the forms themselves. Organic and freeform shapes appear. Kandinsky's forms seem to gravitate to or repel each other: upward movement abounds, in both a literal and spiritual sense -- everything is in motion. And yet, there is balance and order in the tension. Contradictory rythmns pass throught the painting, similar to the music of his friends, Scriabin and Stravinsky.
In a conservator's report in 1983, it is reported: "The various geometric shapes in the design were outlined in black, probably using pen and ink. The freeform shapes appear to have been drawn in light pencil. The areas were then filled in separately with paint in a single layer. The light yellow background was filled in around the design."
In 1926, only a year before this work was painted, Kandinsky published Point and Line to Plane, in Munich. He describes lines as "unharmonic” , “lyrical”, both are musical terms. In speaking of color, he uses those terms and also says that he believed in the "incompatibility of a form and a color" which offers "new possibilities and thus also harmony." Among the valued effects in painting according to Kandinsky, were "contrapuntal" effects achieved through formal and chromatic interactions. In fact, Kandinsky used musical terms to theorize continuously. Kandinsky's own colors often owed much to Russian folk art, although he adhered to Goethe's theories of color, a highly formalized system based on spiritual concepts.
The Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, but in its life it represented the closest cooperation of the arts and crafts. Kandinsky affected and was affected by his comrades and the Bauhaus. Marcel Breuer was a friend, and not only designed furniture for Kandinsky's Bauhaus flat, but named one of his ageless designs the "Wassily Chair." Klee was another friend, whose works have been compared and contrasted with Kandinsky's. Kandinsky is considered the pedant of the two, while Klee's works are praised for a philosophical depth which Kandinsky's work may lack. Itten and Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky and Klee, all progressed in this era toward the geometry which expressed the Bauhaus ideal of simplicity and technological advance. It is not surprising that Kandinsky found his artistic home in the Bauhaus. When he was first introduced to the Bauhaus philosophy, he thought it aligned with what he had been writing for years.
Mrs. Ira Gershwin, in an April 1987 interview explained the provenance of the painting: "Cousin Bodkin, the painter", who was living in Paris, used to send George (Gershwin) photographs and descriptions of paintings that Mr. Gershwin might want to buy. "Line-Spot" was one of them. When the Gershwins moved into an unattractive rented house in Beverly Hills, "Line-Spot" was sent out from the New York home to brighten it up. Some years after George Gershwin's death, Mr. and Mrs. Ira Gershwin decided to give the painting to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art because they "just liked the museum; it was sweet and quiet." "Line-Spot" arrived in 1956.
Prepared for the SBMA Docent Council by Patricia Kaplan 1987
Bibliography
The Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum, "Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915 - 1933," 1983. New York, U.S.A.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Kandinsky in Paris 1934 - 1944," 1985. New York, U.S.A.
The Univeristy of Connecticut, Storrs the William Benton Museum of Art, "Vasily Kandinsky: An introduction to his work," 1974. Connecticut, U.S.A.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning The Spiritual in Art. New York, Dover Publisher, Inc., 1977.
Guggenheim Museum of Art, "Vasily Kandinsky 1866 - 1944 in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum," 1972. New York, U.S.A.
Grohmann, Will. Kandinsky, Life and Work. New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , 1985.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, Inc., "The Spiritual In Art! Abstract Painting 1890 - 1985," 1986. Los Angeles, California .
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Kandinsky in Munich 1896 - 1914," 1982. New York, U.S.A.
Volboudt, Pierre. Kandinsky. New York, University Books, 1986.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. New York, Dover Publisher, Inc., 1979.
Prepared for the website Nov. 2005 by LG
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Inspired by mysticism and theosophy, Wassily Kandinsky affirmed his belief that art was “not a mere purposeless creating of things...but a power that has a purpose and must serve the development and refinement of the human soul.” For Kandinsky, pure abstraction, freed of ties to physical reality, possessed the greatest potential for developing a universal, cosmic sensibility in humanity.
Painted in Germany while he was a faculty member at the progressive Bauhaus, "Line-Spot" represents the geometric abstract mode that Kandinsky developed during this time. In particular, the principle of contrast, identified in Kandinsky’s 1926 treatise entitled "Point and Line to Plane", is essential to this vibrantly colored composition of lines, circles, rectangles and triangles. Here, textured organic forms serve as effective counterpoint to smooth geometric shapes.
- 20th Century European Art, 2021