Three
Evolving Perceptions of Kandinsky and Schoenberg:
Toward the Ethnic Roots of the "Outsider"
Peg Weiss
In a letter written two weeks after witnessing what his new friend the Russian-born artist Vasili Kandinsky might have called a "thundering collision of worlds," Franz Marc linked the names of Kandinsky and Schoenberg with observations on primitive art and "Oriental" music, which, he said, had retained its intrinsic "primitive" characteristics.[1] As is well known, that metaphorical thundering collision had taken place at the beginning of January 1911, when Kandinsky and his friends had celebrated the New Year by attending a concert of Schoenberg's music.[2] They heard the First String Quartet in D Minor, op. 7, the Second String Quartet in F-sharp Minor, op. 10, and the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. Kandinsky's response had been immediate: within two days he had moved from the first sketches to the completed painting Impression III (Concert), a work that with its aggressive yellow visual blast (like the fanfare of trumpets, in Kandinsky's color language), anchored by the ironic black form of the instrument, so brilliantly echoes the concert's aural impact on an artist for whom synesthetic perceptions could be shattering (see figure 1). Black, he wrote in his manifesto Über das Geistige in der Kunst, is "musically represented by a completely closing pause after which a continuation follows as if at the beginning of another world, because what is closed by this pause is ended for all time: the circle is closed."[3] In that passage he went on to compare black with the silence imposed by death but concluded that, although "externally the most soundless color," black was the one color "against which every other color, even the weakest sounding, sounds stronger and more precise." Thus, in choosing to pit strong yellow against black, the artist had unleashed the loudest coloristic sound he could imagine — like the lash of a whip — while heralding the "beginning of another world."[4]
In his letter of 14 January 1911 to August Macke, Marc had exclaimed:
Image not available.
Fig. 1.
Kandinsky, untitled study for Impression III (Concert), January 1911. Charcoal on paper, 10 x 14.7 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. From Kandinsky, ed. Christian Derouet and Jessica Boissel (Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1984). Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Can you imagine a music in which the tonality (that is, the holding to some kind of tonal system) is completely lifted? When listening to this music, which lets every tone struck stand for itself (a kind of white canvas between the color spots!), I had to think continually of Kandinsky's great Composition, which also allows no trace of tonal system . . . and also of Kandinsky's "leaping spots."
At that point Marc knew the great Composition II that had first attracted his attention to Kandinsky when it caused an uproar at the second exhibition of the Neue Künstler-Vereinigung the preceding autumn. Although local critics castigated the artist not only as "Eastern" but also as "insane," and the work as a failed craftsman's "design for a carpet," Marc had written an open letter to the director of the gallery declaring Kandinsky's "Compositions" — regarded strictly as "pictures" — more than a challenge to the great Persian tapestries then on view in the famous Mohammedan exhibition, exclaiming: "What artistic insight does this unique artist harbor!"[5]
Marc's January letter to Macke continued: "Schoenberg starts from the principle that the conceptions of consonance and dissonance do not exist at all. A so-called dissonance is only a consonance that lies further apart."
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Fig. 2.
Kandinsky, Romantic Landscape, 3 January 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.3 x 129 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
And Marc outlined how in his painting he, too, wanted to operate with independent primary colors free of bondage to the paradigm of the prism. Primary colors may be spread out across the canvas, he wrote, in a sense creating "partial dissonances" that in the overall effect of the entire painting would actually create a new consonance, or, as he adds parenthetically, "harmony." Marc had at this time very likely begun work on his Blue Horse I.[6]
Little notice has been taken of the fact that on that same postconcert day Kandinsky's hypercreativity had resulted in yet a second painting, Romantic Landscape, with its trio of horsemen careening across a barren landscape ambiguous in time and space (see figure 2). Whereas the downward plunge of the horsemen is abruptly halted by the upward thrusting form at left, any sense of three-dimensional space suggested by the difference between the scale of this form and the great black form at the right on the one hand and the riders on the other is abolished by the swath of white that brings its brilliant vermilion sun smashing forward again to the plane of the canvas. It is a dizzying space, at once dense and immense, a space in which asteroids, too — Kandinsky's "leaping spots" — seem to inhabit the air. One feels indeed the "air of another planet."
In fact, it would seem that the poetry of Stefan George had served as a
kind of springboard both for Kandinsky, whose own early work often echoed the poet's words and concepts, and for Schoenberg, whose Second String Quartet, played that day in Munich, closed with two movements that were essentially settings of two poems from George's The Seventh Ring cycle: "Litany" and "Ecstasy." It was the latter that seems most to have captured Kandinsky's imagination and to have inspired Romantic Landscape, which also contains echoes of poems from George's earlier Algabal series.[7] Is it any wonder, then, that Schoenberg — who had set fifteen other poems of George's — was, on seeing this painting for the first time the following December at the Neue Secession in Berlin, immediately attracted to it and wrote to Kandinsky: "The one that pleased me most was Romantic Landscape."[8]
The Schoenberg quartet and the George poem underlying its last movement have other dimensions — other subtexts, as it were — that parallel dimensions in Kandinsky's experience. These are expressed in the painting Lyrical, and in the series of folkish All Saints Day paintings, all from the same year, 1911.[9] A key to these connections is hinted at in Marc's perceptive January letter to Macke, in which he combines observations on the theoretical relationships between Kandinsky and Schoenberg with ruminations on another and parallel experience that he described as "shattering":
I have been thoroughly through the Völkermuseum in order to study the artistic means of "primitive peoples" (as . . . most contemporary critics put it when they characterize our efforts). Finally I found myself caught up, stunned and shattered, before the carvings of the Cameroons. . . . In this short winter I have become quite another person.
Indeed, the Cameroons House Post from Munich's great anthropological museum — an institution with which Kandinsky had been familiar since long before his arrival in Munich — was subsequently reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter almanac.[10] Marc described the "jolt" given him by the Schoenberg concert and its inspirational effect upon his artistic thinking but concluded that the real goal would be to bring forth a new art not out of theory but instinctively, in the manner of "the primitive peoples." Schoenberg, he surmised, seemed to be "convinced of the relentless dissolution of European laws of art and harmony, and grasps after the musical means of the Orient, which have (to date) remained primitive."
Here two chords are struck: the notion of primitive art as "shattering," even transformative, because it was somehow "instinctual"; and the equation of this "primitive" with the concept "Oriental." For it is clear that both Kandinsky, the Russian in whose veins flowed Mongolian blood, and Schoenberg, the Jew, were perceived as "Oriental," as we see by the words of critics and friends alike. Alexander Ringer has demonstrated the "Oriental" ramifications of Schoenberg's Judaic grounding and pointed out that
in musical criticism since the nineteenth century the epithet Oriental often served as a synonym for Jewish.[11] Kandinsky, too, whose father had been born in far eastern Asia among the Mongols and Buriats of Kyakhta, was labeled Oriental and thus situated by the critics in that metaphorical Eastern diaspora — equated even, as one Munich critic would have it, with the "kannibalischstische Naturvölker" (cannibalistic nature-peoples).[12] As my research demonstrates, Kandinsky's own ethnographic expedition into the far reaches of Vologda Province in 1889 had been motivated at least in part by a desire to trace his own roots among the Finno-Ugric Zyrian (Komi) peoples. It was also an attempt to get in touch with the roots of those ancient members of his father's clan who had emigrated from the Ural mountain area of the Ob River, from the place known as Kondinsk, to far eastern Siberia — first to Yakutia and then to the even more eastern areas of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border, and Nerchinsk, areas inhabited by the Buriat and Tungus peoples. Ethnic mixing was not uncommon in the vast Russian empire, and there is genealogical evidence of a Buriat intermarriage in the Kandinsky family. Many nineteenth-century ethnographers and linguists thought there were ancient links between the Finno-Ugric and Mongolian peoples, a theory that drove expeditions such as those of Andreas Sjögren and Alexander Castrén, whose reports Kandinsky cited in his own ethnographic writings. Kandinsky himself believed in his Oriental origins and often boasted that he had Mongolian blood in his veins; indeed, the faintly Oriental features of Kandinsky's visage were frequently mentioned by his friends and acquaintances.[13]
The fact is that both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were "outsiders" struggling to find their individual voices in a hostile environment. No wonder they were drawn to one another. No wonder they sought to transcend their environments by similar means, relying on that inner springboard of the human spirit that Kandinsky called "inner necessity." And no wonder Kandinsky found Schoenberg's outward-turning Visions discomfiting and openly admitted to the composer that he much preferred the landscapes and the Self-Portrait from the Back (also known as Self-Portrait from Behind; see figures 3 and 4), in which he found "things as they are and living `as such' innerly," or, as he also phrased it: "pure `fantasy' in hardest material."[14] He recognized in these paintings a primal force that made "things as they are" live, and he equated them with his own in terms of inner power. Indeed, on the very page in the Blaue Reiter almanac on which the Self-Portrait was reproduced appeared Kandinsky's famous equation: "Realism = Abstraction, Abstraction = Realism. The greatest difference in the external becomes the greatest likeness in the inner. "[15] It is a witty visual and verbal pun, for the portrait encountered here — the "greatest difference" from what we expect — does not gaze out at us but rather walks away and, in turning its back to our gaze, jolts us into recognition of that inner "abstract" essence. In fact,
Fig. 3.
Schoenberg, Vision, as reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter
(Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1912). Oil on canvas, 32
x 20 cm. From Der Blaue Reiter, facsimile reprint (Munich: R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, 1979). Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence
Schoenberg.
Fig. 4.
Schoenberg, Self-Portrait from the Back, as it was illustrated in the almanac
Der Blaue Reiter. From Der Blaue Reiter, facsimile reprint (Munich: R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, 1979). Reproduced courtesy of Lawrence Schoenberg.
examples of both types of Schoenberg's paintings were reproduced within Kandinsky's essay "Über die Formfrage" ("On the Question of Form"), along with other examples of "naive" realism such as works by Henri Rousseau, Bavarian Hinterglasmalereien and "miracle pictures," children's paintings, and, tellingly enough, one of Matisse's Music paintings.[16] Not surprisingly, of course, Kandinsky concluded that there was no question of form; any form might be appropriate so long as it arose out of inner necessity.
No wonder both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were drawn, though at different times, to seek their voices in their own roots. Indeed, Kandinsky could laugh up his sleeve at his uneducated critics, being himself a trained ethnologist well read in the universal lore of folk mythology as well as in such specialized areas as Finno-Ugric and Siberian shamanism. Schoenberg's reference in the second movement of the Second String Quartet to the old Viennese folk tune "Ach du lieber Augustin" would instantly have caught his attention, for he knew that the text was an ethnographic relic that, slight as it was, with its seemingly innocent, fragile, poignant tune, referred to earth-shattering occurrences: the Great Plague and the recurrent "end time" prophecies of apocalyptic tradition. He himself had played on simple Bavarian folk-art tradition to express millennial concerns, as in his Hinterglasmalereien; this method at the same time allowed him to reaffirm his own grounding in old Russian mythology and folklore and to explore his fascination with dvoeverie, that characteristic synthesis of pagan and Christian belief systems that he had made the core of his own ethnographic studies.[17]
This is perhaps most easily demonstrated in a watercolor study for his 1911 glass painting All Saints Day II (see figure 5). In this benignly duplicitous depiction of "saints" we can easily detect at the upper right Saint Elias, or Elijah, and his chariot — a saint who, among the Finno-Ugric peoples, with whose beliefs Kandinsky was familiar, was identified with the pagan god of thunder Perun, or Thor. Pointedly, Elias/Thor drives a Russian troika. At the lower left is Saint Simeon Stylites, a double reference to Simon or Semyon of the Russian folk tale "The Seven Semyons": it was Semyon who forged the iron pillar (a shamanic device) from which to survey the world and foretell the future; and the saint of the same name was noted for his conversions of the pagans. Note that he stands here in close alliance with a horseman hitherto identified only as Saint George but who actually lived a double life as another horseman of Finno-Ugric lore, known as the World-Watching-Man — always depicted, as we shall see, with outstretched arms on horseback. And, lastly, at the lower right, there is the figure of the Zyrian shaman Pam, whose confrontation on the banks of the Vychegda River with Saint Stephen, the bishop of Perm — the cleric responsible for converting the Zyrians — was part of a legend Kandinsky knew from his own visit to the Vychegda River area of Vologda Province, the center of his re-
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Fig. 5.
Kandinsky, sketch for the glass painting All Saints Day II (also known as Composition with Saints), 1911. Watercolor, ink, and pencil. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
search as a student of ethnography in the summer of 1889. Here Pam, in his distinctive sorcerer's hat, rows off in a boat, pursued by rusalki, Zyrian water sprites, one of whom tries to climb into his boat. Sorcerers in pointed caps or in magic flight, often with arms outflung, appear elsewhere in Kandinsky's work, as in more than one vignette in Klänge (Resonances), his 1913 book of prose poems and woodcuts (see figure 7).
This expressed interest in folklore can be compared both to Schoenberg's exploration of mythic lore in Gurrelieder and to Kandinsky's devotion to the legendary saga of the Finns known as the Kalevala, a copy of which had accompanied him on his expedition into the farthest reaches of Vologda Province to study the beliefs of the Zyrian (or Komi) peoples in that fateful summer of 1889, at the height of his ethnographic career. Indeed, it was his devotion to the Kalevala that later inspired him to invite the Finnish symbolist painter and illustrator of the Kalevala, Axel Gallen-Kallela, to exhibit with his Phalanx society in Munich in 1904.[18] A particularly interesting demonstration of Kandinsky's vast knowledge of northern folklore can be found in the Russian version of his essay on stage composition, published in 1919, where he compared Wagner's use of the leitmotif to the Lapps' distinctive "musical motif," the vuolle, that each family was said to possess and by which each was identified.[19]
But there is yet another ramification of the Second Quartet's last movement that we have not explored. It is the fact that the George poem that begins "I feel the air of another planet" was entitled "Entrückung," which has been translated as "Transport" but which also bears the translation "Ecstasy." The ancient and almost universal myth of ecstatic flight was immediate in Kandinsky's imagination, for he was intimately familiar with a wide range of ethnographic literature on Finno-Ugric and Siberian shamanism. That consciously or subconsciously he should have related Schoenberg's music to ecstatic shamanic experience is hardly surprising in view of his ethnographic interest in the phenomenon of shamanism.[20] Evidence for this can be found in an observation Kandinsky made a decade later in a proposal submitted to the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. There, in outlining what he termed the "parallelism" of sound and color, he recalled:
I once happened to see how Arabs used the continuous parallelism of sound (a monotone drum) and primitive movement (a pronounced, rhythmic kind of dancing) to achieve a state of ecstasy. Even a simple, schematic [arrangement of lines] could never produce such a result. I also happened to observe the audience during one of Schoenberg's quartets, in which the manipulation of the line of the instruments, and, in particular, the incorporation of the voice, produced the impression of the lash of a whip. It is interesting to note that Arnold Schoenberg introduced the flow of parallel lines into some of his compositions with (at least for musicians) virtually the same revolutionary effect.[21]
Earlier in the proposal he urged the investigation of movements employed in ancient cultures for the purpose of "expressing primitive feelings" before they are forgotten, including those used in "rituals" and "religious rites," noting that even some of those gestures that are distinguished by "extreme sketchiness" may possess "superhuman power of expression."
What has not been noted before and seems particularly convincing in this context is that Kandinsky painted what is perhaps his most compelling homage to the shamanic legend of magical flight on 11 January 1911, just nine days after the Schoenberg concert and seven days before his first letter to the composer. In the painting Lyrical the shaman, as described in the ethnographic literature, flies above treetops and mountaintops on his journey to other worlds.[22] He has already "freed himself in tones — circling — weaving" ("Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend" ). As the canvas itself becomes the singing skin of the monotonal drum, the rider becomes, as the closing line of the poem suggests, "a droning of the sacred voice" ("Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" ). The painting is aptly named to denote the unity of the magical flight and the Klang or resonance of the drum.
The folklore of the northern Finno-Ugric, Lapp, and Siberian peoples, including the iconography of the shamanic drum and the legend of magical
Fig. 6.
Design for a sacrificial blanket depicting Mir Susne Khum
(World-Watching-Man). Mansi (Vogul), 19th century.
Watercolor on paper. From S.V. Ivanov, Materialy po
Izobrazitel'nomu Iskusstva Narodov Sibiri XIX-nachala XX v.
(Moscow: Akademi Nauk, 1954).
flight, was to remain a driving force in Kandinsky's work to the end of his life. In these motifs, so often linked to the quest for regeneration, he expressed his own search for roots, as Schoenberg in his later devotion to Judaism would express his search for rootedness and affirmation of his Jewish heritage.
Among the most ubiquitous of these ethnic motifs for Kandinsky was that of Saint George, whose image was synthesized with that of the northern mythic god known as World-Watching-Man. In the ancient folklore of the Voguls and Ostiaks, among others, this god, son of the great sky god Numi Torem, served as an intercessor between the gods and humankind, flying across the sky at night on his magical horse to keep an eye on the world. He was always depicted on horseback, with arms outflung — as in the characteristically stylized Vogul (Mansi) design for a sacrificial blanket (see figure 6). But the shaman preferred for his flight a piebald, or spotted, horse, so Kandinsky's magic horsemen rode piebald horses. This can be seen in the vignette for Klänge, and in an early drawing for his first Composition, where he had already adapted the arms-outflung figure of World-Watching-Man to the piebald horse (see figures 7 and 8).
Image not available.
Fig. 7.
Kandinsky, vignette to the poem "Blätter" in Klänge (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1913). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
In the transformational language of Kandinsky's Bauhaus period, a time when he stripped his arsenal of forms to the bare bones of geometry — in parallel, one might say, to Schoenberg's development of the twelve-tone method — the multisignificant figure of Saint George/World-Watching-Man/shaman also underwent a transformation. This can be observed in an untitled drawing of 1924 (see figure 9), where the horse is reduced to a thrusting hooked stick representing the leaping animal's back and bent foreleg. The figure on his back has been reduced to the circular drum form, but with the same arms-outflung posture, triangular head, and an eye on his chest to remind us of his identity as World-Watching -Man. The serpent conquered by the hero in his Saint George alter ego writhes about the horse's body.
Lest the reader remain skeptical of this apparently drastic transformational language, we can see the same terms employed in major paintings of this era, including In the Black Square of 1923 and Black Accompaniment of 1924, which represent Saint George on his horse confronting the cosmic
Image not available.
Fig. 8.
Kandinsky, drawing for Composition I . Pencil on paper, 11.3 x 18 cm. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Fonds Kandinsky, Paris. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Image not available.
Fig. 9.
Kandinsky, untitled drawing, 1924. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 32 cm. From Pierre Volboudt, Die Zeichnungen Wassily Kandinskys (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1974), no. 49. Copyright © 1996 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
dragon.[23] In Black Accompaniment there is nearly the same disposition of forms as in the earlier painting, but with a self-parodying humor: the horse reduced to a rearing lancelike back and bent foreleg (similar to that in the untitled drawing, which may, in fact, have been a study); the chin-strapped saint looking rather surprised, as the goggle-eyed dragon at the lower left lolls on its back below the horse's feet just as it had done in the version of saint and dragon more than a decade earlier, the 1911 St. George III. This hieroglyphic shorthand had in fact been suggested to Kandinsky in large part by the schematic representations of gods and animals on Lapp and Siberian shaman drums.
This brief demonstration shows not only the development of a brilliant new visual vocabulary but also the persistence of a richly symbolic imagery representing the artist's continuing quest for and affirmation of the roots of his personal heritage. Also evident is the continuity of an idealistic, Utopian vision that had from the beginning promised him the salvation of a decadent and evil world through art.
By 1923 Kandinsky had lived through the horrors of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the ensuing plague of famine and disease; he had survived alienation, two emigrations, and a great personal loss in the death of his son Volodia, born in the midst of world catastrophe and dead at the age of three. Now back in Germany and firmly ensconced at the Bauhaus, once again surrounded by admiring students and colleagues, he sought to reestablish the vanguard of the old days by contacting his old friend Arnold Schoenberg. Their first exchange in July 1922 was as warm and cordial as ever, and both expressed the wish to meet again.
But when Kandinsky a year later invited Schoenberg to join him in Weimar, the latter's attitude had changed, and a bitterly poignant exchange ensued. Given our knowledge of how everyday life affected Kandinsky's painting and the extent to which his work expressed symbolic meaning, it will be informative to examine the paintings that bracket the 1923 exchange between Kandinsky and Schoenberg.
Just a few weeks before writing to Schoenberg with his proposal that the composer consider taking on the directorship of the Weimar Musikhochschule, Kandinsky had finished a new Saint George painting called Through-Going Line, of March 1923, anticipating the Russian celebration of Saint George's Day on April 24.[24] It is a confident, life-affirming picture in which the schematized but clearly recognizable figure of Saint George, riding a stick horse, unites the heavenly regions of the left-hand side of the canvas, in true shamanic style, with the worldly side on the right. According to Kandinsky's aesthetic vocabulary, the direction of his leap, from left to right, is "toward home." The symbolic serpent writhes well below, effectively trampled by the horse's legs.[25]
On 15 April 1923, a few weeks after completing this painting, Kandinsky wrote to Schoenberg with his proposal regarding the Weimar Musikhochschule.[26] Thereafter followed, in quick succession, Schoenberg's pointed letter, dated 19 April, accusing Kandinsky of anti-Semitism and rejecting the invitation on the grounds that, as a Jew, he understood (on the basis of rumors apparently spread by Alma Mahler) that he would be out of place at the Bauhaus; Kandinsky's stricken and poignant reply of 24 April; and finally, on 4 May, Schoenberg's long and tortured analysis of his condition as a Jew and human being, condemned by a society determined to recognize either the Jew or the human being but not both as once.
Kandinsky's house catalog lists the painting Schwarz und Violett as having been painted in April 1923. Thus it is safe to postulate that this painting was created between the time the artist received the first and second Schoenberg letters (in his response of 24 April, the Russian Saint George's Day, Kandinsky mentions that he had received Schoenberg's first response the previous day). Schwarz und Violett presents on the left the head of Saint George as a black mask, with its characteristic curved and "feathered" helmet, a motif Kandinsky used frequently. However, here one white eye is pierced by a triangular "arrow," while another triangular form, similar to the sails of the "boats" at right, pierces the cheek of the mask, lending the eerie face a tearful aspect. The other eye, half closed, is set askew. To the right — the "earthly" side of the painting, according to Kandinsky's own theories — two boatlike images seem storm-tossed on a tilting, purple plane. In Über das Geistige in der Kunst Kandinsky had described the color purple (Violett ) as "a cooled-off red in the physical and the psychic sense. It has thus something sickly, quenched (like coal slag!), something sad about it. . . . The Chinese use it specifically as the color of mourning."[27] Here, then, the boatlike forms representing the two artists are tossed on a sad and slag-colored sea of rumor, misunderstanding, and deceit. The arrow piercing the eye is a reference to the Lapp myth, which Kandinsky knew well, of the Ganfliege, or arrowlike missile, sent magically by one shaman to harm another.[28]
When Schoenberg hurled his personal frustration and anger at his old friend Kandinsky, it is certain that he could not have guessed the artist's own tortured experiences of war and revolution, famine and disease; nor could he have known of the Kandinskys' lost child, for they kept that a secret all their lives. Schoenberg, desperately wounded, had written from the heart. Difficult as it may have been for him, Kandinsky, though stricken himself, had the wisdom to remain silent. He was forced to recognize that the halcyon Munich days were lost forever; the world was blacker than he had ever wanted to know. For succor he turned once again to the beloved
image so intrinsic to his heritage and so powerful in its promise of regeneration and hope, to his own leitmotif, Saint George. The painting that immediately followed the exchange with Schoenberg was In the Black Square, of June 1923.
According to Kandinsky's theory, black was that "nothing without possibility," that "nothing after the quenching of the sun, an eternal silence without future and hope."[29] But Kandinsky did leave a slight opening for hope in pronouncing black also the color against which all others resonate most strongly. His resonant, regenerational Saint George in his watchful and healing roles as World-Watching-Man and shaman soars on a white trapezoidal plane that is bound to rise beyond the black silence. And indeed, as we know, a reconciliation of sorts did eventually take place between Kandinsky and Schoenberg in the summer of 1927.
Kandinsky too was soon to suffer the fate of artists driven from Germany by the Nazis. His paintings were stripped from the museums and shown in Hitler's exhibition Decadent Art, and he was forced into yet another exile, to end his life in Paris.[30] Perhaps it was merciful that he did not live to know that he had also been expunged from the memory of his own people and was not to be recognized by them again until 1989, one hundred twenty-three years after his birth.[31]
Both Schoenberg and Kandinsky have been seen as pioneers of the modern, inventors of new languages — in the one case of music's twelve-tone system, in the other of "abstraction" in art. Yet in both cases it has been difficult to interpret their later works within the context of twentieth-century critical insistence on "pure" formalism. Critics failed utterly either to see or to comprehend the shamanic imagery and symbolism of Kandinsky's later works such as Open Green, also of 1923, with its soaring Saint George shaman, or the great shaman-drum series that includes Oval no. 2 of 1925, which is based directly on the paradigm of the Lapp shaman drum. Nor have they noticed that the deceptively geometric Peevish, of 1930, actually holds a richly ethnographic subtext dealing directly with shamanism.[32]
It remains to analyze one last interaction between Kandinsky and Schoenberg, which is documented by the last letter Kandinsky addressed to the composer, a response, dated 1 July 1936, thanking Schoenberg for a note that had been delivered by a mutual acquaintance, Louis Danz.[33] Kandinsky's next painting once again seems to carry a subtextual reference to his old friend. In this painting, Triangles, there are two personages constructed of triangles, facing each other. According to the iconographic clues I have developed, both the circle signifying the shamanic drum and the waving ribbonlike form at the far left, which is a reference to the shaman in magical flight, point to an identification of this figure as the artist himself, who appears to offer a palette of colored objects to his visitor.
Perhaps what is suggested here is an exchange of gifts. A closer look at the figure at the right reveals that it is made up of two triangles superimposed, as in the star of David. In this case the triangles are neither equilateral nor symmetrical, but slightly askew; nevertheless, I think there can be no mistaking the implication that the artist's visitor is his Jewish friend Schoenberg, who carries what might be described as a shaman's staff and whose internal world is equally colorful. Indeed, the two "shamans" appear to stand on equal footing. Poignantly, they are separated by a thin (perhaps now insignificant?) snakelike form evoking the dragons of evil in the world.[34]
A drawing that may date from the same period, one that has a motif of a shaman and ladder, may carry a hooded reference to Schoenberg's Jakobsleiter, which the composer had mentioned years earlier, in a letter to Kandinsky of 20 July 1922. Particularly compelling is a "lyrelike" form dangling from the figure of the shaman.[35]
The best the critics could do, even until very recently, with such late works of the Paris period as Around the Circle and The Green Bond was to use the terms Oriental, Byzantine, and Scythian. This is to ignore the fierce, almost fanatical, resolve of the artist to embrace the heritage of Siberian shamanism with near-textbook imagery based on ethnographic sources. In his preparatory drawing for the right side of the painting The Green Bond there is the figure of the artist as shaman, the agent of healing and intercessor between mankind and the heavens, climbing the sacred tree that grows from the summit of the cosmic mountain toward the heavens, symbolized by a cloud. He wears a feathered headdress characteristic of the Siberian shaman but also of that old Blue Rider Saint George of yore, and is accompanied by his magic drum and ladle-shaped beater, which float just to the left of his head and shoulder. He wears his ribbed breastplate — a symbol of his immortality — on his back. He looks back over his shoulder to observe a pointed-head idol, characteristic of the Ostiaks, a northern Russian Finno-Ugric tribe, floating in its shroud and bound with thread, in accord with the beliefs of the Zyrian peoples Kandinsky had studied, who believed that the dead shaman had to be tied up to prevent his soul form known as the Ort from wandering.[36]
Thus did the artist, in the last year of his life, confirm in one of his most "Oriental" paintings the multicultural inheritance of his personal genealogy. The Green Bond represents a grand synthesis of Russian Orthodox, Finno-Ugric, and far eastern Asiatic shamanic belief systems. And we have recently come to appreciate the full extent of Schoenberg's Judaic grounding and his final embrace of his own Oriental heritage, expressed especially in the the last years of his life in works like Kol Nidre and A Survivor from Warsaw.
Only now that we can begin to understand the strength and creative
energy that each of them, both artist and composer, was able to distill from his status as outsider and from his individual Oriental heritage can we perhaps consider the breach between them healed at last.