1. Marc to August Macke, 14 January 1911, August Macke Franz Marc Brief-wechsel, ed. Ernst Brücher and Karl Gutbred (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964), 39-42, esp. 41. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. [BACK]

2. The printed program makes clear that the concert took place on 2 January (not 1 January, as has previously been reported); see also Franz Marc's letter to his wife, quoted in the exhibition catalog Franz Marc 1880-1916 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1980), 29-30. [BACK]

3. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912; reprint, Bern-Bumplitz: Benteli, 1965), 98; translations by the author. [BACK]

4. It is interesting that the most "realistic" of the sketches for Impression III (Concert) includes not only the accompanying musicians but also the figure of the singer who participated in the third and fourth movements of the Second String Quartet. She stands to the right of the piano. Kandinsky devoted the major portion of his treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst to a discussion of color, its psychology and symbolism. Although the treatise was not to become available to the public until December 1911 (with a postpublication date of 1912), the manuscript had been essentially completed by 1910. The coincidence of this particular painting with the Schoenberg concert has been noted previously by Jelena Hahl-Koch; see Schoenberg/Kandinsky Letters, 207. [BACK]

5. The letter was subsequently published by the Neue Künstler-Vereinigung as an offprint and of course immediately came to the attention of Kandinsky and his friends; see Franz Marc Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1978), 127. The painting was destroyed in World War II, but an oil sketch remains (collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), which is reproduced in Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil-Paintings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 305. [BACK]

6. Even before the concert Marc had linked the theoretical Kandinsky and the theoretical Schoenberg. After spending New Year's Eve in the company of Neue Künstler-Vereinigung artists, including Kandinsky, Münter, and Jawlensky, he had written to his wife the following day: [BACK]

7. Romantic Landscape also evokes motifs from two other George poems, "I must saddle ashen horses" and the "great black somber flower" of Algabal. I have discussed in detail the stylistic relationship between George's poetry and Kandinsky's early works in my Kandinsky in Munich — The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), especially in chapter 8, pages 81-90. It is interesting in this context to recall that during a 1980 visit by the author to Judith Köllhofer-Wolfskehl, the daughter of George's and Kandinsky's Munich friend, the poet Karl Wolfskehl, the clear relationship between George's poems and Kandinsky's graphics received a startling confirmation. Then in her eighties, she paused at the illustration in my book of Kandinsky's woodcut The Birds, originally prepared for the portfolio Xylographies in 1907, and began spontaneously to recite:

Schwalben seh ich wieder fliegen
schnee- und silberweisse schar
wie sie sich im winde wiegen
in dem winde kalt und klar
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This was the very poem to which I had compared the same Kandinsky print in the text. Although its birds are clearly not swallows, the image as a whole brilliantly expresses the contrast between the black, ravenous jungle of desire and the clear, cold light of equilibrium sought by the poem's exotic protagonist. In fact, the second verse of the poem actually speaks of the "ravens" and "Papageien" in the dark wood, contrasting them to the swallows of the first and last verses. Kandinsky's print contrasts the dark wood, with its ravens and silent sentinel, against the winter-barren, wind-blown tree and wind-blown maiden at the right, and a transparent bird of more exotic origin than the swallow.

For discussions of the relationship between Jugendstil, George's poetry, and Schoenberg's music, see also Reinhold Brinkmann, "Schönberg und George: Interpretation eines Liedes," Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 26 (1969), 1-28; and Klaus Kropfinger, "The Shape of Line," Miscellanea Musicologica, Adelaide Studies in Musicology, vol. 13 (1984), 131-167. [BACK]

8. Schoenberg to Kandinsky, 14 December 1911, Schoenberg/Kandinsky Letters, 38-40, esp. 38. Yet despite the pleasure he obviously took in it, Schoenberg could not resist exercising his critical faculty as well: his only objection, he said, was to the large scale of the work (it is nearly a meter high and more than a meter wide — 94.3 by 129 cm, to be exact). But Schoenberg gave the proportions in the form of a mathematical equation using not centimeters of canvas but colors — the white proportionately the greatest — that, he complained, seemed to escape from his vision. He had discovered that only by standing farther away from the picture did these proportions diminish, and he could then grasp the whole. Not surprisingly, Kandinsky shot back: "Are you against doubling the strength of the orchestra?" He denounced mathematical equations as just that — "artistically speaking, one minus one may equal two" — and defended his proportions by claiming them as just another artistic means to be manipulated purposefully in order, as he said, to prevent a fleeting view of his pictures, and to transform the ordinary object into "quite another being." Kandinsky to Schoenberg, 13 January 1912, Schoenberg/Kandinsky Letters, 41-43, esp. 42 and 43. [BACK]

9. Lyrical and two versions of All Saints Day are reproduced in Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 88 and 58, 59. [BACK]

10. As I first demonstrated in "Kandinsky in Munich: Encounters and Transformations," in the exhibition catalog Kandinsky in Munich 1896-1914 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1981), 28-82, Der Blaue Reiter almanac was conceived by its editors, Kandinsky and Marc, as a therapeutic metaphor for cultural salvation. Most of the ethnographic artifacts, including folk-art objects, reproduced in the almanac had originally performed a ritual function as symbols of regeneration and resurrection. Indeed, one of the essays on music was even written by a physician (Kul'bin). I have made a thorough study of the ethnographic ramifications of Kandinsky's work in Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995); see also Peg Weiss, "Kandinsky and `Old Russia' — An Ethnographic Exploration," in The Documented Image Visions in Art History, ed. Gabriel Weisberg and Laurinda Dixon, with Antje B. Lemke (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 187-222. A more detailed analysis of Kandinsky's relationship with Munich's Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde is to be found in Peg Weiss, "Kandinsky: The Artist as Ethnographer," Münchner Beiträge zur Völkerkunde 3 (1990), 285-329. [BACK]

11. Alexander L. Ringer, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp. 6-9 and passim. [BACK]

12. M.K. Rohe, "Zweite Ausstellung der neuen Künstlervereinigung München. . . .," Münchner Neueste Nachrichten 63/424 (10 September 1910), as quoted in Franz Marc Schriften, 216-218. Another Munich critic, Georg Wolf, not only emphasized the Oriental elements in the exhibition but castigated the artists as "Morphium- oder Haschischtrunkene" (morphine or hashish drunks) in Die Kunst für Alle (1 November 1910); cited in Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich (1979), 187 n. 143. [BACK]

13. For more on Kandinsky's genealogical origins, see Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 1-10, 213-215; and Weiss, "Kandinsky and `Old Russia'" (1987). See also Vladimir V. Baraev, Drevo Dekabristy i semeistvo Kandinskikh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1991).
Although the serious question as to whether or not Kandinsky held anti-Semitic views has not yet been confronted in the scholarship, it should be noted that Kandinsky's Weltanschauung was clearly the result of a liberal upbringing and education. He vigorously decried the pogroms that followed the 1905 revolution, which he happened to experience at first hand in Odessa. He described those excesses to Gabriele Münter in anguished words, adding that this was the reason he never wished to be called an "Odessan." Kandinsky to Münter, 3 November 1905, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Städtische Galerie, Munich. [BACK]

14. Kandinsky to Schoenberg, 16 November 1911, Schoenberg/Kandinsky Letters, 35-36, esp. 36 (author's translation). [BACK]

15. Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Vasili Kandinsky and Franz Marc (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1912), 85. See also Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Klaus Lankheit (new documentary ed., Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1965), 156, 158; and The Blaue Reiter Almanac (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 164, 166. [BACK]

16. Regarding the purposive arrangement of the illustrations in the text of the Blaue Reiter almanac, see Weiss, "Kandinsky in Munich" (1981), 28-82. See also — with respect to the text and illustrations for Kandinsky's stage composition, Der gelbe Klang, which were included in the almanac — Susan Stein, "The Ultimate Synthesis: An Interpretation of the Meaning and Significance of Wassily Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound" (master's thesis, SUNY/Binghamton, 1980). [BACK]

17. See Weiss, "Kandinsky and `Old Russia'" (1987); and Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 56-63, 99, 143, and passim. Both Kandinsky and Schoenberg were, of course, well aware of the long nineteenth-century tradition of musical exploration of folk music, which had its parallel in the imitation of folkish themes and imagery in the arts and architecture. Kandinsky had frequently exploited folkloristic motifs in his early paintings and woodcuts and, indeed, would continue to do so throughout his life; as late as 1919 he also exploited the "folkish" arts of furniture decoration and glass painting, for instance, in a series of watercolors he called Bagatelles. Schoenberg for his part had worked with folk material in Gurrelieder and in a number of songs and the early opera libretto called Aberglaube. Both would break away from the more or less imitative tradition to conceive their work directly out of personal ethnic traditions. In his 1947 essay "Folkloristic Symphonies" ( Style and Idea, 161-166, esp. 166, 196-203), Schoenberg pointed to the emptiness of that older tradition that could not stand before "real" folk music produced, as is all real music, "spontaneously, as an inspired improvisation.'' [BACK]

18. See Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 45-46; Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich (1979), 65-67; and Weiss "Kandinsky in Munich" (1981), 47-48. [BACK]

19. See Kandinsky, "O stsenicheskoi kompozitsii," Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo 1 (1919), 44. Serge Eisenstein cited this passage from Kandinsky in his notes on Wagner's use of the leitmotif for his unpublished book Grundproblem, which was to deal with the relationships between primitive symbol (as described in the ethnographic literature) and artistic symbol; I am grateful to the Soviet scholar Vjacheslav V. Ivanov for bringing this to my attention (see his excellent study "Eisenstein und die Semiotik der Kunst," pt. 2, in Einführung in allgemeine Probleme des Semiotik, ed. Wolfgang Eismann [Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1985], 205-206). In this context it is interesting that in the 1940s the Lapp scholar Björn Collinder actually referred to the vuolle as a leitmotif; see Collinder, The Lapps (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949), 189-90. See also Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 130.
The concept of an individual identifying song that might even figure in the exchange of souls was prevalent among several cultures and was well known among ethnographers at the turn of the century. Indeed, the frequently cited ability of the shaman (especially among the Finno-Ugric peoples) to return the recovered "soul" of a patient through his ear provided further demonstration of the supreme importance of the faculty of hearing and the restorative power of sound. It is likely that Kandinsky had gotten his information from his good friend the noted ethnographer Nikolai Kharuzin, who had published extensively on the Russian Lapps and on Lapp shamanism. Kandinsky was also well informed about the folk theater of the Voguls, a northern tribe whose elaborate improvisatory "bear festival" dramas may have inspired some of his own stage compositions. [BACK]

20. I discussed Kandinsky's knowledge of the musical aspects of the shamanic experience in a lecture titled "Kandinsky's Ethnographic `Klänge,'" delivered at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles, in March 1990. [BACK]

21. Kandinsky, "Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kul'tury v Moskve" [1923], Sovetskoe iskusstvo 15 (1933), 126-143; my thanks to Lilia Grubisic of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities for her assistance in the translation of this passage (the published translation in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky Complete Writings on Art [Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982], 455-472, refers [p. 467] to "Greek" rites, but it is clear that Kandinsky was alluding to pagan rituals generally).
In another proposal written in June 1921 for the Physicopsychological Department of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, Kandinsky also emphasized the pressing need for "research into primitive art and into all the aesthetic concepts that give primitive art its style," including in his list the art of "primitive peoples" as well as "primitivism in modern art.'' Kandinsky's proposal was published in Iskusstvo: Zhurnal Rossiiskoi Akademii khudozhestvennykh nauk 1 (summer 1923), 415-416; translated in John Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking, 1976), 196-198. [BACK]

22. Lyrical is reproduced in Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 88. [BACK]

23. See Edward Kimball and Peg Weiss, "A Pictorial Analysis of In the Black Square," Art Journal 43/1 (spring 1983), 37-40; see also Peg Weiss, "Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage," Art Journal 45/1 (summer 1985), 137-145. Both paintings are illustrated and discussed in Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 141, 149, 146-150. [BACK]

24. For more information on the importance of Saint George's Day both in Russia and in Kandinsky's personal self-myth, see Weiss, "Kandinsky and `Old Russia'" (1987); and Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), xv, 97, 145, 148, 178, 249 n. 10, and passim. [BACK]

25. For a reproduction of Through-Going Line, see Roethel and Benjamin, Kandinsky Catalogue Raisonné, 648. [BACK]

26. For a discussion of Schoenberg and the directorship of the Weimar Musikhochschule, see Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, "Musik am Bauhaus," in Vom Klang der Farben: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Karin von Maur (Munich: Prestel, 1985), 408-413, esp. 409. [BACK]

27. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 102-103. [BACK]

28. For more information on the helmeted head of the Saint George motif and the Lapp shamanic myth of the Ganfliege, see Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 183. For a reproduction of Schwarz und Violett, see Roethel and Benjamin, Kandinsky Catalogue Raisonné, 650. [BACK]

29. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 98. [BACK]

30. Kandinsky and Schoenberg passed each other in transit during this period, Schoenberg leaving Europe via Paris at the end of October 1933. Although Kandinsky had been in Paris in October, he had returned to Berlin at the end of that month in order to pack for his final move to Paris on 21 December. [BACK]

31. See the catalog Wassily Kandinsky: Die erste sowjetische Retrospektive (Frankfurt am Main: Schirn Kunsthalle, 1989); also published in Russian. [BACK]

32. See Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 147. On the shaman-drum series, see Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 153-167; on Peevish, 168-170. [BACK]

33. Kandinsky to Schoenberg, Schoenberg/Kandinsky Letters, 83-85. Danz, who would later write enthusiastically on Schoenberg (see Louis Danz, "Schoenberg the Inevitable," in Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Merle Armitage [New York, 1937]), was also an admirer of Kandinsky, probably introduced to his work through their mutual friend Galka Scheyer, who was Kandinsky's dealer on the West Coast. At the time of this visit, Danz also delivered to Kandinsky a copy of his book Zarathustra Jr. Speaks of Art (New York: Brentano's, 1934), with a foreword by Merle Armitage, to which Kandinsky made reference in a letter to Galka Scheyer of 6 August 1936. Scheyer also knew Merle Armitage, with whom she was in touch by 1933. Of course, she also knew Schoenberg, who tried to interest her from time to time in selling his paintings. [BACK]

34. For a reproduction of Triangles, see Roethel and Benjamin, Kandinsky Catalogue Raisonné, 962. [BACK]

35. Evidence for the possible date lies in the fact that the verso of this sheet of drawings carries a sketch of the layout of the artist's exhibition at Jeanne Bucher's gallery in Paris in December 1936, and thus could have been conceived sometime prior to that exhibition. The drawing is reproduced in the catalog Kandinsky: Oeuvres de Vassily Kandinsky 1866-1944, ed. C. Derouet and J. Boissel (Paris: Collections du Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1985), no. 615 (lower left), 387. In Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 183, no. 171, this figure is identified as a characteristic conflation of the Saint George/shaman/piebald horse images employed by Kandinsky in many of his later works; the shamanic ladder also appears often in Kandinsky's work. [BACK]

36. Kandinsky had depicted Saint George in feathered headdress on the cover of Der Blaue Reiter. The ethnographic imagery and symbolism of these paintings has been explicated by this author in a series of public lectures as well as in Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 193-195, 200-204. The Green Bond and its preparatory drawings have also been illustrated and analyzed in Weiss, "Kandinsky and `Old Russia' " (1987). I analyzed the shamanic dimensions of Around the Circle in the lecture "Kandinsky's Shamanic Emigrations," delivered at the 28th International Congress of the History of Art in Berlin, July 1992, and in "Interpreting Kandinsky's Iconography: Sources in Ethnography and Shamanism," in Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, vol. 9, ed. Susan C. Scott (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University, 1995). For a reproduction and discussion of Around the Circle, see Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia (1995), 194, 193-195. [BACK]