Spirituality and Materialism
At the moment Schoenberg found himself turning to painting, the painter Vasily Kandinsky sought inspiration in music. What Kandinsky was attracted to in music was its nonrepresentational nature. In it he sought a model by which to break the representative constrictions of visual art. Just as Schoenberg developed tone color to the point where textures of sound have the formal autonomy of an abstract tableau, so
Kandinsky attempted to liberate the signifying possibilities of painting from all reliance on a depicted objective world. After attending a concert by Schoenberg on the first day of 1911, Kandinsky received confirmation of the direction he himself had been taking throughout the previous year. Recognizing the analogous efforts of Schoenberg to construct new principles of formal harmony, he immediately contacted the musician, establishing an alliance that proved to be one of the most productive in twentieth-century art. These proponents of atonal music and abstract painting were both determined to articulate tensions that had hitherto received no legitimate form. The turning point in Kandinsky's thinking, he recounts in 1913, came when, standing in front of Monet's painting the Haystack, he failed to see what subject it represented. At that moment he realized that this absence of recognizable content made no difference whatsoever in the painting's effect. On the contrary, what suddenly became clear was the absolutely "unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams" (Kandinsky 1913: 363). This was the thought that developed into abstract art, so analogous to the new forms of Schoenberg's music.
The year preceding Schoenberg's concert in Munich, 1910, is the one in which Kandinsky reaps the implications of his intuition. It is the transitional moment of his career, during which he works out his conceptual rationale for abstract art. As yet, however, he has not taken the plunge into full abstraction. He has not abandoned the depiction of natural, empirical forms. In 1910 he stands at the juncture of two imaginative worlds, two different conceptions of art, two "warring forces" in the history of European thinking. And what Kandinsky's great paintings of the prewar years show is precisely the meeting of the worlds. At this moment he conceives of harmony as residing in their clash, a clash that he sees as both the origin and the end of artistic expression.[20]
Written mainly in 1909–1910 and published at the end of 1911, Kandinsky's study On the Spiritual in Art calls the two warring forces materialism and spirituality. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it claims, the two are contending for the control of Europe. Materialism has held the upper hand for centuries. Its knowledge is based on the procedures of science and statistical computation, assuring us that truth can be observed, tested, and communicated in clear and unequivocal form. Its ethic is consumeristic, hankering after what Søren Kierkegaard calls the "interesting" experience. Its economy legitimates greed and its politics consists in muscling one's neighbors. In decades to come, Max Weber and Martin Heidegger will have something similar in mind when they speak of the totally administered, rationalized world, which reduces all of life to an ensemble of objects. In Kandinsky's view, the art of proper materialism is realism. By the end of the nineteenth century it gives way to naturalism, which in turn dissolves into impressionism. And in this development, Kandinsky claims, we see that the reign of materialism is coming to a close. In impressionism hard, objective facts are presented as functions of something else, not primary but secondary truths, consequences of subjective interpretation.
In the first decade of the new century a spark of inner life has finally begun to pierce the materialistic night. The spirit, writes Kandinsky, has begun to awaken, even if not surely enough to provide cause for celebration. The fledgling "soul" as yet lacks direction and a means of expression. More distressing still, it lies in a precarious state of convalescence, struggling to recover from that debilitating "desperation, unbelief, lack of purpose" with which it has been afflicted for so many centuries. The feeble glimmer of a star in a vast gulf of darkness is at present no more than a beacon of hope, which "the soul scarcely has the courage to perceive, doubtful whether this light might not itself be a dream, and the circle of blackness, reality" (Kandinsky 1909–11: 128). The maturing of soul will depend on whether it succeeds in countering the practical pressures bearing down on it.
Never has the strife between these cosmic forces been as pronounced as in the moment in which Kandinsky is writing. The "modern movement" of culture, claims the painter in 1912, is a conjunction of two related syndromes:
1. The destruction of the soulless material life of the nineteenth century, i.e., the collapse of those supports of the material [life] that have firmly been regarded as unique, and the crumbling and the dissolution of the individual components thereof.
2. The building-up of the spiritual-intellectual life of the twentieth century, which we too experience, and which already manifests and embodies itself in powerful, expressive, and definite forms. (Kandinsky 1912a: 256–257)
There is no question in Kandinsky's mind: He intends to promote the second moment, the construction of the spiritual life. This is what he identifies as the avenue to unimagined new meanings in art and knowledge. And yet, at this stage of his career he cannot separate the construction from the destruction to which it is tied. However much theosophists and cultural philosophers might have called out for spiritual regeneration and self-realization at the turn of the century, Kandinsky considers no rebirth to be possible outside the world of hard and fateful constrictions. The spiritual atmosphere is like the air, he writes, "which can either be pure or filled with foreign bodies." What makes up this atmosphere are not only visible and external experiences but also "perfectly secret actions that 'no-one knows about'":
Suicide, murder, violence, unworthy and base thoughts, hate, enmity, egotism, envy, "patriotism," prejudice are all spiritual forms, spiritual entities that go to create the atmosphere. And on the contrary, self-sacrifice, help, pure, high-minded thoughts, love, altruism, delight in the happiness of others, humanity, and justice are also such entities, which can kill the others as the sun kills microbes, and can reconstitute the pure atmosphere. (Kandinsky 1909–11: 192)
In 1910 Kandinsky resolves to bring art into the service of such purification. In fact, this is the decision that causes the rupture between him and the group of artists known as the Munich New Artists' Alliance (NKVM) over which he had presided since 1909.[21] But what is remarkable about this acknowledged pioneer in abstract and formalist art, however, is his insistence that no artistic form has any rationale
whatsoever outside of the content that it serves. Even paintings that contain no recognizable figures of the material world, he claims, must be held strictly accountable to the question of what they express. Without this accountability they can never amount to anything more than senseless ornament. "Form, " writes Kandinsky in "On the Question of Form," "is the external expression of inner content " (Kandinsky 1912a: 237). What are we to understand by inner content? At first blush it would seem to be precisely that spirituality which Kandinsky has taken such pains to distinguish from materialism. And this spirituality, in turn, is associated with what, in On the Spiritual in Art, he calls the "internal necessity" of the artist, a "secret, inborn power of 'vision,"' the "feeling (to which the talent of the artist is the path)" (Kandinsky 1909–11: 131 and 141). The spirituality that constitutes a work's content appears to be a type of order or knowledge, grasped by emotion and articulated by art, of the invisible structures of historical existence.
And yet, this description of content tells only half the story. If we examine Kandinsky's writings between 1909 and 1911 more closely, we find that the content of art is not one of two elements in the cosmic antithesis but the antithesis itself . At Kandinsky's last exhibition with the NKVM, in September, 1910, he addresses the question of artistic form and content as follows:
Cold calculation, patches leaping at random, mathematically exact construction . . . silent, screaming drawing . . . fanfares of colors . . . great, calm, heavy, disintegrating surfaces.
Is this not form?
Is this not the means ?
Suffering, searching, tormented souls with a deep rift, caused by the collision of the spiritual with the material. . . . The living element of living and "dead" nature. Consolation in the appearances of the world—external, internal. Premonitions of joy. The call. Speaking of the hidden by means of the hidden.
Is this not content?
Is this not the conscious or unconscious purpose of the compulsive urge to create? (Kandinsky 1910a: 82)
The modern, if not eternal, content of art is the collision of the spiritual and the material, or human experience as a clash of fundamental, ontological difference. Art is concerned with the interconnection of inner and outer, spirit and matter, subject and object. "Our point of departure," Kandinsky claims in 1909,
is the belief that the artist, apart from those impressions that he receives from the world of external appearances, continually accumulates experi-
Fig. 6.
Vasily Kandinsky, Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor), 1910 or 1913, pencil, watercolor, and
Indian ink. Courtesy Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris.
ences within his own inner world. We seek artistic forms that should express the reciprocal permeation of all these experiences . . . in short, artistic synthesis. This seems to us a solution that once more today unites in spirit increasing numbers of artists. (Kandinsky 1909–10: 53)
Accordingly, Kandinsky's paintings of these years contain both types of elements: dissolving forms of the material world—mountain peaks, churches, horses, boats, and riders—as well as abstract patterns. Works such as Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor) (dated 1910, but more likely from 1913) and Improvisation XI (1910) present the derealization of the physical world as an impetus for new and alternative constructions. Colors, structures, and centers of visual energy become every bit as important as the phenomena contextualized within them. Here jagged, linear vectors cut across soft, diffused, and rounded shapes. Bold and primary colors, combined in ways "long considered dishartnonious," press up against or bounce off each other in countless directions (Kandinsky 1909–11: 193). The physical depth lost in the two-dimensionality of his canvases is compensated for by deep swirls of temporal and spatial movement onto which the composition opens like a window on cosmic combustion. Pictorial motifs become ciphers of
Fig. 7.
Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation XI, 1910, oil. Courtesy Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
universal forces within a network. Here unions and contrasts are one and the same.
At this junction of materialism and spirituality, Kandinsky describes his language of form and color as constructed out of a series of self-propagating oppositions: warm and cold, light and dark, concentric and eccentric, activity and passivity (Kandinsky 1909–11: 161–195; Cheetham 1991: 76–77). The two poles between which art has always found its place—namely, objective "impression" and subjective "expression"—come to meet at their extremes. "Realism = Abstraction / Abstraction = Realism. The greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity " (Kandinsky 1912a: 245).
The new spiritual order contained in this kind of painting is admittedly not easy to recognize. Many people see it rather as anarchy, the same word they use to characterize music in 1910. For them, observes
Kandinsky, anarchy means "aimless iconoclasm and lack of order." But this is not anarchy; anarchy is rather
a certain systematicity and order that are created . . . by one's feeling for what is good . Thus, here too there are limits . . . [but they] are constantly widened, whereby arises that ever-increasing freedom which, for its part, opens the way for further revelations. (Kandinsky 1912a: 242)
What seems to be disorder, then, is actually the order of a struggle that is at the heart of art: of freedom against constraint, of formative energy against form, of new meanings against the signs in which convention tries to trap them. What looks like anarchy is simply the record of art's inevitable destruction and reconstruction of language. Anarchy is only a disparaging word for artistic extensions of formal order, of art's battle against the fossilization of rhetoric on behalf of a "feeling for the good."[22]
What does Kandinsky mean by this feeling for the good? In the same text he likens it to a process of "evolution," "freedom," "progress forward and upward," "revelation," "the inevitable, continual triumph of new values." The feeling for the good is that which is embodied in those "powerful, expressive, and definite forms" that burst the constraints on a soul (Kandinsky 1912a: 236 and 257). Schoenberg describes a comparable energy when he stresses that art cannot be produced by technical ingenuity, but only by spiritual compulsion: "Expressive content wishes to make itself understood; its upheaval produces a form. A volcano erupts . . . a steam-kettle explodes" (Schoenberg 1911b: 367). The same inevitability is at work in the feeling for the good. The feeling for the good is not itself an "expressive content" with a proper, corresponding form of its own. It is rather an upheaval of the content in the very effort to make itself understood. Accordingly, the form of this upheaval can only be turbulent, dynamic, and unresolved. This, if anything, is the "expressionism" of Kandinsky's and Schoenberg's art: a "pressing out" of something not necessarily understood in which discovery occurs. Like others of their generation, Kandinsky and Schoenberg were familiar with the theories of the art
historian Alois Riegl to the effect that every artwork manifests an artistic will, or Kunstwollen . Here, however, something else is at work. What art ultimately expresses—the "content" it shapes—is actually the struggle for expression. And this struggle is good in itself. It is itself the good, a feeling for the good, a wish to understand. This may, indeed, be the only justification for "expression."
The idea is repeated in different terms by August Macke, also, like Schoenberg, a contributor to Kandinsky's Blue Rider almanac. Art, writes Macke, exists only where a work reveals the historical, existential, or emotional turbulence out of which it arises: "The joys, the sorrows of man, of nations, lie behind the inscriptions, paintings, temples, cathedrals, and masks, behind the musical compositions, stage spectacles, and dances. If they are not there, if form becomes empty and groundless, then there is no art" (Macke 1912: 89). Joy and sorrow—without which no form can be artistic—are upheavals of spiritual content, destabilizations of a given mental condition. Art is an intellectualization of passion. It is not a manifestation of spiritual content so much as a form revealing the upheaval of this content, in joy or sorrow. Dances, cathedrals, paintings, and plays are products of dissonant or ecstatic experience. If they do not reveal this turbulence they amount to nothing. Thus even a certain "formalist" art has its own content, which consists in its own effort at self-definition.