Expressionism, Nikolaus Pevsner snootily pronounced, was “the art of the ugly, an heroic stylisation of the hideous”. Wassily Kandinsky, its most exemplary adherent, was taxed with the charge of producing “art for art’s sake”. There is, admittedly, some truth to this characteristically unfeeling Pevsnerian verdict. For it was precisely this aspect of his craft that got Kandinsky into trouble.
Kandinsky styled himself as the champion of the “little man”, rebelling against such snobbish notions as harmony, which is to say against the consensus that ran from Raphael down to the Royal Academy. Yet it was, ironically, the “little man” himself who railed most against abstraction. And so, along with Klee, Feininger, and countless other radicals, Kandinsky’s works were tarred as Degenerate Art by the Nazis in 1937, in the infamous exhibition of that name.
But if Kandinsky was a victim of Right-wing cancel culture, he was also a victim of Left-wing cancel culture. This should surprise us. For Kandinsky was practically a communist. At Moscow University, where he read law and economics, he produced a sympathetic dissertation titled “On the Legality of Labourers’ Wages”. The Blue Rider collective — whose paintings are now on show at Tate Modern (25 April – 20 October) — he spearheaded was established in 1911 with a stirring call to arms that recalls the last line in Marx’s Manifesto. “Der Blaue Reiter will be the call that summons all artists of the new era and rouses the laymen,” declared Kandinsky and his mate Franz Marc.
On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s slim opuscule timed for the group’s first exhibition, likewise made clear that the true purpose of art was to defeat the vacuous materialism of modern man. All the same, as that title suggests, there was a decidedly romantic strain to Kandinsky’s leftism that left his more dogmatic comrades cold. In 1908, Kandinsky had been fired by the German translation of Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, a nutty pamphlet by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that preached the gospel of Theosophy, its esoteric message encased in the book’s frontispiece, a palette bearing the legend “Key to the Meaning of Colours”. The pair, it seems, believed in “auras”, essentially coloured emanations around human bodies that conveyed emotions. Today, we would call them vibes.
Proper, positivist Marxists, one imagines, would have impatiently clicked their tongues at this sort of claptrap, but not Kandinsky. All the stuff about the “vibrations of souls” somehow spoke to him. And so colours replaced objects in his painterly imagination. We may think, at first glance, that the Blue Rider pictures are no more than decorative wallpaper, but in fact, as Kandinsky’s writings show, many of them are essentially works of religious art, dealing with such premonitory themes as the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.
As it was, though, Soviet Russia’s revolutionary bureaucrats were after depictions of Large Projects, whereas Kandinsky wanted to paint Small Pleasures. They were in the business of dreary instruction, not Dreamy Improvisation. What was needed, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky felt, was “art of five kopeks”, not worthless art but art within the means of the masses. Accordingly, Kandinsky fell out of favour. He had been a bit player in the Revolution, and had done his bit curating provincial museums for the Bolsheviks, not to mention helped establish the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. Still, it was a tough racket being an Expressionist in a world of Social Realists. Routinely and puerilely assailed as bourgeois and boring, he leapt at the first chance to leave. In 1921, he moved to Dessau, throwing in his lot with Gropius’s Bauhaus, which remained a going concern until the Nazis shuttered it when they seized power. The remaining decade of his life was spent in Parisian wilderness. Kandinsky died an unhappy man in 1944.
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