The road to abstraction, like many journeys, was always more fun than the arrival. Between 1909 and 1914 the three founders of abstract painting – Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Kazimir Malevich in Moscow, Piet Mondrian in Amsterdam and Paris – worked independently to transform ideas about pure form into a revolutionary painterly syntax. All rejected 19th-century materialism for what Kandinsky called “inner necessity” and “the spiritual in art”; for all, those paintings that tremble on the brink from recognisable representation into abstract forms and shapes constitute their most creatively compelling period.
Kandinsky’s Bavarian landscapes, such as “Kochel – Straight Road”, shimmer into triangles and pyramids of expressive colour, then figurative forms explode into feverish kaleidoscopic patterns called “compositions”. In the same years, Malevich’s chunky peasants dissolve into suprematist blocks, Mondrian’s mills and trees flatten into vertical lines. After that, endgame: black square, geometric abstraction, Utopia and nihilism converged.
“Painting is the thunderous collision of different worlds which in mutual combat are destined to shape and name the new world,” wrote Kandinsky. His 1913 painting “Improvisation 30 (Cannons)”, with its murderous machine slicing collapsed buildings and people, reminds us that political and social fracturing, the threat of a war to end all wars, was the milieu that gave birth to abstraction. Fear of nuclear apocalypse and postwar spiritual yearning had the same effect 50 years later in cold war America, when abstract expressionism became the new religion.
Neither abstraction nor utopianism is fashionable today, especially in Britain, whose cultural values have always been pragmatic and empirical. Tate Modern’s Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction is the first big UK show devoted to the artist, and most of the important works in it have never visited London before. How unfamiliar these distillations of chaos from 1913-14 look here: the torrents of soaked colour and vortices of paint; thick, streaked pigment meeting calligraphic swirls, light and dark, hot and cold, jagged and smooth, crashing together in the monumental “Compositions V1” and “VII”; the frenzied, overlapping, repeated abstract motifs in “Fugue”; the merest suggestion of ladder and ravine in the cascading purple-blues of “Improvisation Gorge”. Yet they also, surprisingly, look like naive period pieces, rather than the bold opening up of painting’s boundaries that they were.
This is not just because abstraction failed to become art’s holy grail, the “new beautiful path for painting susceptible to infinite development” that Kandinsky hoped. A recent retrospective at Nice’s Fondation Maeght included the same important, energetic, often joyful works as here: iconic such as the Compositions; rareties such as “Nude”, anatomical detail disappearing into a yellow blaze that would “ring like a fanfare” to “the extravagant waste of the last forces of summer”; or “Crinolines”, a vibrant surface of exuberant pink, yellow, green dabs depicting stylised grandes dames whose billowing dresses and elongated figures reshape before our eyes into colour bands laid out on receding planes, an abstract structure. Yet the French show gave Kandinsky’s pioneering quest a more desperately adventurous, less dated edge than Tate does. Why?
One reason is a rather jumbled, inelegant hang, but most significant is Tate Modern’s eternal problem of historical vacuum. The Path to Abstraction condenses Kandinsky into the vital epoch 1908-1922 but confusingly gives no idea where he came from or where he was headed. The answer to the first is Russia and to the second, exile from Russia. Both impinge massively on the masterworks here; indeed it is impossible to understand Kandinsky without grasping his roots in Russian symbolism. By omitting the pre-1908 works (“Colourful Life”, with its floating Moscow cupolas, say, or “Promenade”) that announce Kandinsky’s beginnings in a mesh of fin-de-siècle forces – the sinuous lines of art nouveau, Russian folk tales, the poetic, fragmented Slavic symbolism of Mikhail Vrubel – Tate drives those influences underground, leaving them to surface inexplicably, without the story of transformation, thus making Kandinsky look less of a ground- breaking original than he was.
The truth is that every great abstract composition of 1911-14 here begins with apocalyptic images – floods, messianic riders, doom, the angel of the Resurrection – derived from Russian symbolism and myth. In “Deluge I”, battling figures defy huge waves of paint as a streak of lightning cuts the picture diagonally, while a rider on a white steed blows a golden trumpet. Look for him, and that horseman, logo of Kandinsky’s avant-garde “Blaue Reiter” (“Blue Rider”) group, is everywhere – in “Cossacks”, “Improvisation 20”, “Lyrically”, the sketch for the lost “Composition II” – pulsing through quasi-abstract forms to the future, stampeding over the past.
Except that he cannot stamp out the past. Kandinsky, born in 1866, was an academic lawyer who did not discover art until his 30s. He trained and lived in Munich, absorbed German expressionism and, as is extensively documented in Tate’s catalogue, became an aesthetic theoretician fascinated both by affinities between music and abstract art, which would reject objects in favour of “sounds to vibrate the soul”, and by theosophist mumbo-jumbo popular in 1900s Russia. Most of this is of academic interest; what matters is that he was a virtuoso painter who brought to art the intense spirituality of the convert, and a cosmic ecstasy going back to 19th-century Russian landscapists such as Isaac Levitan and Mikhail Nesterov – both also born in the 1860s.
“Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. This feeble light is but a presentiment, and the soul, when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality” was his explanation of the lush, saturated colour set against black biomorphic shapes in “Black Spot” (1912). It recalls Russian icons, but you see too how its nervy, tense, balanced dissonance anticipates Arshile Gorky – another eastern artist, from Armenia – and, via his exile to America, Jackson Pollock.
Yet in Moscow, where Kandinsky returned at the outbreak of the first world war – as an enemy alien he had 24 hours to leave Germany – the soul’s flutterings soon looked dangerously bourgeois. The influence of German expressionism on his paintings waned; suprematism and constructivism, Bolshevik house styles, made their impact. Before they did so, Kandinsky allowed himself one last, magnificent figurative expression of love for his native city: the vertiginous “Moscow Red Square” (1916), where the city’s domes shift and shake in a polyphony of dynamic, prismatic colour. It is an image at once of chasm and of triumph.
Kandinsky, though given official Bolshevik status, quickly became disillusioned. In “Twilight”, “In Grey”, “Overcast”, “Grey Oval”, “Black Spot”, between 1917 and 1921, chromatic brilliance is re-placed by a sombre palette, sharper forms, a tendency to geometrisation, which reflected both grim civil war Moscow – Kandinsky’s baby son died of malnutrition in 1920 – and the mesmeric effect of Malevich’s suprematism.
Kandinsky fled to Berlin in 1921. Yet the freedom and openness, so exhilarating and disorientating, in his prewar compositions vanished once he was cut off for good from “fairytale Moscow . . . the soil out of which I derive my strength” and, like many Russian exiles, he did little more than elaborate increasingly formalistic variations on the last works he made in his homeland. That story is heralded in the 1921 paintings here, but is complete only if you fast-forward to the months before his death in 1944 and the Pompidou’s “Tempered Elan”, where, in flat pictographic forms, the blue rider and the angel of the Resurrection re-appear, separated once more by a mighty, geometric diagonal wave – suggesting the final eclipse, surely, of the Russia that created this radical, cerebral artist who was mired nonetheless in his nation’s past.
‘Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction’, Tate Modern, London, tel +44 020 7887 8888, until October 1. Supported by Tate members and Access Industries. Kunstmuseum, Basel, from October 21
