In 1909 Kandinsky and the German painter Gabriele Münter (Münter, Gabriele), who had been his mistress since 1902, acquired a house in the small town of Murnau, in southern Bavaria. Working part of the time in Murnau and part of the time in Munich, he began the process that led to the emergence of his first strikingly personal style and finally to the historic breakthrough into purely abstract painting. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether was not, it should be noted, due merely or even primarily to strictly aesthetic considerations. No one could have been less of an aesthete, less of an “art for art's sake” addict, than Kandinsky. In addition, he was not the sort of born painter who could enjoy the physical properties of oil and pigment without caring what they meant. He wanted a kind of painting in which colours, lines, and shapes, freed from the distracting business of depicting recognizable objects, might evolve into a visual “language” capable—as was, for him, the abstract “language” of music—of expressing general ideas and evoking deep emotions.
The project was not, of course, entirely new. Analogies between painting and music had long been common; many thinkers had attempted to codify the supposed expressiveness of colours, lines, and shapes; and more than one fairly ancient sketch might compete for the honour of being called the first abstract (abstract art) picture. Moreover, in these years just before World War I, Kandinsky was by no means alone in his attack on figurative art. By 1909 the Cubists were turning out intellectualized and fragmented visions of reality that baffled the ordinary viewer. Between 1910 and 1914 the list of pioneer abstract artists included many fine painters. A strict examination of works and dates can show, therefore, that Kandinsky does not quite deserve to be called, as he often is, the “founder” of nonfigurative painting; at least he cannot be called the only founder. But, when this historical point is conceded, he remains a pioneer of the first importance.
Kandinsky's widely accepted claim to historical priority rests mainly on an untitled work dated 1910 and commonly referred to as “First Abstract Watercolour.” On the basis of research done in the 1950s, however, this work can be dated somewhat later and can be regarded as a study for the 1913 “Composition VII”; and in any event it must be considered merely an incident—among many for which the evidence has not been preserved—on Kandinsky's route. In “Blue Mountain” (1908) the evolution toward nonrepresentation is already clearly under way; the forms are schematic, the colours nonnaturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape. In “Landscape with Steeple” (1909) similar tendencies are evident, together with the beginning of what might be called an explosion in the composition. By 1910 “Improvisation XIV” is already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 “Encircled,” there has definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point of departure in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that come such major works as “With the Black Arch,” “Black Lines,” and “Autumn”; in such pictures, done between 1912 and 1914 in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist's achievement.
Kandinsky was an active animator of the avant-garde movement in Munich, helping to found in 1909 the New Artists' Association ( Neue Künstlervereinigung). Following a disagreement within this group, he and the German painter Franz Marc (Marc, Franz) founded in 1911 an informally organized rival group, which took the name Der Blaue Reiter (Blaue Reiter, Der) (“The Blue Rider”), from the title of one of Kandinsky's 1903 pictures.
Russian interlude.
When World War I was declared in 1914, Kandinsky broke off his relationship with Gabriele Münter and returned to Russia by way of Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans. An early marriage to a cousin had been dissolved in 1910 after a long period of separation, and in 1917 he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreevskaya, whom he had met the previous year. Although he was past 50 and his bride was many years younger, the marriage turned out to be extremely successful, and he settled down in Moscow with the intention of reintegrating himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet government, which at first showed itself anxious to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the arts section of the People's Commissariat for Public Instruction. His autobiographical Rückblicke (“Retrospect”) was translated into Russian and published by the Moscow municipal authorities. In 1919 he created the Institute of Artistic Culture, became director of the Moscow Museum for Pictorial Culture, and helped to organize 22 museums across the Soviet Union. In 1920 he was made a professor at the University of Moscow and was honoured with a one-man show organized by the state. In 1921 he founded the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. But by then the Soviet government was veering from avant-garde art to Social Realism, and so, at the end of the year, he and his wife left Moscow for Berlin.
In spite of the war, the Russian Revolution, and official duties, he had found time to paint during this Russian interlude and even to begin a quite drastic transformation of his art. Whereas in his Munich work as late as 1914 one can still find occasional allusions to landscape, the canvases and watercolours of his Moscow years show a determination to be completely abstract. They also show a growing tendency to abandon the earlier spontaneous, lyrical, organic style in favour of a more deliberate, rational, and constructional approach. The change is evident in such pictures as “White Line” and “Blue Segment.”
Bauhaus period.
By this time Kandinsky had an international reputation as a painter. He had always, however, been interested in teaching, first as a lecturer in law and economics just after getting his university degree, then as the master of a painting school he had organized in Munich, and more recently as a professor at the University of Moscow. He seems not to have hesitated, therefore, when early in 1922 he was offered a teaching post at Weimar in the already famous Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art. At first his duties were a little remote from his personal activity, for the Bauhaus was not concerned with the formation of “painters” in the traditional sense of the word. He lectured on the elements of form, gave a course in colour, and directed the mural workshop. Not until 1925, when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, did he have a class in “free,” nonapplied painting. In spite of the somewhat routine nature of his work, however, he appears to have found life at the Bauhaus rewarding and pleasant. The climate was one of research and craftsmanship combined with a certain amount of aesthetic puritanism; it was classical, to use the term rather loosely, by comparison with the warm romanticism of his pre-1914 days in Munich.
Kandinsky responded to this climate by continuing to evolve in the general direction of geometric abstraction, but with a dynamism and a taste for detail-crowded pictorial space that recall his earlier sweeping-gesture technique. That Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his publication in 1926 of his second important treatise, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”). In his first treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. Now, in the same spirit, he analyzed the supposed effects of the abstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot.