Vol. 3 (3). 2018

Koj?ve, A. (1985): Les peintures concr?tes de Kandinsky // Revue de mеtaphysique et de morale, avril – juin.

Koj?ve, A. (2001): Les peintures concr?tes de Kandinsky. La lettre volеe (coll. «Palimpsestes»), Bruxelles.

Lamberz, E., Uphus, J. B. (2006): The Ccumenical Councils. From Nicaea I to Nicaea II // Corpus Christianorum Concilium Nicaenum II —787. Brepols, Turnhout.

Sers, Ph. (1995; 2016): Kandinsky, Philosophie de l’art abstrait. Hazan, Paris.

Sers, Ph. (2012): La Rеvolution des avant-gardes, l’expеrience de la Vеritе en art. Hazan, Paris.

Sers, Ph., Escande Y. (2003): Rеsonance intеrieure, dialogue sur l’expеrience artistique et l’expеrience spirituelle en Chine et en Occident. Klincksieck, Paris.

Sers, Ph. (2015): Rеsonances: Kandinsky et la nеcessitе intеrieure. Hazan, Paris (в сопровождении факсимильного переиздания альбома Kl?nge 1913 г. в ранее не публиковавшемся переводе Филиппа Супо).

Weil, S. (1950): Attente de Dieu. La Colombe, Paris.

Источники цитирования в изданиях на русском языке

Кандинский, В. В. (2008): Избранные труды по теории искусства: В 2-х т. / Под ред. Н. Б. Автономовой, Д. В. Сарабьянова, В. С. Турчина. М.: Гилея.

Кожев, А. В. Конкретная (объективная) живопись Кандинского. Человек. 1997, №6.

Флоренский, П. А. (1990): Столп и утверждение истины. М.: Правда.

Флоренский, П. А. (1993): Храмовое действо как синтез искусств. Иконостас. Избранные труды по искусству. Спб.: Мифрил.

EMILY CHRISTENSEN[37 - Emily Christensen – The Courtauld Institute of Art.]

«AMBIVALENT» IMAGES: WASSILY KANDINSKY’S ABSTRACT-ORIENTALIST PAINTINGS[38 - The Russian version of the article will be published in the next issue of the article. – Editorial Board. Русский перевод этой статьи будет помещен в следующем номере журнала. — Ред.]

Abstract

In the years 1909—1911, Wassily Kandinsky sought to change art – but not simply for the sake of it. He wanted to create art capable of generating a spiritual epiphany in his viewers. To achieve this he strove for both a suitable formal element (abstraction of forms) and spiritual content. It was essential to Kandinsky that the paintings be recognised by his viewers as spiritual. Orientalist subject matter offered him this opportunity. This paper proposes that in a group of five paintings completed during this important period of transition, Kandinsky turned for inspiration to his personal experience of «the Orient’: photographs and sketches from his trip to Tunisia in 1904—1905 and two exhibitions in Munich in 1909 and 1910. Kandinsky quickly discovered that it was not only the spiritual associations that helped him achieve his objective; the visual material from his trip to Tunisia presented an approach to the dissolution of form. Bodies were veiled and hooded; architecture appeared reduced to flat planes and geometrical shapes. Content and form combined to propel him towards abstraction in a manner not available with any other thematic subject. Postcolonial studies of Orientalist art suggest that it typically involved the implicit or explicit support of an imperial agenda: the domination of «the Orient’ by «the West’. This interpretation oversimplifies what Kandinsky did with his abstract-Orientalist paintings. Kandinsky’s paintings engaged with Orientalist themes, but they were not conventional Orientalist works. Analysis reveals that he rejected as many dominant power structures as he accepted. This complex interplay of acceptance and rejection, or what Homi Bhabha expressed in terms of conflicting desire and derision led to the creation of quintessentially «ambivalent’ images.

Introduction

Starting in 1909, Wassily Kandinsky transformed art: he formulated the concept of abstract art and then experimented until he was able to paint it. Abstraction was arguably the most influential innovation in art of the twentieth century, and Kandinsky is seen as one of its founders.[39 - Rose-Carole Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 1. See also Alfred H. Barr, «Cubism and Abstract Art’ in Abstraction: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Maria Lind (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2013), pp. 28—33.] For Kandinsky, however, abstraction of form was not an end in itself: in his book On the Spiritual in Art he explained that «art is […] a power that has a purpose and must serve the development and refinement of the human soul.»[40 - Wassily Kandinsky, «On the Spiritual in Art’, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Volume One (1901—1921), trans. by and ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 114—219 (p. 212).] He believed this could be achieved through abstraction, but only if it conveyed spiritual significance. This study proposes an entirely new understanding of Kandinsky’s art in these critical years: his formal and thematic dependence on «Oriental» themes.

This study will examine a group of five paintings to reveal how content and form combined in these works in a manner uniquely suited to propel Kandinsky towards a new type of art. These paintings, which I will refer to as «abstract-Orientalist» paintings, have never previously been examined as a distinct group through the lens of postcolonialism. There are more paintings from this period with Orientalist references, but unfortunately space dictates a narrow focus in the present article.[41 - See, for example, Emily Christensen, «The Tunisian Sources of Wassily Kandinsky’s «Improvisation on Mahogany’», The Burlington Magazine 159 (September 2017): 714—719. A comprehensive study of Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings forms the subject of the author’s PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.] Kandinsky assigned these paintings titles that include the words «African», «Arabs» and «Oriental».[42 - Kandinsky assigned titles to his paintings in German until the year 1916, and recorded the titles in his Handlists, the hand-written lists of his paintings. See Hans K. Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonnе of the Oil Paintings, Volume One: 1900—1915 (London: Sotheby Publications, 1982), p. 23. For ease of reference, English translations of the titles will be used in the text of this study.] Today we understand the three terms above to mean different things with distinct geographic, political and historical connotations; for Kandinsky, however, and for his contemporaries, these terms were interchangeable and related not to specific geographies, but rather to a culturally constructed idea.[43 - Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1978; reprint, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003), p. 1.] Kandinsky’s manipulation of this idea in his early abstract art forms the subject of this study.

Kandinsky’s artistic objectives during these years centred around the desire to produce «spiritual» art. His book On the Spiritual in Art, written in 1909 but not published until 1911, was his major intellectual contribution in the period under examination here.[44 - Kandinsky also wrote several smaller articles and edited and contributed to TheBlaue Reiter Almanac, but as the latter largely reiterated his views on abstract painting first propounded in «On the Spiritual in Art’, the Almanac will not be examined further here.] In his book, he articulated the view that art is ’spiritual bread for the spiritual awakening now beginning’ and believed it could lead viewers, and ultimately society as a whole, to a «spiritual turning point».[45 - Kandinsky, «On the Spiritual in Art’, p. 138. «The Spiritual Turning Point’ is the title of Chapter 3 in «On the Spiritual in Art’.] The intellectual landscape that Kandinsky inhabited was in the throes of responding to Nietzsche’s proposition, «God is dead!», which Kandinsky cited in his book.[46 - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 120. And see Kandinsky, «On the Spiritual in Art’, p. 139.] Raised in the Russian Orthodox tradition, Kandinsky was never an atheist, but like other cosmopolitan intellectuals across Russia and Europe, he was looking for a new solution to what J.J. Clarke has described as:

a pervasive cultural disquietude, an uneasy awareness of fault lines running deep into the strata of European cultural life, down through levels of politics, religion, and philosophy, giving rise to a sense of some fundamental breakdown at the heart of the West’s intellectual, spiritual and moral being.[47 - J.J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The encounter between Asian and Western thought (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 28.]

Kandinsky’s drive to produce «spiritual art needs to be understood in this context. And, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Kandinsky believed that «the West» that he inhabited was materialistic and spiritually corrupt. Like them, he turned to «the Orient’ to fill the spiritual void.[48 - See discussion in Clarke, pp. 16—34.]

Although Russian, Kandinsky lived in Germany during the period under examination here and had done since 1896. This paper does not seek to deny his Russianness, nor his feelings about Moscow which he described on several occasions in spiritual terms. Nevertheless, Kandinsky was raised in a multilingual, metropolitan household, grew up in rapidly modernising Russian cities, and spent his formative artistic years in Munich, studying the European artistic tradition. This paper proposes that when Kandinsky referred to «the West», he was referring to the modern, increasingly homogenous metropolises across Europe, extending into Russia, and his view of «the Orient» was framed in opposition to this construction of «the West».[49 - In addition, studies show that while there is some evidence that Russian academics were more willing to challenge the notion that «the Orient’ was a homogenous whole, this was primarily within St Petersburg University; meanwhile the general public perceptions and stereotypes paralleled those in Germany. Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The politics of identity and Oriental studies in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).]

A key element of Kandinsky’s understanding of «the Orient’ was a three-month trip to Tunisia that he took with his partner Gabriele M?nter in 1904—1905, during which he produced hundreds of sketches, approximately thirty tempera paintings and several oils on board.[50 - Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Drawings: Catalogue Raisonne, Volume Two: Sketchbooks (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2007), Vivian Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours: Catalogue Raisonne, Volume One: 1901—1921 (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1992), and Roethel and Benjamin.] In addition, Kandinsky and M?nter between them took more than one hundred and eighty photographs of their surroundings.[51 - See the discussion on authorship of the photographs in Roger Benjamin with Cristina Ashjian, Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015), p. 78.] This Tunisian material is important for two reasons: it shows that Kandinsky had already engaged with conventional Orientalist themes; and it provided a visual resource for his subsequent abstract-Orientalist works.

The Abstract-Orientalist Paintings

The most literal representation of Tunisia in Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings occurs in Arabs I (Cemetery) (Fig. 1) of 1909. It is among his earliest paintings to experiment with abstracted forms in a context other than landscapes. Dominated by bright, warm yellows and contrasting, cool blues, the painting provides direct references to Kandinsky’s trip to Tunisia, and evidence of his reliance on the artistic outputs from that trip. Roger Benjamin has identified two specific photographs which Kandinsky has «amalgamated’ in order to produce this image: Tunisian Village (Fig. 2), which provides the background of the wall with arch and doorways, the steps down, and the twisted, pollarded tree; and Ottoman Cemetery, Tunisia (Fig. 3), which provides the rows of turban graves.[52 - Benjamin with Ashjian, pp. 93—94.] The four partially-abstracted figures appear to be loosely based on sketches and photographs from the trip. The two seated figures wrapped in burnous cloaks, one at the far left and one at the far right of the canvas, appear in multiple gouache paintings from the trip.

Two other paintings from 1909 show Kandinsky developing his Orientalist theme by reference to Tunisia while introducing increasingly abstract forms. He described this practice as follows:

I dissolved objects to a greater or lesser extent within the same picture, so that they might not all be recognised at once and so that these emotional overtones might thus be experienced gradually by the spectator, one after another.[53 - Wassily Kandinsky, «Cologne Lecture’, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Volume One (1901—1921), trans. by and ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 392—400 (p. 393).]

Improvisation 6 (Africans) (Fig. 4), shows two turbaned figures in the foreground, in front of a white building with a green dome and a series of abstracted shapes delineated either by black lines or by contrasting blocks of colour. The building resembles the Tombs of the Beys, in Kandinsky’s painting Tunis Street (Tombs of the Beys) (Fig. 5), with its blank white walls and green tiled, domed roof. The Pencil sketch for Improvisation 6 (Africans) (Fig. 6) bears an even closer resemblance (although reversed) to the Tombs of the Beys, showing not only the dome, but also the small turret in the corner, which Kandinsky subsequently omitted from the oil painting. The turbaned figures, meanwhile, recall those from his Pencil sketches of figures in costume and Pencil sketches of male and female figures (Figs. 7 and 8) and photographs including of Courtyard of the Dar El Bey Mosque with traditionally dressed visitors (Fig. 9).

A closely related painting is Orientals (Fig. 10) of 1909. The figure on the left with dark brown skin, small feathered hat (known as a cechia) and loose white trousers that become tight around the lower legs is identifiable from a photograph taken by the artists in Tunisia, namely the right-hand figure in Three dark-skinned men in elegant clothes in front of a cafе (Fig. 11). The composition suggests people sitting in a cafe, a common theme in Orientalist art and popular photography, and a subject Kandinsky painted in Tunisia, in his work Moorish Cafе.[54 - See discussion in Benjamin with Ashjian, pp. 30—31.]

Arabs II and Arabs III (with Pitcher) both from 1911 show Kandinsky conflating his visual references to Tunisia with Persian and possibly Syrian influences in broad stereotypes of Orientalism. Before discussing these paintings individually, it is important to note that by naming the pair Arabs II and Arabs III (with Pitcher), Kandinsky made a deliberate link back to the first of his abstract-Orientalist paintings: Arabs I (Cemetery). Stylistically the three are dramatically different; the titular link suggests that his intention was to link the paintings by theme. The titles prepare the viewer to search out, even in the most dissolved forms, conventional images of «the Arab’, and, by implication, to make the association between Orientalist themes and spirituality. In Arabs II[55 - Unfortunately, this painting is owned by a private collection and the author was unable to obtain permission to reproduce this image. A reproduction of the image can be found in the artist’s catalogue raisonnе. Roethel and Benjamin, p. 360.], the composition is centred around a group of galloping blue horses ridden by the abstracted forms of men in flowing white burnouses. Of the figures in the lower right corner, the red ones are barely discernible other than by the turbans on the backs of their heads, while the small figure pointing to the riders clearly has dark skin and a red cechia hat reminiscent of the left-hand figure in Orientals.

In Arabs III (with Pitcher) (Fig. 12), only the title allows the identification of the almost entirely dissolved shapes in the upper left and right of the painting as riders on galloping or rearing horses ridden by men in white burnouses and wearing turbans. The reclining woman and the pitcher are, by contrast, easily identifiable. The reclining woman with her exotic veil and chin in her hand does not appear in sketches or photographs from the trip to Tunisia. It seems most likely that she was introduced as a visual cue to the Orientalist theme of the painting, particularly given that the «Oriental’ horsemen are almost entirely dissolved into abstract shapes. The presence of a reclining woman in Orientalist art is one with which Kandinsky and his viewers would have been familiar from innumerable Odalisques painted since the eighteenth century, all erotic fantasies based on assumptions around the availability of sexual encounters in «the Orient’.[56 - Christine Peltre, «Et les Femmes?», in De Delacroix ? Kandinsky: L’Orientalisme en Europe, ed. by Roger Diederen and Davy Depelchin (Paris: Hazan, 2010), pp. 157—165.]

Ambivalence and Postcolonial Theory

Before proceeding further with an analysis of these paintings, it is necessary to address the treatment of postcolonial theory and its related terminology used in this study. The decades-long debate around «Orientalism’ has been highly charged. The term itself is burdened with a multiplicity of meanings, and will be largely avoided in this paper in favour of the adjective «Orientalist’ (in relation to art or themes) which is used here to reference an affinity with a genre of painting produced mainly in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring largely imaginary scenes of people and places outside of Europe, often in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The term «Orientalism’ will be used sparingly to reference the postcolonial debate around the meaning of «the West’s’ engagement with «the Orient’. Other than the brief outline below, this paper does not purport to reproduce a history of the debate, but rather extends some of its most important ideas to an analysis of Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings.

Postcolonial interpretations of Orientalism began with the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s book Orientalism. Said criticised the Orientalism practiced by «the West’ on «the Orient’ and analysed it in terms of Foucauldian discourse and the relationship between truth and power. For Said, the study of «the Orient’ is not and never was a neutral academic exercise in pursuit of truth.[57 - See Foucault’s statement that «truth is a thing of this world. […] Each society has its regime of truth, its «general politics» of truth.» Michel Foucault, «Truth and Power’ in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 51—75 (p. 73).] On the contrary, he argued that Orientalism is a manifestation of the power relationship that underlies the broader «Western’ imperial project, and as such it says more about the moral and political concerns of «the West’ than it does about any «Oriental’ reality.[58 - Said, pp. 11—12.] The proliferation of inverted commas in the preceding sentences reflects the sensitivity which surrounds these terms in the wake of the debate.[59 - Not the least of which was Said’s use of the term «the West’ in his criticism of how «the West’ essentialises «the Orient’, which has itself drawn criticism for essentialising «the West’. See for example, John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 5.] For the purpose of this study, inverted commas will be used for these essentialised terms to represent the way in which they were used by Kandinsky (and others) in the period.

While Said’s work did not engage significantly with painting, his arguments were systematically applied to nineteenth century French Orientalist painting by Linda Nochlin in her article, «The Imaginary Orient’.[60 - Linda Nochlin, «The Imaginary Orient’, Art in America, 71, (May 1983), pp. 119—131, 186—191.] Nochlin’s article translates the standard themes of Orientalist ideology into the visual language of painting: among them, the mystery of the East, the vice of idleness, the harmonious religious practices, and of course lasciviousness and the sexual availability of submissive women. All of these appear in Kandinsky’s Orientalist paintings and need to be examined both in relation to their status as century-old themes, and to their particular manifestation in his twentieth century modernism. Significantly, Nochlin also identifies four conspicuous absences in Orientalist art: the absence of history, in which the Oriental world is «a world without change, a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals, untouched by historical processes;’ the absence of the Western colonial presence; the absence of artistic interpretation, bringing with it the implication of scientific objectivity; and finally the «apparent absence of art’, the eradication of all artistic traces to create a «pseudo-realist’ painting.[61 - Nochlin, p. 122.] These, as shall be seen below, provide a method for interpreting the complex interplay of the conventional and the unconventional in Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist works.

The criticisms of Said have been manifold.[62 - These include, most famously, Bernard Lewis’ accusation that Said’s book was anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic, anti-American and motivated by hostility: Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also John MacKenzie’s concern that Said presents an unchanging Western imperial intention over a span of 150 years, a well-argued critique, but one that is less relevant to this dissertation: MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, theory and the arts. A book summarising the critiques and comments on Said’s Orientalism is A.L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002).] A significant critique for present purposes comes from J.J. Clarke in his book Oriental Enlightenment. Clarke accepts much of Said’s analysis, particularly his exposure of hidden and suppressed ideological agendas, but he argues that Said’s analysis is too restricted in its dogmatic identification of Orientalism with the dominant imperialist ideology.[63 - Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment, p. 25.] Clarke asserts that in some cases it also represents, «a counter-movement, […] albeit not a unified or consciously organised one, which in various ways has often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive structures of imperial power.»[64 - Clarke, p. 9.] It was not, he argued, simply a question of «power’ and «domination’; it was an attempt to confront the structures of knowledge and power and to engage with «Oriental’ ideas in ways that confronted the «painful void in the spiritual and intellectual heart of Europe’.[65 - Clarke, p. 34.] Elements of this interpretation are anticipated by Kandinsky’s work.

Homi Bhabha has proposed, in his complex, multi-disciplinary chapter, «The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, an alternative to the binary oppositions identified by Said.[66 - Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 94—120.] Bhabha also largely agrees with Said’s thesis that Orientalism is a «regime of truth’ which creates «the Orient’ as a unified zone of the world.[67 - Bhabha, p. 101.] He produces a more subtle reading, however, with his focus on stereotyping.[68 - Bhabha, p. 95.] He is not interested in the stereotype as a wholly positive or negative characterisation; rather, he explores its inherent «ambivalence’: an expression of ««otherness» which is at once an object of desire and derision.»[69 - Bhabha, p. 96.] Looking at Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings as ambivalent images allows the complex nature of this important and underestimated group of paintings to be revealed. At one level, the Orientalist themes express Kandinsky’s yearning for the spirituality he associates with «the Orient’ while simultaneously exposing his tendency to reduce «the Orient’ to a homogenous, undifferentiated whole. And at another level, he relies on conventional Orientalist themes that play to the desires of his viewers while simultaneously rejecting artistic conventions through his dissolution of form.

Exhibitions as Catalysts

The intellectual catalyst for Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings was, this study proposes, two exhibitions in Munich in 1909 and 1910, both of which he reviewed for the Russian art journal Apollon.

In 1909, Kandinsky visited «Japanese and East Asian Art». Featuring 1,276 works, this exhibition took place at what turned out to be the start of Kandinsky’s intellectual commitment to spiritual content in his art.[70 - Jens Kr?ger, «The 1910 Exhibition «Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst»: Its protagonists and its consequences for the display of Islamic art in Berlin’ in After One Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition «Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered ed. by Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010), pp. 65—116 (p. 72).] He wrote about the exhibition:

Here, along with the truly Oriental gift for combining the subtlest details into an overall consonance, one finds landscapes of an extraordinary breadth and abstraction in the handling of colour and form, subordinated to a sense of rhythm that is the pure expression of a unique, wholly artistic temperament. Again and again, so much that is part of Western art becomes clear when one sees the infinite variety of the works of the East, which are, nonetheless, subordinated to and united by the same fundamental «tone’! It is precisely this general «inner tone’ that the West lacks. Indeed it cannot be helped: we have turned, for reasons obscure to us, away from the internal and toward the external. And yet, perhaps we Westerners shall not, after all, have to wait too long before the same inner sound, so strangely silenced, reawakens within us and, sounding forth from the innermost depths, involuntarily reveals its affinity with the East – just as in the very heart of all peoples, in the now darkest depths of the spirit, there shall resound one universal sound, albeit at present inaudible to us – the sound of the spirit of man.[71 - Wassily Kandinsky, «Letters from Munich (1)», in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Volume One (1901—1921), trans. by and ed. by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 54—59 (p. 59).]

Coming at a time when Kandinsky was seeking new content that would be identifiably spiritual, this exhibition revealed the potential to achieve his artistic objectives by reference to the «Oriental gift’ with its «inner tone’. Although there is no way of knowing definitively whether the exhibition inspired his links between «the Orient’, spirituality and abstraction, or whether it coincided with ideas he had already read about, its powerful effect on Kandinsky at this formative time is evident from the quote above.