Blue Riders

Last Friday’s visit to Kandinsky retrospective at ‘Hyogo Bijutsukan’, which revolved around his Blue Rider period (1911-14), made me reread extracts from his essay published in the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), which in turn were reproduced in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (one of the few theory books I shipped from UK to Japan nine years ago).

For the uninitiated, the Blue Rider was a coterie of artists, a movement of sorts, including among others, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Jawlensky, Schoenberg. The group published an Almanac and held two exhibitions (WW1 cut the movement short). Kandinsky's writing on the problem of form in The Blue Rider Almanac is considered as one of the first and best defences as well as promotions of abstract art, his ideas quickly catching up especially in the English speaking world. Here are a couple of extracts from the Almanac:

If the reader is able to free himself for a while from his own wishes, his own thoughts, his own feelings and skims through this book, going from a votive picture to Delaunay, from Cezanne to a Russian folk print, from a mask to Picasso, from a glass painting to Kubin, etc., etc., then his soul will experience many vibrations and he will enter into the world of art. Here he will not be bothered by outrageous defects or aggravating errors. Instead he will experience a spiritual plus instead of a minus. 

                                                            […]

The artist, whose life is comparable to a child’s in many respects, frequently can reach the inner sound more easily than anyone else. In this respect it is especially interesting to see how the composer Arnold Schönberg paints — simply and confidently. As a rule he is interested only in the inner sound. He omits, without regard, all embellishments and refinements and ‘poorest’ form in his hands becomes the richest (his self-portrait, for example).

                                                            […]

In order to ‘understand’ [an abstract] picture the same liberation as in realism is necessary, i.e., here too one must learn to hear the whole world exactly as it is without any representational interpretation. And in such work abstract forms (lines, planes, spots etc.) are not important as such, but only as inner sound, as life.

                                                           

For Kandinsky it seems colours and sound are one, or at least interchangeable. Schoenberg ‘paints’ with his music, and in turn music permeates abstract art. Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician — he learned the piano and cello at an early age — claimed that when he saw colour he heard music. He even went as far as associating colour tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound!

Kandinsky incorporated musicality early on in his pointillistic works, employing mottled dots and blobs of colour. One such work was on display at Hyogo Gallery: Russian Beauty in a Landscape (1905), through which, in Kandinsky’s own words, he tried to ‘express the musical spirit of Russia’. These referential qualities, as we know, are gone once Kandinsky embraces abstraction: the later paintings are left to their own, self-referential, vibratory devices (or the lack of them). I stayed with one such painting — Composition VII — for some time and the experience was rewarding as I was able to draw out a host of ‘small pleasures’ from the lines and shapes dancing, floating, hovering, rebounding or blending into each other.

But no matter how invigorating Kandinsky’s abstract work may be, I think one should be always on guard against the overinterpretation, careful not to ‘overstay’ a painting’s welcome. One of the pleasures of abstract painting, after all, is that you can always come back to it and detect musical intricacies anew. Actually, I’ll be totally honest here: the main reason I went to the exhibition (it took me good two hours by train in one direction) was to see Paul Klee’s painting Cacti (1912). Or let’s put it this way: if it hadn’t been for Klee I doubt I would have gone. Yes, it is all to do with my fixation with the plant, with the fact it was painted by my current painting hero, and of course with the title of this blog.

I was immediately attracted to Klee’s cactussen for their subdued colours, the picture unusually dark for such prickly, palpable species, as if saying ‘don’t waste time on me, I am obviously not that special’. Yet the more I looked at the painting the more I got convinced there was more to it than just the sinister-looking pots — who can tell for sure what those teeth-like projections inside the middle pot are? And where is the blinking cactus in that one?! Isn’t it altogether missing? It made me feel a bit disconcerted at the time. Days later I came across this anecdote which, I felt, almost vindicated my previous ignorance. In 1895 Kandinsky saw Monet’s Haystacks at Giverny, after which experience he later stated: "It was from the catalogue I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/).

I was also happy to see a number of paintings by Kandinsky’s friends from the Blue Rider group — Münter, Macke, Jawlensky. One that struck me in particular was Gabriele Münter’s Jawlensky, Werefkin (1908-9), in which she paints the couple in a leisurely yet rather enigmatic pose while resting upon the green hillside. One is never completely sure as to the nature of their current sentiment — whether they are in love, or upset with each other, plain indifferent, whatever. The blank faces and plain flowers may add to the feeling of tranquillity, but for me the absence of facial features only raises the emotional stakes in this kind of painting. And then there is that ominous-looking yellow bolt that splits the sky…

My tour ended some 90 minutes and three gallery rooms later, still enough to tire me out as I hardly could stand on my two feet. I ended up buying a Kandinsky A4 folder, a B2 Blue Rider poster (which now hangs in my room), and a ‘3D Stereo Viewer’. Kandinsky would have been proud. Well, I came across this telling anecdote related to the old man Kandinsky’s worsening eyesight (and some would say worsening art).

The year was 1944. Kandinsky had died on December 3rd of that year after coping with failing health since early March. By the summer his eyes had become almost permanently half-closed. After his death his widow Nina explained that he possessed the rare talent of being able to represent in his mind the world of his paintings with their colours and their forms, exactly as he later set them down on canvas. It has been suggested that these forms, their myriads of rings swimming across the surface of the work, were the effects of phosphenes that can be impressed on the eyeball when the eyes are closed. Towards the end of his life Kandinsky would have been painting what he was seeing with his eyes closed. That might suggest that he lost his grip on reality to some extent, but Nina says not.

http://picsandpoems.blogspot.com/2009/03/kandinsky-did-it-first.html

‘I shut my eyes in order to see’, said Gauguin. Finally, do have a look at this cool kinetic Kandinsky. Who knows, this is how the man himself might have seen it with the help of those phosphenes.

Klee Rules

Seeing Paul Klee’s paintings first hand is a great experience. The current exhibition at MOMAK (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) entitled ‘Klee: Art in the Making’, has been beckoning for weeks. I finally made it this past Sunday, at first having to wait for a hailstorm to clear off – it rained for the best part of the afternoon.

There is so much music and rhythm in Paul’s work. The paintings are beautiful in their duality: on the one hand intuitive, poetic, spiritual; on the other organized, orderly, architectural. Someone described Klee’s drawings in Pedagogical Sketchbook as ‘creative arithmetic’ — nicely summed up. The MOMAK exhibition, as the title suggests, sheds light on the actual process and methods Klee used to produce his art. The methods were paramount to him: from 1911 onwards, Klee kept an ongoing list of his works as each entry included, beside a title, a detailed description of the techniques used. In this Klee was a fanatic: the earliest entry relates to the work from 1883, when he was only four years old. Klee documented this "working process" with photographs of his atelier in various periods (spot Klee in his Bern studio, 1926), and even marked certain paintings as "Sonderklasse (Special Class)", ‘keeping these works at hand to use as models to reflect on’. Klee’s techniques were varied, and the exhibition outlines them into four distinct parts, evidently following Klee’s own categorizations:

Process 1: “Ölpause — Oilpause” (sketches colourized, only slightly modified)

Process 2: “Zerschnitten/Neukombiniert — Cut/Reassemble”

Process 3: “Teilstücke — Parts” (“non-symmetrical balance”)

Process 4: “Recto/Verso — Two-sided Sheet” (IR scans reveal the underlying images, which seem to have little to do with the painting itself, apart from a possible thematic inspiration — one such very spare painting has a background drawing of what looks a heavily tattooed Hell’s Angel-type fella with a mean-looking mutt on the leash! How progressive is that!)

The above methods are not unlike how a modern poet, especially one equipped with a word-processor, might compose verse. I recall an interview with the poet Hugo Williams in the ‘Horizon Review’, in which he was asked about the materials he uses to write with — here is Hugo’s answer:

A pen, which never leaves the house; a beautiful Parker. After that I type it out, then handwrite it, and it goes back and forth from typing to writing until I’m happy with it. One thing I do sometimes is type out individual units, bits that stick together. Very often I find though that I don’t know what order things are in, so I have to find that out by getting a beginning and an end. Then, to find the middle bits, I make strips of paper with the text and move them around on a desk. I suppose that’s what people do with computers but I just do it on the desk.                       

 [http://www.saltpublishing.com/horizon/issues/03/text/brown_phil.htm]

Another important work from the MOMAK exhibition is Klee’s Tightrope Walker (1923). The whole drawing is hovering, like its protagonist, between the tragic and the comic. The work has been commonly interpreted as a metaphor for a precarious existence of a modern man, yet Klee used this particular piece for an even more important end: to demonstrate his dynamic concept of space and perception. In the aforementioned Pedagogical Sketchbook Klee’s tightrope walker with a bamboo stick is ‘emphatically concerned about his balance. He calculates the Gravity on both ends. He is the scale’ (p. 42). As he walks the balance is alternately disturbed and restored, left to right, right to left. Klee uses this elegant metaphor to allude to the subjectivity of human perception. As Sibyl Moholy-Nagy explains in her introduction: ‘Man, precariously balanced on two unstable legs, uses optical illusion as a safety device. Horizon as concrete fact, and horizon as an imaginary safety belt that has to be believed in…’ (p.10). Indeed, Klee shows us another example:

 

asking if the representation of the house wall is incorrect. He concludes that it is not incorrect logically (as the lower windows are larger perspectively since they are closer to the eye), but are incorrect phychologically, because ‘every creature, in order to preserve his balance, insists on seeing actual verticals projected as such’ (p.41). Klee’s idea of balance is non-symmetrical though. It is achieved through the ‘equalization of unequal but equivalent parts’. Here is Klee’s illustration:

As Moholy-Nagy puts it: ‘The purely material balance of the scale finds its counter-part in the purely psychological balance of light and dark, weightless and heavy colours’ (p.10). Klee thus challenges our conventional perception, ushering us into the world of metaphysical and spiritual — his invitation to approach art intuitively. This ‘transition from observation to intuition’ defines, as Moholy-Nagy suggests, Klee’s deepest axiomatic wisdom: TO STAND DESPITE ALL POSSIBILITIES TO FALL! Sounds cool. I should hang this up above my writing desk.

Klee’s concepts and speculations are no less fascinating than his paintings. Having so far only scratched the surface, I will keep probing and investigating. Expect further musings on Paul Klee. To wrap this entry up, here is a 4 minute video of Klee’s few paintings as they drift in and out of a low-key jazzy tune. The beauty of juxtaposition.

April 27, 2011