WASSILY KANDINSKY|11 MIN READ

How to Read Wassily Kandinsky's Art

He paid half the cost of a book of poems and woodcuts, and material for an album of his work reached Amsterdam by secret routes. Each of these six works carries a story like that, and each story changes what you see.

WRITER Moryarty

Composition Nine — Wassily Kandinsky, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wassily Kandinsky art can look like a language without words, and in a way it is: one he built from colour, line and rhythm across a long, restless career. Few artists have left so many clues to how their pictures were made and what they meant to him. This is the story of six of his works, each a different door into that language. One is a book of poems and woodcuts he helped pay to print, another a lithograph portfolio made the year he joined the Bauhaus. There is a painting that hung in his own dining room, the picture he said first brought circles to the foreground, a blue wartime canvas, and an album smuggled into Amsterdam to be printed after his death.

Each work reads differently once you know how it came about. Kandinsky left his own explanations, museums have traced later histories, and both have something to teach. Some pictures make most sense through sound. Some through materials, because his choice of printmaking technique was never casual. Some pictures make most sense through subjects from Kandinsky's earlier figurative work that remain inside the abstraction, and some through the war years, when he lived almost reclusively in an apartment at Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. None of these stories gives a single fixed meaning, but each one changes how the work looks.

Klänge Plate 19 and Kandinsky's musical album

Klänge Pl.19 comes from Klänge, the only book of poetry Kandinsky ever wrote. He called it a musical album, and the comparison was exact. Thirty-eight prose poems sit beside fifty-six woodcuts, and together they make something closer to music than to an ordinary book. In the poems, words repeat until their sense empties out and only sound remains.

The woodcuts took five years. Between 1907 and 1912, the same years Kandinsky's painting left the recognisable world behind, he used printmaking as a rehearsal for that departure, an experiment in flat, reductive marks. The plate carries the same discipline: crisp contours and simplified shapes in yellow, blue and red on a warm beige ground, with darker accents holding the structure.

Part of the book follows Saint George and other knights in search of truth, and a horse and rider recur throughout. For Kandinsky the rider meant more than an old subject. It was his symbol for moving beyond representation, for leaving the things of the world behind and carrying the viewer with him.

In a prospectus written for the publisher, Kandinsky said he wanted to create nothing but sounds. The title already says it: Klänge, the German word for sounds. The poems were modelled on very young children's first attempts at speech, where repetition empties language of meaning until only its music is left.

The publisher needed convincing. R. Piper & Co. in Munich hesitated over the project, and the book only went ahead when Kandinsky agreed to pay half the costs himself. Poeschel & Trepte in Leipzig did the printing, in an edition of three hundred signed and numbered copies plus forty-five outside the trade. Of the woodcuts, forty-four are printed in black and twelve in colour.

Looking back, he said the poems and woodcuts preserve the traces of his development from the figurative to the abstract. A copy is held today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with others at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kleine Welten I and why Kandinsky chose lithography

Kleine Welten I opens a small portfolio with a large idea behind it. In 1922, the year Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, he made the twelve prints, and Propyläen-Verlag in Berlin published them the same year. The edition ran to two hundred and thirty: thirty deluxe copies on Japan paper and two hundred regular copies on Bütten paper.

The title of the portfolio echoes Kandinsky's statement that to create a work of art is to create the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the set as poetic images, each meant to call up a different realm. For him abstraction was a spiritual language. Each of the twelve prints is a self-contained composition of line, plane and colour, complete on its own.

Kleine Welten I is a lithograph, and that was a considered choice. In the portfolio's introduction Kandinsky explained what the technique could do: it combines many kinds of marks and colours to make an image that comes closest to a painting. The print itself demonstrates what Kandinsky claimed for lithography, with crisp black linework and vivid accents of yellow, red and blue on a white ground.

Each technique had its job. Etching, he wrote, suited the study of line. Woodcut played foreground against background. Against these, lithography was the technique he credited with coming closest to painting.

Lithography also suited his wider hopes for art. He called it modern and democratic. Its smooth surface carried a rich range of marks and colours, and it could yield an almost endless number of impressions. One drawing could reach many hands.

One artist's proof of the portfolio carries a handwritten note from Kandinsky to Walter Gropius and his wife Ise, written for their wedding in October 1923. An impression of Kleine Welten I is held today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which acquired it in 1931.

Auf Weiss II and the meaning of its Saint George connection

Auf Weiss II was painted between February and April 1923, while Kandinsky was teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar. A preparatory study for the composition survives in the Centre Pompidou collection. The finished picture first hung in the dining room of the apartment he shared with his wife Nina at the Bauhaus in Dessau.

With crisp black lines and small accents of red, yellow and blue, the canvas is energetic but controlled.

The Centre Pompidou sees a story inside the geometry. The museum reads the jagged black X shape at the centre of the canvas as an abstracted Saint George with his lance, a Russian symbol of valour and victory that Kandinsky returned to often. The museum's reading of the black X shape as Saint George is a reminder that for Kandinsky abstraction wasn't a clean break from his subjects.

Kandinsky himself was more interested in what forms do than in what they depict. He was fascinated by the effect that colour and form have on the human mind, and a canvas like this one can be held two ways at once: as a pattern of energies working on the viewer, and as a remembered story of a rider saint. The two ways don't cancel each other out.

The painting reached the public in a personal way. Nina Kandinsky gave it to the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, and it has been in the collection since 1976. It's held today at the Centre Pompidou.

Circles in a Circle makes the circle a subject

In 1923, during his Bauhaus years, Kandinsky painted Circles in a Circle, which he said was the first picture of his to bring the theme of circles to the foreground. One large, precise circle holds a constellation of smaller circles.

Reds, greens, yellows and pinks fill the circle, and overlapping shapes give the picture its depth.

Marcel Duchamp admired this side of Kandinsky's work. In 1950 he wrote that by tracing his lines with ruler and compass, Kandinsky had opened a new way of looking at painting.

From the summer of 1928 the painting was in California with Galka Scheyer, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles. In April 1931 she sold it to the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg in Los Angeles, and that June she wrote to Kandinsky about the sale.

The original is held today by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia.

Bleu de ciel and Kandinsky's wartime optimism

Bleu de ciel was painted in 1940, in the apartment at Neuilly-sur-Seine where Kandinsky spent the last eleven years of his life. The Bauhaus had closed in 1933 after Hitler came to power, and he had left Germany for France. By 1940 France was occupied, and he lived in that apartment almost as a recluse.

Earlier in 1940 he had visited Joan Miró in Varengeville-sur-Mer, on the Normandy coast, travelling with the painter Alberto Magnelli to see Miró's Constellations. After that visit, Kandinsky took up Miró's colours and Miró's constellations of biomorphic shapes, and the floating forms in this painting belong to that exchange.

The blue, the museum says, is a specific sky. From the studio window in Neuilly Kandinsky could see the sky above Mont Valérien, and the Centre Pompidou identifies that milky, shaded blue as an atmospheric blue taken from it. The forms drift across it without a single focal point, so the eye is left to wander and discover small events one by one. The title names only the sky's blue, not the creatures floating in it.

The painting was a reaction to the war that had just broken out, the third war of Kandinsky's life, and the museum reads it as a statement of freedom and optimism. In those years he filled his abstraction with cellular forms and small fantastical creatures, as if retreating into nature. Only the monogram keeps a little of the geometric rigidity of his earlier work.

Nature became the source of his wartime invention. The half-animal, half-imaginary creatures are close to the patterns he designed in 1942 and 1943 for curtains made by Jean Bauret and the Société industrielle de la Lys. Their colours earned this painting and other chromatic works of the period the name chinoiserie, after the oriental use of colour.

Nina Kandinsky gave the painting to the Centre Pompidou in 1976, and it's held today at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. Thanks to her gifts and her estate, the Centre Pompidou holds the most complete collection of his work anywhere.

11 tableaux et 7 poèmes from clandestine transport to print

11 tableaux et 7 poèmes is an album, not a single picture. It gathers eleven paintings and seven poems by Kandinsky. The material was collected by Jean Paul Penraat and J. Penraat, and it was first intended for Christian Zervos, the editor of the art journal Cahiers d'Art, either for the journal or as a separate work.

The reproductions, the poems and the template for a special stencil print reached Amsterdam by illegal routes with the Penraat brothers, and waiting for the material was the young publisher Frans Duwaer.

Duwaer was a second-generation printer and publisher in Amsterdam, and a friend and supporter of non-figurative art. In 1940 he had conceived a trilingual art magazine.

Kandinsky made the stencil print, a pochoir, before his death. It appeared only in selected copies of the album. Its template travelled with the other material. The regular edition ran to two hundred copies on Hollande van Gelder paper; forty-five of them carried the original stencil, and a further thirty copies outside the trade carried it too, numbered in Roman numerals.

Printing was finished on 17 November 1945, a year after Kandinsky's death. Jan Bons printed the album, and Frans Duwaer published it in Amsterdam. A copy is held today at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Pompidou has a copy numbered V/XXX, with an original gouache stencil dated 1944, from the bequest of Nina Kandinsky in 1981.

Across all six works one conviction holds: a picture can behave like music or poetry and still be a picture. Choose the work you'd like to hang, whether that is Klänge, Auf Weiss II or Bleu de ciel.

Did you know?

Seeing one of Claude Monet's Haystacks helped push Kandinsky off his planned path.
Between 1902 and 1904 he made more than fifty woodcuts in a romantic, fairytale-inspired style, long before he began the Klänge woodcuts.
Klänge had a direct and lasting influence on Expressionism, Dada and Russian Futurism.
For many years Kandinsky was considered the first artist to make non-figurative art, although historians now accept that abstraction had several origins.
In 1911 Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider group in Munich.
Kandinsky moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1933, at a moment when abstract artists and André Breton's Surrealists were in open dispute.
Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Questions people ask about Kandinsky

What type of art did Wassily Kandinsky make? He is best known as a pioneer of abstract, non-figurative art, though the label covers a long and changeable career. He trained in law and economics and only turned to painting in Munich at about thirty, moving from figurative scenes through the Blue Rider's expressionism to Bauhaus geometry and, finally, the biomorphic invention of his last French years.

What does Kandinsky's art mean? Kandinsky was fascinated by the effect colour and form have on the human mind. He argued for a spiritual purpose in art in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, one of the three books he published around 1911 and 1912. Some works still hold remembered subjects, like the Saint George the Centre Pompidou reads at the centre of Auf Weiss II.

Was music important to Kandinsky's art? Very much so. Hearing Wagner's Lohengrin helped push him off his planned path and toward painting, and his only book of poetry was conceived as a musical album in which words were emptied of meaning until only sound remained. In the Klänge prospectus he wrote that his aim was to create nothing but sounds.

How did the Bauhaus change Kandinsky's art? When he began teaching there in 1922, his painting turned geometric and measured: circles, lines and planes held in controlled balance, with the clarity now associated with the school. His teaching sat alongside his theoretical writing as part of his influence on modern art, and the Bauhaus years give us the precise, graphic language of works like Auf Weiss II.

Where can I see Kandinsky's originals? No other museum's Kandinsky holdings are as complete as those of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Kandinsky collection at the Centre Pompidou was built mainly from Nina Kandinsky's gifts and estate. Original impressions of the Kleine Welten portfolio also sit in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim in New York, the Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, while the Metropolitan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art both hold Kleine Welten I. Reproductions of many of these works are gathered in our Kandinsky collection.

About the author

We're Moryarty Vintage Posters, a European company founded in 2015. We have five shops in Spain and Portugal and a catalogue of more than two thousand vintage posters. Every artwork we sell is restored by hand and printed in our Barcelona workshop on museum-quality fine art matte paper. The Kandinsky collection is one we love to work with, and writing these stories was a way to share why his pictures reward a longer look.

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