Although it is difficult to apportion influences of contemporary artists on Kandinsky, he
had close colleagues who were also important innovators. He shared ideas with the
Futurists whose manifesto included a desire to be free of the past and picture the totality
of life, its sounds and smells as well as its forms. The following individuals (Table 1)
provide examples of important pictorial innovations in comprehensive composition that
were not in the mainstream of Kandinsky’s thinking, but nevertheless, in the long run,
were part of more general trends in art.
They were motivated by inner feelings that had to be ordered using particular choices of
shapes and colours. In all of this turmoil arbitrary choices had to be made which were
then adhered to as a constraint of the movement, which produced them. For all their
claims to break with traditions, modern movements of this time set up critical barriers to
reinforce their arbitrariness (Figs 18-22).
Table 1 Innovations by Kandinsky’s contemporaries
|
Artist
|
Important visual innovation
|
|
Lyonel Feininger
|
Transparent planes
|
|
Paul Klee
|
Transparent planes
|
|
Umberto Boccioni
|
Merged forms and planes
|
|
Carlo Carra
|
Merged forms and planes
|
|
August Macke
|
Tonal depth in rounded forms
|
|
Franz Marc
|
Tonal depth in rounded forms
|
|
Mondrian
|
Juxtaposition of coloured
rectangles
|
|
|
|
Franz Marc worked closely with Kandinsky on the launch of the Blue Rider group. In the
first edition of the Blue Rider almanac Marc regretted, “people’s general lack of interest in
new spiritual treasures. New ideas are hard to understand only because they are
unfamiliar”. In Pan magazine for 1912 he wrote:
“ We are today seeking the things in nature hidden behind the veil of appearances… We
seek and paint this inner spiritual side of nature…. Because this is the side we see, just
as in earlier tomes people suddenly ‘saw’ violet shadows and the ether in which all things
were bathed. It is no more possible to explain their vision than ours. It lies in the times”
He could see clearly that he was living in a period of sharp historical transition in
definitions of art and its new potent sources of mental imagery. Kandinsky at that time
felt that Marc was more in tune with these ideas than he was himself.
“ The strong abstract sound of form does not necessarily demand the
destruction of the representational. In the painting by Marc (The Bull) we can see
that here too, there are no general rules. The object can thus fully retain both
inner and outer sound, and its individual parts maybe transformed into
independently sounding abstract forms and thereby create a general abstract
overall sound”.
Marc certainly went further than Kandinsky in trying to experiment with one of the
fundamental problems of painting, which is to match the main colours of the subject with
its background. Marc was not convinced of the infallibility of the colour wheel. He
actually used a prism to check the purity of effect of his painted colours in their
juxtaposition. He claimed he could achieve this better with a prism than with the naked
eye. Referring to a painting of his dog he wrote to his friend August Macke that to begin
with, the dog seen through the prism was “encircled by the most fantastic rings of
colour’. He adjusted the dog’s colour to a more pure yellow until these rings
disappeared. This was a procedure by which Marc controlled his colour composition,
which was then justified or organised correctly.
Unfortunately Marc’s mind was blown to pieces at Verdun at the peak of his intellectual
development.
Although many painters are still shackled by the caveman's urge for reproduction, the
mental freedom of constellating the random has now become infinite. Through the
painter's inner vision, new possibilities and aesthetic expressions may be spiritually
conceived, and in this freedom are of a unique, and some would say, a superior value. At
heart, we all desire to organise and express our mental life in a cosmic organisation.
Unfortunately, the eyes of the average observer have not been freed from the bonds of
imitation and the perspective of a faked third dimension to take in a mental reality. In this
respect, it has been said that the non- objective artist is ‘a practical educator, the bearer
of joy and a creator who deals with eternity’.
If to some the harmony of order and beauty of these non-objective creative paintings is
not immediately obvious or appealing, it gradually becomes evident to anyone
permanently exposed to their increasingly realized influence.
Fig 18 Umberto Boccioni, Simultaneous Visions (1911)
Fig 19 Carlo Carra, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1911
Fig 20 Lyonel Feininger Mouth of the Riga III (1929/30)
Fig 21 Paul Klee Image of letters(1925)
Fig 22 Franz Marc The Little Yellow Horses(1912)
