Kandinsky was to use the absence of external objectivity as the logical starting point to
research the rules governing the correct placement of visual elements on the canvas in
order to evoke predictable emotional responses in the viewer. To follow Kandinsky, a
painter had to cease looking for a meaning in his subject. To open a two-way channel of
communication between painter and viewer, certain arrangements and positions of
points, lines, angles, and particular colours had to carry definite universal meanings.
The scientific objective of Kandinsky’s mission was to unravel this code to reveal a
theory of painting utilising only its basic graphic elements without which a work of art
cannot come into existence.
The basic elements were those that all previous theories of painting had to deal with,
namely:
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Point
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Line
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Plane
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Colour
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Tone
He developed the idea of point as the ‘proto-element’ of painting. He believed that the
systematic study of the role of point in nature, music and other art, and the combination
of point and line, should reveal a unique visual language for communicating inner
feelings. Painting and music, for example, would share a common language of the
emotions. Starting with point, his innovation was to codify the contributions that each of
the basic graphic elements has in isolation and then to examine their reciprocal effects
in combination without attempting to reproduce reality. His method was to create a
dictionary of graphic elements independently of the composition and then examine their
additive effect in the plane of the canvas as the ‘grammar’ of an abstract composition.
The mental impact of seeing involves the transmission of light waves between painter
and observer, and he invented a new descriptive language based on the nouns and
verbs used to describe the impact of sound waves and things in motion. Thus, a point
has ‘a sound’, and a line exhibits ‘a tension for movement’. Regarding the effects of his
pictures on viewers he said;
“The spectator is also too accustomed to look for the ‘meaning’, in other words an exterior
relationship between the parts of the picture. Our era, materialistic in life and therefore in art,
has produced a spectator who does not now how to simply put himself in front of a painting, and
looks for everything possible in the painting but does not allow the picture to work an effect on
him’
What counts he said, is “the effective contact with the soul”. However, it is significant
that he cross- referenced this analysis with views of real objects, both man-made and
natural. Some of his examples have been reproduced in the following figures (Fig 7 A-F).
Fig 7 Classification of real objects
A. Example of the visual impact of ‘discrete points): section through a root nodule made
by nitrate- forming bacteria in a pea root (enlarged 1000 times)
C. Example of the visual impact of lines in combination; holograph of a radio tower seen
from below (photo of Moholy-Nagy)
E. Example of the visual impact of complexes of lines in movement; swimming
movements of algae created by flagellation
F. Visual impact of lines and points in combination; line drawing of a histological section
of ‘loose’ ligament tissue of the rat
Nature was an important source of elements. He backed his arguments with examples
of bone structure, branching of trees, the progressive circular pattern of development in
plant shoots, and the galactic clusters of stars.
What are we to make of this in relation to his avowed approach of non-subjectivity?
First, he was merely starting from nature to range freely beyond in the invention of forms
suggested by its diversity. Second, they were elements chosen as parts of an imagined
whole. Third, his basic elements would not normally be selected for graphic
communication except by scientists or engineers wishing to make a narrow professional
point. In this sense, there is a randomness in Kandinsky’s choice as to what part of the
whole carried his mental message, which in any case does not require knowledge of the
whole. The element is primarily a highly personal metaphor to help communicate the
artist’s mental universe. In the history of art, the only parts of nature that had been
selected in this way to focus on pieces of a whole were headless human torsos with
partly severed limbs. Here the sculptor was trying to get a response to the curves
produced by muscles and fatty connective tissue without the distractions of the essential
linearity of the standing human body, and its powerful interactivity through facial
expression.
