1
Rose-Carol Washton Long
DURING the last century, scholars celebrated the two editors of Der Blaue Reiter for their publication of a yearbook, which brought together an extraordinary mixture of art works from a variety of periods and countries.1 That the two artists were messianic utopians as well as consummate publicists has usually not been questioned.2 Yet, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially with the 1984 English translation of Peter Bürger’s book Theory of the Avant-Garde reiterating many of the comments of the Marxist historian Georg Lukács from the 1930s, a number of art historian such as Richard Sheppard and Margaret Tupitsyn have considered the works of Der Blaue Reiter too hermetic and not sufficiently anti-institutional to be politically relevant or effective.3 In other words, the concept of ‘avant-garde’ as a political vanguard would no longer be awarded to Der Blaue Reiter. But the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Der Blaue Reiter almanac demands a re-evaluation of these critiques, especially since art historians have become so much more aware of the complexities of causation. Instead of insisting upon party affiliation as the determining factor in the establishment of a political viewpoint, they are more open to examining the range of an artist’s opposition to traditional beliefs.4 In addition, historians studying the period before the 1917 Russian Revolution have often discussed the political motivations of contemporaneous writers, artists and philosophers. Christopher Read, for example, has maintained that the intensity of repression under the Czars led many of the intelligentsia to use ‘artistic creativity’ in the search for social justice, even though they might be divided as to the actual method.5 Accordingly, more art historians are determined to uncover the multiple forces – the co-mingling of social, cultural, and political issues – that contribute to a nuanced narrative of change.6
Although Kandinsky and Marc shared the responsibilities of producing the almanac, Kandinsky’s contribution has been given greater weight in most studies of Der Blaue Reiter. The multiplicity of his theoretical writings explaining their experimental innovations, in addition to the Bavarian’s shortened life, have led to an emphasis on the Russian-born artist in deciphering the political and social position of Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky himself was partly responsible for the negative assessment of his political interests and those of Der Blaue Reiter. In his 1911 manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had assigned politicians to a very low level in his mapping of those who enlarged understanding of the world. Likening his schematic representation of affective types to a triangle, he had placed politicians – whom he specified as ‘elected representatives and their supporters’ – on the lowest rung. But he did not include a range of political representatives, never citing racists or even monarchists, but primarily leftists and socialists. He even praised socialists for their economic policies that attempted to kill off, what he termed, ‘the capitalist hydra’ by severing ‘the head of evil’. Nonetheless he critiqued them for being unthinking followers of doctrines and platitudes, and especially for their hatred of anarchism about which, he claimed, they knew little except for ‘the terrifying name’.7 Kandinsky’s acerbic words have led many to maintain he had no political concerns;8 few have sensed his own interest in anarchism as a political, social and cultural concept.
Scholars have acknowledged that Kandinsky used the term anarchistic to describe his new works as well as the paintings and music of his contemporaries, but they have primarily viewed his use of the term as an aesthetic choice, as an emphasis of his belief in freedom from stylistic rules unconnected to audience participation.9 They have been more likely to see Symbolism and Theosophy rather than their co-mingling with anarchism as motivation for his theoretical views or as a major basis for his structural and thematic works.10 Contextual investigations into the practices of Cubism and/or the Russian avant-garde,11 are a further reminder that it is time now for a more thorough examination of the role anarchistic thought, in addition to Theosophical and Symbolist philosophies, played in Kandinsky’s vision of Der Blaue Reiter as a journal designed to impel the spectator into making societal change.12
From the turn of the century to World War I, concerned citizens in Germany and even more so in Russia were plagued by the problem of how to achieve greater economic and social justice for all. Growing industrialization and commercialism, along with the seemingly unchanging political system of autocratic monarchies, led many of the educated elite to explore not only the heretical metaphysical concepts of Theosophy but also alternative political theories such as Marxism and anarchism as they sought to transform the restrictive social, religious and political institutions in their respective countries. Although anarchists, like Theosophists, consisted of many shifting factions and contradictory philosophies, adherents of both groups believed in an international brotherhood which would work to combat the unequal, stultified systems in their native lands. Both admired creativity and gave artists a special place in the struggle for a just world. But anarchists, infused by the economic writings of Marx, argued with socialists as to which was the most effective political force in battling capitalism.13 Whether oriented towards individual or communal action, anarchists in Russia and Germany praised small rural villages for their communitarianism and emphasized their faith in natural law (stemming from the medieval period) over parliamentary law.
Russian philosophers such as Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov (whose views Kandinsky had hoped to include in the almanac)14 and poets associated with Russian Symbolism, such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Georgi Chulkov, who called themselves mystical anarchists,15 interacted in their investigations of Marxism, socialism, anarchism, Symbolism, and mysticism as they as they struggled to find affective means to oppose the autocracy of czardom and its relation to the official Russian Orthodox church.16 In Germany, scholars such as Andrew Carlson have explained that anarchists ‘exerted power all out of proportion to their numbers’.17 Herwarth Walden, whose Sturm gallery gave the Blaue Reiter artists their first exhibition in Berlin, encouraged anarchists such as the poet Paul Scheerbart and the architect Bruno Taut to write for his journal Der Sturm. Taut, who had incorporated the Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin’s concept of mutual-aid into his own philosophical justifications, praised Kandinsky’s inclusion of the principal of freedom – his openness to multiple styles – as a model for architects in a 1914 essay published in Walden’s Sturm.18 Gustav Landauer, the German translator of Kropotkin’s tracts, had known Walden and his first wife Else Lasker-Schuler since the early years of the century, and moved among others in Kandinsky’s social circle.19 Calling himself both a socialist and an anarchist, Landauer, who in 1919 became one of the leading members of the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Räterrepublik, attacked private ownership and praised the middle ages and the medieval guild as a model of communitarian organization. In June 1914, Kandinsky was invited to meet with Landauer and other anarcho-pacifists to discuss problems preventing world peace.20 Although Kandinsky did not attend the conference, the invitation points to his interest in the political events of the day.
A few anarchists were terrorists and their success with assassination led, as is well known, to the censorship of newspapers and pamphlets and to rigorous checking of individuals associated in any way with anarchism by the police and other security personnel.21 Nonetheless, Kandinsky mounted a defense of anarchism in the almanac. In the essay ‘On the Question of Form’, he challenged the notion that anarchism was aimless and unstructured, and insisted that the term indicated ‘a certain systematic quality and order’.22 Yet the artworks included in the almanac, such as Kandinsky’s large 1911 oil painting which he called Composition V (figure 1.1), as well as those of his co-editor Marc and the other artists involved with the group, seem particularly unstructured. The visual results seem to be markedly different from that of well-known anarchist painters such as the French artist Paul Signac, whose 1895 large-scale oil painting In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come (figure 1.2) included not only the French symbol of anarchism – the rooster – in the lower right, but a peaceful and calm scene of the pleasures that cooperation and mutual-aid could bring to the masses.23 In contrast to Signac’s work, Composition V seems jarring and turbulent in its swirls of amorphous colour. Yet Kandinsky not only referred several times to Signac’s 1899 book, De Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme, which was translated into German in 1910, but also pointed to the role of Neo-Impressionist colour as the beginning of his process of abstracting images from the external descriptive world.24 In addition to admiring Signac’s use of colour, Kandinsky shared other affinities with this famous French painter. Like Signac, Kandinsky drew support from the communitarian understanding of anarchism – from Kropotkin, then living in exile in London – and more directly from Landauer,25 active in intellectual circles in Munich around Der Blaue Reiter, as well as from Bulgakov, who had been Kandinsky’s professor at the University of Moscow, and Ivanov, whose approach to drama Kandinsky admired.
1.1 Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911.
All these seekers for change, from Kropotkin to Ivanov, rejected written law – codified law – in favour of indigenous, communally inspired oral regulations, or what today we might call vernacular codes. Criticizing the middle class, particularly the socialists for using these written systems so rigidly that they made the state and capitalism inseparable, Kropotkin for example called for ‘mutual-aid’ or freely agreed upon cooperation, which he described as emerging from the ‘natural law’ or the basically ethical morality of early peasant communities.26 Both celebrated these indigenous codes as the truth that lay hidden behind the artificial structures imposed on humanity by established, authoritarian systems, and both cited the middle ages as an example of a period when some artisans and farmers worked freely and cooperatively. In Russia, Berdiaev and Bulgakov castigated Marxist materialism while praising ‘ethical Marxism’ and a new religiosity derived from the communal system of the Russian peasant in their search for a solution to Russian authoritarianism, while poets such as Ivanov envisioned the theatre as means for propagating his mystical anarchist view of reuniting the poet and the masses. The Russians in particular referred to the Russian Symbolist philosopher Soloviev’s concept of sobernost (community) as well as his interpretation of ‘natural law’, and all urged writers and artists to use their particular skills to find strategies that could motivate change.27 Kropotkin’s citation, for example, that artists’ ‘impressive pictures’ should portray the ‘heroic struggles of the people against their oppressors’, was particularly significant to those committed to artistic practice.28 Ivanov stressed the need to find new, unconventional methods that would increase the communion between the artists and the ‘crowd’.29
1.2 Paul Signac, In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come, 1895.
In his memoirs, published shortly before the beginning of World War I, Kandinsky had discussed the importance of stirring up ‘a critical attitude towards accustomed phenomena’.30 He even praised ‘activism’ as central to freedom by noting the significance student protest had for him when he was at the university in Moscow in the 1880s. Repression, particularly that of student groups, had led to both individual and collective activism that contributed to undermining the rigid conditions of his time. He guardedly admitted his anti-institutional attitudes in these memoirs by referring to his student days, where he had discovered his preference for the internal law or the natural law of the Russian peasant in contrast to the inflexibility and rigidity of centralized, government rules or what he called Roman law.31 Without flexible stimuli, Kandinsky believed change would be difficult, and like many anarchists he relied on the concept of natural law to provide him with a defence for moving into areas that were uncharted, even disturbing to many.
To find startling stimuli that would awaken the public, Kandinsky had to move beyond the conventional easel painting of academically rendered realistic forms to which the public was accustomed. His belief in natural law assisted his transformation of a nineteenth-century concept of Gesamtkunstwerk into a twentieth-century ‘total work of art’. Instead of relating parallel stimuli – local colours and forms to produce ordinary, natural shapes – Kandinsky looked to multiple contrasting stimuli of colours and abstracted forms, synthesized from drama, poetry and music to communicate the chaos and disharmony of his time. If he could prove that confusion led eventually to knowledge, he could deal with the problematics of communicating to the spectator. Accordingly, he used numerous means –writing manifestos, organizing exhibitions, formulating a yearbook for the Blaue Reiter cohorts to both promote and to explain the significance of their approach to a frequently uncomprehending public.
In his longest and most theoretical essay in the almanac as well as in the slightly earlier manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky used the concept of ‘natural law’ in relation to his belief that an underlying law or principle existed for all the arts, calling this principle Innere Notwendigkeit (inner or internal necessity). He explained in the yearbook essay that three elements – (1) the personal, (2) the period, that is time and space including the national, and (3) the universal – made up Innere Notwendigkeit and he stressed that all three had to be exchangeable in order to be forceful.32 The key word was ‘exchangeable’ – that is, all three were in play in the creation of new forms, which had to be both the ‘child of its time’ and the ‘mother of the future’.33 Believing that the exchange, the intermingling of different styles (abstraction and realism), different art forms (drama, poetry and music) were strengthened due to their origins in natural law, he and Marc had the confidence not only to break with the dominant styles of the past but also to emphasize their freedom from all rules. Zealously asserting their intention of striking against ‘old, established power’, they assured that ‘everything would be [is] permitted’ in their battle to affect the future.34
Although the editors believed in the concept of the inter-relationship of the senses, unlike the earlier generation of Symbolists and Wagnerites, who attempted to parallel stimuli like sound with colour, they maintained that a more dynamic effect could be achieved by contrasting stimuli. Kandinsky argued that his own conflicted and disharmonious period demanded ‘clashing discords, loss of equilibrium … opposites and contradictions’.35 Since each of the arts had its own underlying natural law or basic principle, he urged the exchange as well as the incorporation of multiple, contrasting stimuli in one total art work, calling this combination a ‘truly monumental art’, a form he believed was on the edge of major expansion.36
The almanac was an expansion of this concept, as the editors placed reproductions of such marginalized artefacts as Russian lubki, Bavarian religious paintings on glass, and Gothic woodcuts next to Blaue Reiter works as well as comparing anonymous artworks from different periods of time and place with well-known international painters such as Henri Matisse. They were clearly aware of how shocking these comparisons might be to the popular eye, especially if they were used in essay after essay. But the choices were also intended to educate the onlooker accustomed to established traditions. The art historian Wilhelm Worringer, from whose 1912 book, Die altdeutsche Buchillustration, reproductions were borrowed for the yearbook, had stressed that alternative art forms could help to alter the ‘cultural arrogance’ of ‘educated Europeans’.37 At the conclusion of ‘On the Question of Form’, the editors placed a European copy of a Japanese abstract, geometric drawing opposite a thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture from Magdeburg Cathedral (figure 1.3) to signal through the pictorial that both tropes – abstract and real – were the answer to the central question about form that had been raised by the title. The choice to reproduce a thirteenth-century sculpture, depicting the parable of the Foolish Virgin tormented by her lack of preparation for the second coming, may also lie in its subliminal message of preparation for the new world to come on earth – the ultimate aim of Der Blaue Reiter.
1.3 European copy of a Japanese pen drawing opposite a photograph of a column capital from Magdeburg Cathedral, c. 1210 as they appeared in Der Blaue Reiter.
The two artists also selected essayists who could further convey the reasons for their disengagement from the academic requirements of a narrative structure or conventional notions of beauty and harmony to communicate their utopian message. Because they believed music was the most removed from convention, musical scores by several contemporary composers – Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern – along with explanatory essays by Schönberg, the composer Thomas von Hartmann, and the theorist Nikolai Kulbin were included in the yearbook. All the essayists on music were particularly close to Kandinsky and not only supported learning from the various arts but also were engaged in this practice. Schönberg painted as well as composed music. Not only was his musical score for one of Kandinsky’s favourite dramatists and poets – Maurice Maeterlinck – placed in the almanac, but reproductions of the composer’s paintings were included as well. In his essay ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schönberg specifically disputed the need for paralleling text and music.38 He insisted that a ‘delicate’ idea in poetry, for example, could become more affective if it was paired with a ‘fast and vigorous’ musical theme, a concept he followed in composing the music for Maeterlinck’s poem Herzgewaechse. The Russian music and art theorist Nikolai Kulbin, who read portions of On the Spiritual to a Russian congress of artists at the end of 1911, also painted. He was even more explicit about oppositions in his essay ‘Free Music’. Advocating for musical intervals he called ‘the discord’ in order to excite and arouse the observer, he encouraged musicians to study alternative sources, such as non-western musical compositions, citing the concept of natural law to justify the resulting ‘dissonance’.39 Affecting the observer was central to Kulbin and he clearly urged the artist to ‘provoke the creative imagination of the spectator’ so that both would ‘jointly create the picture’.40
1.4 Gabriele Münter, photo of Blaue Reiter members: Kandinsky sitting on over-turned bucket in centre, Thomas von Hartmann in bowler hat to his left, 1911–1912.
The other composer, Thomas von Hartmann, who wrote the music for Kandinsky’s stage composition, not only referred to anarchist ideas, but actually titled his essay ‘On anarchy in Music’. Von Hartmann is often seen in photographs of Der Blaue Reiter group next to Kandinsky (see figure 1.4), who described his warm feelings about the composer and his wife as similar to the closeness he felt with Marc and his wife.41 In his essay, Von Hartmann, who met Kandinsky in Munich where he was studying music, urged his readers to ‘welcome’ the anarchistic principles that led composers to use what he called ‘opposite sounds combinations’ to awaken the audience.42 Indeed, he deliberately used the German verb erschüttern – to shock – to describe the effect he wanted to produce.43 Like Kandinsky, Hartmann used the term Innere Notwendigkeit to justify his use of disharmonious sounds. He also did not advocate one singular style or source, arguing for the combination of both conscious and unconscious intuitive choices to produce the strongest direction for future creativity.
Similar to the invited composers, Kandinsky argued for contrasting or alternative stimuli from multiple sources to explain how he would startle his audience. Building on colour and form – the basic elements of the painter – and appropriating concepts from music, poetry, dance, and drama, he used charts in On the Spiritual to point out how colour opposites could create a sensation of dance-like motion by advancing and then receding from the spectator. He also discussed how adding different tones of another colour could enhance or reduce these affects and could even produce an illusion of opening the canvas into infinite space. To insist that primarily colour and form rather than images delineated by traditional linear perspective could convey the illusion of space was an unsettling idea. But, like his composer friends, he relied on the concept of Innere Notwendigkeit not just to reiterate the evocative potential of colour and form but more importantly to justify the pairing of colour and forms previously thought to be disjunctive, stating: ‘the incompatibility of certain forms and certain colors should be regarded not as something “disharmonious’, but conversely, as offering new possibilities’.44
To emphasize the potential destabilizing power of repetition – simple from advertising or complex from numerous media,45 he cited experiments from the poetry of Maeterlinck. Describing how the dramatist used the same word over and over again to loosen its external signification so that its sound could create a mood, Kandinsky also referred to a production of a Maeterlinck play in St. Petersburg where Ivanov used a plain piece of canvas to suggest a tower rather than imitate explicit natural form. Kandinsky, who had been in St. Petersburg at about the time of that production, praised this approach for being able ‘to arouse the imagination of the audience’.46 Although he explained the importance of abstracting from the natural, corporal image, he also discussed the importance of retaining some portion of it to add to the resonance of his works, writing that the ‘choice of object’ in addition to the choice of color and form had to grow out of the ‘Prinzip der inneren Notwendigkeit’.47 Fearing accusations of ornamentalism, Kandinsky emphasized that the repetition of increasingly hidden imagery could also be a weapon for involving the spectator. Similar to Kulbin and Hartmann, Kandinsky also mentioned that some of these stimuli might be subliminal or ‘subconscious’ but that they could ‘exert just as lively and creative an effect’.48
To emphasize that he was not prescribing absolute laws, Kandinsky often warned that his equations of stimuli were ‘extremely provisional and clumsy’.49 Rigid rules would not have been appropriate for an artist committed to freedom from established, conventional ideas. His insistence in ‘On the Question of Form’ that the artist should be allowed to use either real or abstract forms and his use of italics to reinforce the answer to his title by stating ‘the question of form does not in principle exist’ stems from his absorption of the anarchist belief in freedom from absolutism.50 The potential of ‘different elements’ in ‘different forms’ or the ‘different arts’ synthesized into one ‘monumental art’ was the challenge for him before World War I.51
In Composition V (figure 1.1), painted during the months that he was completing On the Spiritual and Der Blaue Reiter almanac, Kandinsky combined many of the multiple dissonant stimuli about which he had been writing to produce a monumental oil that could be one more example of a ‘total work of art’. The very title is of course meant to suggest the abstract, non-material quality of music. On first impression, a dominant black shape startles as it contrasts with multiple colours from the other parts of the canvas. Beginning as a narrow line at the top right of the canvas, it runs towards the upper left, and then thickens considerably as it curves towards the centre.
1.5 Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints’ Day II, 1911.
But on second impression, images – trumpets, walled cities with bent towers – appear to emerge from within the lines and colours. Since Kandinsky had explained that the theme of the Last Judgement was the starting point for this oil as well as for a number of other works,52 it should not be surprising that these types of images with their evocation of conflict and struggle would appear in other 1911 works such as a smaller oil All Saints’ Day (figure 1.5) and a watercolour Sound of Trumpets (figure 1.6), both based on Russian folk imagery (see figure 1.7). But when compared to those smaller works, only the arrangement of a walled city with bent towers atop a mountain peak in the top centre of the large oil is clearly visible. Other motifs visible in the watercolour and the smaller oil – the angels with trumpets in either corner, St. John viewing his apocalyptic vision in the lower right, the person about to retrieve his head at the sound of the trumpet, and the rowboat struggling in the tumultuous waters – are not readily identifiable, as Kandinsky simplified their corporality into a skeletal line and/or veiled these motifs with amorphous colours.53
In the case of the trumpets, not only are the trumpets in the upper corners hard to perceive due to their illusionary transparency (the background colours are visible within their black outline), but Kandinsky multiplied their number to a total of five. The third trumpet outlined in black comes forth from the lower left, and becomes transparent before it merges with the large black, curved form. This dark, ominous, threatening shape seems to increase in size as it moves towards the spectator and may be an attempt to represent the terrible sound of the trumpet on Judgement Day. Others had tried to represent sound visually through colour and line – for example in a nineteenth-century lubok the stream of sound is represented by a widening rectangular shape positioned diagonally across the print – but no other artist (to my mind) has been so successful in conveying the blasting sound of Judgement.54 But Kandinsky did not want to simulate past renditions of Judgement Day, but rather to evoke the disturbing mood and anxiety of the chaos of the present. By using the discord of contrasting colours and the disjunction of barely visible motifs, he aimed to startle and then involve the viewer.
1.6 Wassily Kandinsky, Sound of Trumpets (Study for Large Resurrection), 1911.
1.7 Vasily Koren, Scene from Revelation VIII: 10–13, 1696.
Since this canvas is over six feet in height, the centre of the canvas where the trumpet and the dark curving shapes appear to merge, meets the eye of the spectator. Using very thin, curving black lines and pale colours at the bottom corners of the canvas, Kandinsky produced a very destabilizing, immaterial quality. By employing ‘the overriding of one color by another, or of many colors by a single color …. /the very thinness or thickness of a line, the positioning of the form upon the surface’, he created an illusion of expanded space that appears to ‘turn the painting into a being hovering in mid-air’.55 That is, the traditional canvas could become an entity such as a ‘stage’ upon which the struggle for a contemporary revelation could be waged.
Similarly, in the essay ‘On Stage Composition’ placed before the text of his multi-dimensional theatre piece, The Yellow Sound, Kandinsky specifically argued, as had Ivanov, for unconventional strategies, calling for the use of antithesis rather than a Wagnerian paralleling of sound and colour.56 In the directions for the theatrical work, Kandinsky listed a series of oppositions: giants versus small people, foggy colours but loud music, stationary figures and ones running in different directions, light versus dark shapes. In ‘Scene 3’, for example, he asked for the coloured lights to become the most intense when the music was to subside. At the end, after a yellowish-white light caused a yellow giant to grow to the top of the stage while extending his arms to form a cross, the stage was to become immediately and dramatically dark while the music continued.57 Explaining in all his major essays of this period, that he wanted his works to ‘klingen’ to sound to ‘vibrate’, this multimedia presentation – The Yellow Sound – was meant through its multiple strategies to shock the spectator into involvement. Many of the reproductions, such as ‘Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho’ (figure 1.8), drawn from Worringer’s Die altdeutsche Buchillustration and relating to biblical battles, are one more example of the struggle in achieving goals. After all, it was Worringer who defended Der Blaue Reiter in 1911 when nationalist critics attacked their work as alien and ‘childish’ by emphasizing that a new art form should emerge from the combination of the abstract and empathetic currents of the medieval Gothic period.58 Worringer’s concept, clearly expressed in his well-known earlier books Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,59 was one more echo of the anarchist belief that the medieval epoch had a special lesson for the present time, and was most likely one of the reasons the editors thought of having this art historian contribute to a possible second edition of the almanac.
1.8 Stephan Arndes, ‘Jews with the Ark of the Covenant at the Walls of Jericho’, Lubeck Bible, 1494, appeared in Der Blaue Reiter.
Believing their troubled times should produce provocative form, Kandinsky emphasized that all artists, not just painters, should consider ‘clashing discords’ and ‘oppositions and contradictions’ as he had in Composition V and in The Yellow Sound. The dissonance would take the spectator by surprise, and help to break the reliance on the harmony put forth by the idealized and conventional naturalism of the Italian Renaissance and the academic painters supported by the German and Russian monarchies. Although Signac wanted to challenge conventional ways of thinking by depicting a golden age brought about by the natural law of mutual assistance, his peaceful, calm work could only be the beginning as Kandinsky stated. It could not suggest continuous protest nor shock the spectator. Across Europe, overlapping circles of intellectuals including Theosophists, Symbolists and anarchists, as well as followers of Bergson and Nietzsche, were all committed to exploring new processes of thought to bring about change in the world order, but the contribution of Russian and German communal anarchists, particularly their commitment to freedom from rules, their hatred of capitalism and materialism, and their embrace of the concept of mutual-aid from what they believed were the middle ages (or what Worringer considered the Gothic period) should not be neglected as we try to re-examine the relevance of Der Blaue Reiter. They gave theoretical support to the Blaue Reiter artists’ search for alternative visual approaches, such as the embrace of the vernacular and of the discordant and dissonant to awaken the unaware, the dormant masses.
The collective critiques of anarchism repeated throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have obscured the tremendous appeal of communitarian anarchists to ‘progressive utopians’ before World War I. In the 1920s, right-wing German nationalists charged the faculty and students of the Bauhaus with being full of ‘anarchy and disorder’, attacks which continued in the 1930s when National Socialists derogatorily described modern art as degenerate as well as politically and culturally anarchistic.60 Stalinist communists and Frankfurt school theoreticians, as well as French Post Structuralists, have insisted that those anarchists groups that sought insight into rural peasant life rather than that of the urban labourer were romantic and nostalgic. Lukács, for example, writing in the 1930s, long after the Soviet communists had moved towards enforcing a centralized and bureaucratic state, linked anarchism with bohemian confusion and an inability to comprehend the economic difficulties of the proletariat. Scholars have not only written about the abandonment of anarchist principles by the Soviets but chronicled the massacre of anarchists by Soviet communists, as the Soviet state began to eliminate its political opponents.61
Altering our perception of the dominant system through visual and aural dissonance is central to the critical discourse about performance art and multi-media presentations today. Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, performed in New York’s Park Avenue Amory from 7 December 2016 to 8 January 2017 with its searing opposition of 13 large scale screens where film, text and words shock the spectator out of their complacency is but one reminder of the general impact of Kandinsky’s concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk made up of contrasting forces. Not only does Rosenfeldt include reference to the preface of the almanac, but a ‘call to activism through art’ is implicit in his programme.62 Of course, Der Blaue Reiter was not the only source for Rosenfeldt and others who utilize multi-media presentation, but exploration of how and why Kandinsky addressed spectatorship under the guise of early twentieth-century anarchism may produce further solutions for our problematic twenty-first century. Although Kandinsky was not a member of a Theosophical or anarchist group, he was a synthesizer of ideas from opponents of the Russian and German mainstream establishment. His reference to these religious and political philosophers, literary and artistic figures indicates a clear preference for public personas who found alternative strategies for motivating societal change. Moreover, Kandinsky’s later participation, along with other artists not always considered socially engaged, such as Ivanov,63 in the newly formed Soviet government, suggests that their readiness to accept Soviet communism (albeit for a brief time) as the anticipated solution to the problems of injustice and inequality, is not unrelated to their earlier calls for social upheaval. Their practice of activating the viewer may not always be interpreted as political, but perhaps we should enlarge our understanding of what we mean by the political. Lifting the public from their passivity may be even more central in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth.
Notes
1The documentary edition, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by Klaus Lankheit and first published in English in 1974, has been frequently reissued, although it is not identical in size to the original and does not consistently follow the original layout. Lankheit’s account of the group is nonetheless still a good general introduction to its history. The Munich Lenbachhaus has been the source of numerous scholarly volumes. See, for example, A. Zweite (ed.), The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus Munich (Munich: Prestel, 1989).
2See Annegret Hoberg, ‘The Blue Rider – History and Ideas’, in. H. Friedel and A. Hoberg (eds), The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich (Munich: Prestel, 2013), esp. pp. 56–66; and Hoberg, ‘Painting Alone Was Not Enough For Us, Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc: The “Blaue Reiter” Almanac Revisited’, in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky (Munich: Prestel, 2008, 2016), pp. 85–95.
3Although Jochen Schulte-Sasse, who wrote the introduction to Bürger’s well-known book, emphasized that Bürger was qualifying Lukács, Bürger continued the Hungarian’s over-simplified critique of Expressionism and abstraction as aestheticzing; see ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’, in P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxxiii–iv. For reflections of some of these concepts in treatments of Kandinsky, see Richard Sheppard, who characterized Kandinsky’s work as representing conservative longings for the past, ‘Kandinsky’s Oeuvre 1900–1914: The Avant-Garde as Rear-Guard’, Word & Image, 6:1 (1990), p. 42. The title of Margarita Tupitsyn’s Gegen Kandinsky/Against Kandinsky (Munich: Villa Stuck / Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006) reflects her of view of Kandinsky’s abstraction as dream-like and removed from the material, concrete world especially when compared to Soviet artists such as Rodchenko, see pp. 33–4/142. Valery Turchin, Kandinsky in Russia (Moscow: Society of Admirers of the Art of Wassily Kandinsky, 2005), also does not believe that Kandinsky was ‘political’.
4My interpretation of the concept of ‘political’ has been inspired by Marsha Meskimmon’s chapter ‘Politics, the Neue Sahlichkeit and Women Artists’, in M. Meskimmon and S. West (eds), Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995), pp. 9–27. Although she was focusing on the degree to which women’s political views have been over-looked, I feel her concept of opposition to mainstream ideologies is relevant to men as well.
5See C. Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), esp. pp. 22–35; and also Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellecutal Background (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 15–27.
6For a thoughtful discussion of this approach, see A. Confino, ‘Prologue: The Historian’s Representations’, in Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 1–22.
7See Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ [1912], in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 139. However, the English words ‘republicans or democrats’ in that translation of the German ‘Volksvertretungsanhänger oder Republikaner’ would be better served by the translation ‘elected representatives and their followers or Republicans’; see W. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 7th ed. (Bern-Bümpliz: Benteli, 1963), p. 36.
8See, for example, Christine Hopfengart, ‘The Fateful Year of 1933’, in M. Baumgartner, A. Hoberg and C. Hopfengart (eds), Klee & Kandinsky (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee / Munich: Prestel, 2015), p. 224.
9Reinhard Zimmermann refers to Kandinsky’s association of anarchism with freedom but does not explore this connection, see R. Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Kandinsky, vol. 2 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002), p. 658. The cultural historian, Peter Jelevich, is one of the few who wrote about the possibility of anarchism’s impact on Kandinsky, particularly his theatre pieces; see P. Jelevich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 217–35. More recently Olga Burenina-Petrova mentions Kandinsky as an ‘anarchist sympathizer’, in ‘Anarchism and the Russian Artistic Avant-Garde’, in M. Tupitsyn (ed.), Russian Dada 1914–1924 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia / Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); see p. 229. See also N. Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), for her contention that anarchism had an impact on Kandinsky as well as other Russian artists and poets, pp. 75–84ff.
10Following the lead of German cultural historians such as Ulrich Linse and Janos Frecot, who examined the immersion of intellectuals in Germany at the turn of the century in anarchist theories, as well as art historians and historians such as Robert and Eugenia Herbert, and Donald Drew Egbert, I posited in a 1987 essay that Kandinsky’s awareness of Russian and German anarchist theories, along with other alternatives to established institutions such as Symbolism and Theosophy, were critical for Kandinsky’s development of abstraction; see Long, ‘Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future’, Art Journal, 46:1 (1987), pp. 38–45, reprinted in M. Blechman (ed.), Drunken Boat (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), p. 125ff. More recent contextual scholarship, such as Hoberg’s essays or the catalogue for the exhibition, E. Smithgall (ed.), Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border (Washington, DC, The Phillips Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2011), do not, however, include references to anarchism. The study by L. Florman, Concerning the Spiritual – and the Concrete – in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014) makes no mention of occultism, anarchism or Symbolism but instead problematically emphasizes Hegel. Surveys of Kandinsky’s lifework such as Kandinsky, A Retrospective (Paris, Centre Pompidou and Milwaukee Art Museum, 2014) and Philippe Sers, Kandinsky: The Elements of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016) do not engage with the issues of contextualization but provide many good quality illustrations.
11See, for example, M. Antliff and P. Leighten, ‘Introduction’, in Antliff and Leighten (eds), A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 9, as well as their other books and essays; also see A. Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); and Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy. These contextual results have often been challenged or ignored by other scholars focusing on Cubism; see, for example, R. Krauss, ‘The Circulation of the Sign’ [1992], in The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 25–85, or A. Umland, Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 16–27, 33–9, who makes no reference to the possible impact of anarchism upon Picasso. L. Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York, London: Thames and Hudson, 2012) mentions neither anarchism nor Theosophy, relegating the possibility of such concepts to a footnote, p. 35 note 3.
12For discussion of the impact of Symbolism and Theosophy upon Kandinsky’s works, see R-C. W. Long, Kandinsky: The Devolopment of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For background on the interplay between Symbolism, Theosophy and other occult groups see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a discussion of the relation between Thesophy, occultism and science, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich in Context’, in Der weisse Abgrund Unendlichkeit/The Infinite White Abyss (Dusseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2013), esp. pp. 236–8.
13Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchists and Marxists argued over which group represented socialism. At times, International Socialist conferences excluded anarchists, but boundaries between the two were often porous. Even religious parties argued about how Marx might be utilized and some proposed a type of Christian socialism; see Read, Religion, Revolution, pp. 17–27.
14Letter from Kandinsky to Marc, 1 September 1911, as partly cited in K. Lankheit, ‘A History of the Almanac’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (London, Thames and Hudson 1974), pp. 16–17.
15Read describes Bulgakov as close to ‘Christian anarchism’ and discusses his theories of religious universalism; see Read, Religion, Revolution, pp. 57–67. He also mentions that Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Chulkov and Ivanov all worked together in 1904–1905 on the journal Voprosy Zhizhi.
16See Long, Kandinsky, pp. 36–9, for a discussion of the fascination that Rudolf Steiner, the head of the German Theosophical Society until 1913, had upon these Russians, particularly Ivanov, who felt Theosophy would help to revive the age-old Russian messianism of being a saviour to the world. Also see Rosenthal, The Occult and O. A. Maslenikov, The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
17A. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, vol. 1 The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), p. 7.
18B. Taut, ‘Eine Notwendigkeit’, Der Sturm, 4:196–7 (1914) in English translation in Long (ed.), German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 123–6.
19For a discussion of some of these overlapping groups, see J. Frecot, ‘Literatur zwischen Betrieb und Einsamkeit’, in Berlin um 1900, exh. cat. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1984), pp. 319–47, 351–3; also see E. Klüsener, Else Lasker-Schüler (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980), pp. 44–68; and E. Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 3–16, and passim. Lunn explains that Landauer’s reference to his approach as anarcho-socialist was, most likely, an attempt to unite both groups, see pp. 104–5 and 190–4.
20For a discussion of this conference, see Lunn, Prophet of Community, p. 245. Letters from the Serbian writer Dimitri Mitrinovič to Kandinsky discuss the forthcoming peace conference; see Mitrinovič to Kandinsky, 25 June 1914, 30 June 1914, and undated in Gabriele Münter–Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. See also a letter to Kandinsky dated June (?) 1914, in which Mitronovič mentioned that Landauer had introduced him to the writings of Kropotkin. See in addition, S. Behr, ‘Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic: Pan-Christian Universalism and the Yearbook “Towards the Mankind of the Future through Aryan Europe”’, in The Oxford Art Journal, 15:1 (1992), pp. 81–8.
21Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, p. 7.
22Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, in Complete Writings on Art, p. 242.
23For analysis of the relation of Signac’s painting to anarchist concepts see M. Feretti-Bocquillon, et al. (eds), Signac 1863–1935 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 195–200; and also R. Roslak, Neo-impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France (Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 126–32, 141–62, 186–92.
24Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 149; Kandinsky cites the German edition of Signac’s work published by Axel Juncker, Charlottenburg, 1910.
25Landauer translated, for example, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid into German in 1904. For a discussion of the impact of Kropotkin, as well as Proudhon, and Tolstoy upon Landauer, see Lunn, Prophet of Community, p. 213ff.
26See the collection of Kropotkin’s essays, especially ‘Anarchist Communism’, in R. N. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York, London: Benjamin Blom, 1968); also see P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 26–33.
27Read discusses the centrality of Soloviev’s philosophy to the Russian intelligentsia in his Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 38–9. Noemi Smolik believes that Soloviev and Bulgakov were critical for Kandinsky’s ideas but due to her focus on the importance of Russian religious philosophy and art, she neglects discussion of German and Russian anarchism, and Theosophy’s German and Russian groups, in addition to the role of Russian lubki and Bavarian glass paintings; see N. Smolik, ‘Russian Beginnings, Modernism’s Prophet or its Adversary?’, in Friedel and Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky, pp. 30–53.
28See Kropotkin, ‘An Appeal to the Young’ [1880], in Baldwin (ed.), Kroptokin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 278.
29Rosenthal, ‘Theater as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists’, Russian History, 4:2 (1977), pp. 122–41. See also Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy, for her discussion of Chulkov’s and Ivanov’s interpretations of anarchist beliefs, esp. 54–8.
30Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 361–2. Turchin’s emphasis that the ‘Reminiscences’ were filtered through Kandinsky’s attempt to publicize himself further reminds us of the importance of his choosing to mention activism in 1913.
31Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 362.
32Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, pp. 240–2.
33Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 131.
34Quotations from Franz Marc, ‘The “Savages” of Germany’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 61, and Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, p. 241.
35Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 193.
36The clearest statement for this possibility is in ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 155. Kandinsky used italics to emphasize this concept in the German edition: ‘die wirkliche monumental Kunst; see Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 56.
37W. Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, in English translation, in Long (ed.), German Expressionism, pp. 10–13.
38A. Schönberg, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 90–102.
39N. Kulbin, ‘Free Music’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 141–6. Kulbin’s essay is an abridged version of one that appeared in 1910 in the St. Petersburg publication Studiia Impressionistov; an English excerpt appears in J. E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 11–17.
40Kulbin, ‘Svobodnaia muzyka’ (Free music), Studiia Impressionistov (1910), p. 26. Kandinsky letters to Kulbin from the end of 1911 and the beginning of 1912 indicate that the Russian theorist sent Kandinsky a lubok of the Last Judgement; see E. F. Kovtun’s editing of Kandinsky’s letters to Kulbin in Monuments of Culture, New Discoveries (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1981).
41Kandinsky unpublished letter to Gabriele Münter, 10 August 1911, in Gabriele Münter–Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachaus, Munich. Jelena Hahl-Koch noted that Kandinsky used the more private ‘Du’ rather than the more formal ‘Sie’ when communicating with von Hartmann; see J. Hahl-Koch (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 138–9, and 157–9. (In the 1981/83 German edition, Hartmut Zelinsky refers to the impact of the ego anarchist Max Stirner but does not discuss communal anarchists.)
42In two interviews (18 June 1965 and 8 September 1965) with von Hartmann’s wife Olga in New York, she recalled how both men would experiment with writing to friends in Russia and receiving answers although the letters were not mailed. She also described their shared interest in extra sensory phenomena and in Theosophical literature.
43For the German edition used, see T. von Hartmann, ‘Über Anarchie in der Musik’, Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1965), p. 90; for the English version, Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 114.
44Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 163. He indicated that a geometric form such as a triangle could communicate a mood of, say, stability or peacefulness but its placement in relation to its position of the canvas could change that perception.
45Ibid., p. 192.
46Ibid., p. 146. For a discussion of this St. Petersburg group, see, Rosenthal, ‘Theater as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists’, pp. 122–41.
47Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 168.
48Ibid., pp. 168–9.
49Ibid., p. 189.
50See Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, p. 248.
51Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 192.
52Kandinsky, manuscript prepared for lecture at the Kreis der Kunst exhibition, Cologne, 30 January 1914, published in J. Eichner, Kandinsky und Munter (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1957), pp. 109–16, and discussed in Long, Kandinsky, p. 108ff.
53Even in the large oil study for Composition V in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg most of the motifs are not easily identified. For a specific discussion of these motifs in a number of Kandinsky’s other works produced between 1910 and 1912, see Long, Kandinsky, pp. 75–107.
54For a reproduction of this lubok, see Long, ‘Constructing the Total Work of Art: Painting and the Public’, in J. Lloyd (ed.), Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910–1925 (New York: Neue Galerie, 2013), p. 43.
55Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, pp. 194–5.
56Kandinsky, ‘On Stage Composition’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 260–2.
57Kandinsky, ‘The Yellow Sound’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 278, 283. For further discussion of Kandinsky’s connection to the Russian poets and playwrights who called themselves ‘mystical anarchists’, see Long, ‘Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction’, pp. 39–40; and for the impact of Maeterlinck and others on the concept of stage compositions, see Long, Kandinsky, pp. 58–64.
58See Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, pp. 10–13; also see K. A. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith (ed.), The Expressionist Turn in Art History: A Critical Anthology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 1–7.
59W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. M. Bullock (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1967) and Form in Gothic [1910], trans. M. Bullock (New York: Schocken Books, 1964).
60‘Die Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar’, Beilage zur Thüringer Tageszeitung, 3 January 1920; for the linkage of ‘political anarchy’ with ‘cultural anarchy’ see also Fritz Kaiser, Führer durch die Austellung Entartete Kunst [1937], in English translation in Long, German Expressionism, pp. 308–11.
61For Lukács’ dismissal of anarchism, see ‘“Grösse und Verfall” des Expressionismus’, Internationale Literatur 1 (1934) in English translation in Long, German Exressionism, pp. 313–17. For a discussion of Kropotkin’s critique of Lenin and others before he died in 1921 in Russia, see Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, pp. 225–8. Olga Burenina-Petrova believes the crack-down on Moscow anarchists began in 1918; see ‘Anarchism and the Russian Artistic Avant-Garde’, pp. 230–42.
62See brochure for Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto (New York: Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory, 2016/17).
63Kandinsky left the Soviet Union for Germany in 1921 and Ivanov left in 1924. The Russian Symbolist poet Andre Belyi, who sought solutions for change in Marxism and Steinerism, also welcomed the Revolution of 1917.