Gerald N. Izenberg
Department of History
Washington University, St. Louis

The origins of abstract painting would not seem to be a promising subject for biography. By definition non-representational, abstraction has no apparent reference to anything outside itself, let alone to the life of the painter. Yet it is precisely on this difficult terrain that the importance of biography for cultural history proves itself.

Before we begin with the specific example of Wassily Kandinsky, the first painter to systematically paint in an abstract style, we need to be clear about just what the biographical approach means. While intellectual and cultural biographies abound, they tend to be suspect to specialists in the fields of the biographical subjects. Specialists fear that biographies too often attempt to explain artistic and intellectual creations by the facts of their creators’ lives, “reducing” the first to the second and eliminating the forms and contents of creativity as entities in their own right. Properly understood, however, biography need not be reductive. For the facts of a life are not simply objective biological, psychological or familial givens, which somehow underlie a painting, poem or work of philosophy as its real meaning. Rather, biographical “facts” take on their full meaning for a life only in the interpretation that the individual gives them. One’s life is in this sense as much a construction as one’s art. The preoccupations of the two are frequently the same or closely related, and they inevitably inform one another. For Kandinsky, for example, early separation from his mother, who left him with his father when they divorced at her initiative, took on the spiritual-religious meaning of a lost paradise. His later quest for love was meant to fulfill not only emotional needs but philosophical-artistic ideals, in the spirit of Russian mystical theology and European Symbolism. In short, Kandinsky’s deepest personal needs and relationships were mediated to him by his cultural heritage and his cultural aspirations.

Kandinsky himself argued for the importance of individual biography in painting in the very work in which he articulated and defended the idea of an abstract art, On the Spiritual in Art (1911).  What he called “inner necessity,” the painterly impulse that was the source of all true art, originated in three elements: the artist’s personality, the spirit of his age, and the quest for the pure and eternal, or the “objective” element. While he thought of this last as the essence of all great art, he also argued that the eternal could only be found through the individual and the historical elements. In his quest for the eternal the artist had to somehow transmute subjective experience and generational issues into the objective and timeless.[1]

For Kandinsky, the generational issues were clear. A soulless modernity had replaced concern for the eternal with the mere timeliness of material progress. Modern society had turned life into an “evil, purposeless game” of selfish egos. Artists too had been corrupted. In their competitive chase for external success they cheapened their art by pursuing an ideal of superficial beauty. But the ultimate evidence of contemporary purposelessness and conflict was internal and psychological. “Unuttered thoughts and unexpressed feelings…are the elements that constitute the spiritual atmosphere,” Kandinsky wrote. The spirit of self-sacrifice and help, high-minded thoughts, and impulses of love, altruism, humanity and justice fought within the self against hidden impulses of suicide and murder, unworthy and base thoughts, hatred, enmity, egotism, envy, ‘patriotism,’ and prejudice in an effort to “reconstitute the pure atmosphere.”[2] It was the job of painting to strive for just such a reconstitution in the symbolic sphere of color, which for Kandinsky represented psychological and psychosocial states, through the achievement of color harmonies that would reconcile the conflicting elements. “Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium, ‘principles overthrown’…great questionings, apparently purposeless strivings, stress and longing…opposites and contradictions—this is our harmony,” Kandinsky claimed of the goal of painting.[3]

As we will see, Kandinsky’s evocation of modern psychological conflict had autobiographical origins. But so too did his idea of harmony in painting. In his “Reminiscences,” the memoir he wrote shortly after his breakthrough to abstraction in 1911, Kandinsky claimed a particular Moscow scene from childhood as the inspiration for all his painting. It was an image of Moscow in the red light of the late afternoon sun, when the riot of city colors exploded and dissolved into one without losing their individuality, like the instruments of a giant orchestra producing the climactic fortissimo chord of a symphony. [4] At the same time, Kandinsky asserted, his mother combined the very qualities that were the embodiment of his ideal Moscow: “striking serious and severe beauty through and through, well-bred simplicity, inexhaustible energy, and a unique accord between a sense of tradition and genuine freedom of thought, in which pronounced nervousness, impressive, majestic tranquility, and heroic self-control are interwoven. In short… ‘Mother Moscow’ in human guise.” “Moscow,” he went on to proclaim, conflating both city and parent, “the duality, the complexity, the extreme agitation, the conflict, and the confusion that mark its external appearance and in the end constitute a unified, individual countenance; the same qualities in its inner life…and yet, just as unique and, in the end, wholly unified—I regard this entire city of Moscow, both its internal and external aspect, as the origin of my artistic ambition.” [5]

An ambition, however, that initially seemed unattainable. “To paint this hour”—Moscow unified in the red light of late afternoon—“must be for the artist the most impossible, the greatest joy,” Kandinsky wrote. The greatest joy because it was the very image of absolute harmony, the reconciliation of all contradictions. Impossible, because nature was the great creator there; the human painter, it seemed, could at best only imitate her, and no mere imitation could equal the original. Kandinsky’s initial aesthetic problem derived from the fact that he figured nature as a divine, feminine force separate and remote from man. He once wrote of his reaction to the great paintings he had seen in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, “I…noticed that not one of the great masters had attained the exhaustive beauty and ingenuity of natural modeling; nature herself remained untouched. Sometimes, she appeared to me, in the abstract sense, ‘divine’: she created as she saw fit; she followed her own path toward her goals, which are lost in the mists; she lived in her domain, which existed in a curious way outside myself…What relation had she to art?” [6] Kandinsky’s conception of nature’s superior, feminine creativity was not unique to him; he shared it with a generation of artists and writers who had increasingly come to feel the marginality and femininity of art in an age that glorified utilitarian productivity. But it also had, as we have seen, an explicitly biographical dimension, one that would prove extremely ambiguous in its impact.

On the one hand, if creativity was embodied in the feminine, as represented in nature, “Mother Moscow” and the figure of Kandinsky’s own mother, the path to it might pass through the love of an idealized woman. In this hope and belief, Kandinsky was not only recapitulating his own past but refracting in a personal way religious and Symbolist ideas prevailing in Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Kandinsky was the son of a well-to-do Russian tea merchant who embodied the progressive middle-class that wished to modernize the homeland it regarded as the most politically and socially backward country in Europe. Like many children of his generation, Kandinsky believed that it was necessary to devote his life to political and social reform. In his case that meant putting aside the passion for art that he had apparently felt from early boyhood and training as an economist and legal scholar who could help bring modern methods of law and social science into the antiquated system of Russian absolutism. He was a liberal who believed in the need for constitutionalism and representative government, but his liberalism was distinctively Russian. It stressed populist legal traditions in opposition to legal abstraction and rejected what it regarded as the selfish individualism of the Western commercial spirit. It put as much emphasis on personal/moral as on social/political regeneration to counter the dangers of egotism and materialism. The key to the kind of transformation that would elevate both individual and society, according to the religious philosophers Solovyov, Fedorov and Berdyaev, whose ideas permeated Russian literary Symbolism, lay in the creative potential of human beings in art and in love. Through art, the human imagination could rise above mere natural necessity to imitate God in the creative act, to become, in an odd fusion of Nietzsche and Russian orthodoxy, the Overman. The artist could in turn transform social life through his creations, which would be the public expression of his ideal of spiritual freedom. But such transcendence of the natural and egotistical was only possible through the love of man and woman, which fused the feminine spiritual element with the masculine fleshly one into a truly androgynous being that represented a new, higher creation, a “spiritual corporeality.” In this synthesis, woman, uncorrupted by the materialistic pursuits of modernity, represented higher spirituality, and her love was the condition for the possibility of both artistic creativity and spiritual regeneration for a man.

At the same time, the perfection of such a woman would seem to make her out of reach. And this dilemma dovetailed with Kandinsky’s own biographical experience. It was not surprising that his mother represented to him freedom of thought, majestic tranquility and heroic self-control, typically “masculine” virtues in the nineteenth century. She was in character if not in vocation one of the “New Women” of the age. She had divorced her husband when Wassily was four years old and left him with his father to marry another man, which whom she eventually had four more children. Though relations between the former spouses remained amicable, and she visited her son in her ex-husband’s house, she was indeed, as Kandinsky was later to describe nature, in another domain, following what must have seemed to the young child her own “mysterious paths” to her own goals. Though he claimed later to have had a happy childhood, he also once wrote to his lover Gabriele Münter, “I was often sad. I sought something, I was missing something, I wanted something unconditional. And it seemed to me impossible ever to find what was missing. At that time I called the state of mind ‘the feeling of paradise lost.’”[7] The theological and Symbolist idealization of love both reinforced and gave cultural meaning and sanction to his quest to regain paradise and to win the key to true creativity through the love of a woman. But its biographical source rendered it highly problematic emotionally and psychologically.

It was out of this personal and cultural background that Kandinsky came to both art and love. In 1896, at the age of thirty, on the verge of taking up his first academic position upon graduating Moscow University, he threw over his career and moved to Munich to begin life as an artist. He had come to the conclusion, he later said, that the social sciences would not revolutionize Russia, and he could therefore indulge his first love, art. But he never gave up his political/social ideals; now it would be through his art that he would do his part to transform himself and his society. Kandinsky came to Munich because it was the German art capital and because, through the aunt who had largely raised him, he had learned a creditable German. Kandinsky arrived with his wife, a cousin for whom he had great liking but no passion, and without previous artistic training. After an apprenticeship of only a few years, he felt confident enough to open his own school in 1901. In keeping with his liberal feminism and in militant defiance of existing norms, it admitted both men and women. And it was one of its most promising students, the young Gabriele Münter, with whom Kandinsky fell in love in the summer of 1902. The affair transformed both his life and his art.

Eleven years his junior, Gabriele Münter was a “New Woman.” Born into a politically radical family in Germany, she was encouraged to develop her artistic talent and left home to study on her own in Munich’s Bohemian, Schwabing. Kandinsky’s school represented liberation and dignity after the male hostility she encountered in her previous instruction. Like other independent young women she had taken up cycling, a passion she shared with her teacher; it enabled the two to go off alone to begin their romance during the school’s summer painting excursion in the Bavarian countryside.

Because the affair had to be clandestine before Kandinsky left his wife and because they were often separated even afterwards, they carried on an extensive correspondence which documents the emotional texture of the relationship in detail. Kandinsky’s letters reveal both the great expectations he had of the relationship for his happiness and his creativity and the stormy consequences of his disappointments. They also reveal the deep ambivalence that resulted from his dependency on Münter. Kandinsky believed that it was only through union with the ideal woman that he could arrive at his goal of realizing his personal and artistic vision of harmonious wholeness out of chaos. In 1902, Münter became that woman. It was to prove an unbearable burden for the talented but initially awestruck young student, and ultimately for the relationship. But out of its failure came the aesthetic reaction that produced an artistic revolution.

Initially the relationship had a revivifying effect. Kandinsky’s artistic output before 1902 had been relatively small, consisting mostly of landscapes, a few “anecdotal” paintings of fairy tale themes, and some Jugendstil graphic works. His use of oils reveals him to be the colorist of his early reputation among his teachers and fellow students. Thickly painted in rich deep hues, these pictures reveal an unmistakable, if modified, Impressionist influence. In March of 1901 he was complaining that for all his desire to paint, he felt inhibited by a need to work provisionally and was producing only “scraps.” Within a few months of meeting Münter, however, his productivity rose dramatically and the range of his subject matter broadened. There was a particularly substantial increase in the number of watercolors and woodcuts; almost all of the latter and many of the watercolors were devoted to scenes of “Old Russia” and medieval Europe. They express the converging impact of his love and his newly revived powerful childhood feelings for the city of Moscow, to which he returned in 1903 for the first time since leaving Russia. Kandinsky made the connection explicit when he gave Münter as a first gift the painting “Strolling Lady,” depicting an elegant young woman in festive medieval costume standing in front of a walled castle towards which rides a column of knights on horseback blowing fanfares. The painting, he wrote, represented his love for her.[8] The idealized images of noble ladies and knights, the representations of hidden trysts and medieval marriage scenes, sad farewells and happy reunions, triumphant processions and dramatic duels all figured the inner story of their relationship. The canvases of larger scope—“Sunday (Old Russia),” “The Arrival of the Merchants”—depict the harmonious premodern society that for Kandinsky furnished the necessary context for a spiritualized, courtly, romantic love.

Kandinsky openly insisted that Münter’s love was the very condition of his creativity. He fantasized a oneness so complete that it would inaugurate the new era anticipated by the Symbolists. During the anguished period before he left his wife he assured Münter, “The two of us will have a fine, harmonious life. We live together as one being. We understand one another, have the same feelings, enjoy life, nature, God…. We belong together. A great power has united us…. The golden age is coming when we go through life hand in hand. It is coming, Ella, it is coming.”[9] Separation from his wife made his dependency on Münter even more intense and explicit. “The more I think about it,” he wrote her the following year, “the more strongly I feel that I can’t make it without you.”[10]  Whether lonely and self-doubting or confident and optimistic, he sounded the same theme. On a trip to Russia he wrote in a moment of despair, “Be with me and be good to me. I need your support so much…. I implore you, my Ella, help me, help me for God’s sake to mind myself again. You can do a lot, you can do everything, beloved…. Help me with your love…to regain my old powers…. You must want it, or otherwise I will be ruined.”[11] Reporting more cheerfully the next month that he had won a prize for the best painting in an Odessa exhibition, he again invoked her indispensability: “If we only have more peace, I will paint something great qualitatively and quantitatively. A few more years and I will win. But you, my Ella, my shining star, you must believe in me. Then I will accomplish something. I repeat what I once said: a lot depends on you. You alone can’t do everything, but only through you can I achieve true greatness.”[12]

They were never to have the peace Kandinsky said he needed for this. It was not only Münter’s initial anxieties about an affair with a married older man, the snatched moments and missed trysts of a clandestine relationship, or even her somewhat reserved character that made Kandinsky desperately insecure from the beginning. It was her independence, her very separateness that tormented him. But he himself exacerbated that torment by distancing himself from her emotionally, both to preserve the sense of her divine remoteness and to avoid losing himself in his dependency. His earliest letters reflect his deep ambivalence; he alternated between taxing her with not loving him completely and confessing that he was too “egotistical” to be with anybody. The climax of his conflict over her came during their sojourn in Paris in 1906-7, a long-awaited opportunity to be together in the capital of modern painting and absorb the latest developments of Post-Impressionism. Still in guilty torment over leaving his wife, he insisted on obsessing over his “crime” to the very person who was its occasion. Münter made some remark, and in a rage Kandinsky insisted she leave; they lived apart, visiting only on weekends, during the rest of their stay. It was a critical turning point in the relationship. Four years later, in the midst of another quarrel, Kandinsky reminded her of it. “Don’t forget the years when the whole world, life, nature, the cosmos were like bottomless blackness for me, seemed to me like black walls that had buried me alive, when I had no fear of death, only of the possibility of life. At that time I had in you no support…[and] I had no one but you with whom to talk.”[13] By the end of the stay in Paris he had to go to a health spa for a rest cure, unable to work.

Ironically, it was in Paris that he had completed his two greatest “Old Russia” works, “Motley Life,” a large busy canvas representing the varied panorama of medieval Russian society, and “Riding Couple,” a gorgeously colored rendering of a knight with his lady against the skyline of medieval Moscow, done in pointillist style.  They were a working through of his suffering, wishful attempts to preserve in art the romantic ideal that had failed in life. The Paris episode taught Kandinsky that Münter would not exist for him alone, that he could not find personal or artistic salvation through love. The relationship was far from over, but it would never again be what it had been. Significantly, he was never to paint in the vein of Old Russia again.

For a short while he did not paint at all. From the sanatorium, he wrote out of his crippling depression, “I would like to feel again, to be able again, as before, to cry before nature, to kneel before her and give thanks. I let it go, however, and torture myself as little as possible about it. But it must absolutely return, or receive new forms.”[14] It was the latter that happened. It has been suggested that the opportunity to be together with Münter in the idyllic setting of their house in Murnau furnished Kandinsky with the stability he needed to break through to a distinctive style. But “Murnau” was more result than cause. The crushing disappointment of Paris turned out to be a kind of liberation. Deprived of the possibility of possessing absolute femininity as the avenue to reproducing nature’s way of creating, Kandinsky was free to find a way of exploring a method of creating ex nihilo on his own. It was only after the emotional-spiritual trauma of Paris that he could begin to work through the artistic acquisition of Paris, the freedom of color shown him by Matisse and the Fauves, whose radicalism outstripped even that of the Post-Impressionists he had gone there to study.

The first fruits were the brilliant Fauvist land- and townscapes of 1908-9, unlike anything Kandinsky had done before in their brilliant prismatic color and increasingly indistinct shapes and allusive line. So abrupt was the change that art historians have been hard-pressed to explain it. But the Fauvist paintings were only a brief stopping place. By the fall of 1909, Kandinsky had completed a draft of On the Spiritual in Art, though it would take two years to be published; he was already exploring the possibilities of abstraction. This was Kandinsky’s first substantial writing on art since his reports on the German art scene for a Russian art periodical in 1902. His thesis that the task of art was the reconciliation of inner strife through the creation of a harmony on canvas takes on much more concrete meaning in the light of his recent emotional history. It was of its very essence that Kandinsky was not about to specify those “secret happenings…unspoken thoughts, hidden feelings,” which demanded sublimation into a purely spiritual synthesis, but he had spoken too often to Münter of the “low and unworthy thoughts” which bedeviled him for her to miss their autobiographical referent.

Kandinsky's shift toward abstraction, however, was not yet complete; he could not get wholly rid of referentiality.[15] The possibility of pure color as a vehicle for expression still rested at this point on the idea that colors had “natural” emotional correlates, as much rooted in reality as the object world. For the moment the objective signification of color took the place of the “real world,” supplying Kandinsky with the foundation he feared to lose but keeping him tied to a source outside himself. When Kandinsky drafted On the Spiritual, he was not yet painting in an abstract style. Two events helped complete the transformation. The first was a further rupture with Münter in the summer of 1910, which led him to openly proclaim his wish to rid himself of any external dependency. “I would like to live in solitude and push away life’s adversities,” he wrote her bitterly after another quarrel. “Fine! I know it’s mean-spirited. I know it very well. But I’m tired of being ‘generous.’ I’m tired of many things. I wish I could live only for art.”[16] The second was a series of encounters that almost immediately followed around the turn of 1911, first with Franz Marc, a kindred spirit with whom he was to form the Blue Rider, and even more fatefully with Arnold Schönberg, whose atonal music offered the model of an art which pursued its “independent progress through its own destiny.”[17] The final breakthrough came that summer, significantly while Kandinsky was alone in Murnau, Münter having gone off to visit her relatives for a few months. He described it a few years later in a lecture that because of the outbreak of the war he never gave.

The summer of 1911, which was unusually hot for Germany, lasted desperately long…. Suddenly, all nature seemed to me white; white (great silence—full of possibilities) displayed itself everywhere and expanded visibly…. This discovery was of enormous importance for me. I felt, with an exactitude I had never yet experienced, that the principal tone, the innate inner character of color, can be redefined ad infinitum by its different uses…. This revelation turned the whole of painting upside-down and opened up before it a realm in which one had previously been unable to believe. I.e., the inner, thousandfold, unlimited values of one and the same quality, the possibility of obtaining and applying infinite series simply in combination with one single quality, tore open for me the gates of the realm of absolute art.[18]

Sometime around this epiphany, Kandinsky painted his first abstract painting.

From a contemporary point of view, Kandinsky’s sudden awareness of the relativity of color signification should have shattered his belief in the soundness of “inner necessity” as a criterion for successfully achieved objective aesthetic harmony. Our current notion is that there is no such thing as "objective harmony," that what counts as harmony for us is a constructed idea, a subjective, or inter-subjective, norm. That is not how he interpreted his discovery. To the contrary, it was this insight into the relativity of color that opened for him “the gates of the realm of absolute art.” Its meaning for him was conditioned by the historical and conceptual context of his original artistic dilemma—the problem posed by the artist’s crisis of masculine creativity in the light of feminine nature’s priority. His insight freed the painter to become a true creator who, god-like, self-sufficient, like nature herself, defined the meaning of color through his own usage, without external constraint. Now he was the equal of the feminine, no longer needing to possess it in order to match its achievement. For a long time, he said in the autobiography he could now write from the vantage point of journey’s end. He had been “conscious of the weakness of art, and of my own abilities in particular, in the face of nature. Years had to elapse before I arrived, by intuition and reflection, at the simple solution that the aims (and hence the resources too) of nature and or art were fundamentally, organically, and by the very nature of the world different—and equally great, which also means equally powerful.” And if there were any lingering doubt that the breakthrough to abstraction represented a masculine victory over the feminine through the appropriation of feminine creative omnipotence, it was resolved through the striking metaphor, combining masculine with colonial supremacy, with which he described the act of painting.

I learned to struggle with the canvas, to recognize it as an entity opposed to my wishes (=dreams), and to force it to submit to these wishes. At first, it stands there like a pure, chaste maiden, with clear gaze and heavenly joy—this pure canvas that is itself as beautiful as a picture. And then comes the imperious brush, conquering it gradually, first here, then there, employing all its native energy, like a European colonist who with ax, spade, hammer, saw penetrates the virgin jungle where no human foot has trod, bending it to conform to his will.[19]