Driven to Abstraction
By: Remy Dean
Tags: Art, Abstract, Painting, History, History Of Art

As the Nineteenth turned into the Twentieth Century, there was a vogue for trying to represent the abstract, such as music and emotions, in visual form. This was an idea more associated with Victorian mysticism than art and is represented in the book Thought-Forms compiled in 1901 by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, in which they attempt to depict both music and the listener’s emotional response using line and colour...

So, in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, there were a few artists experimenting with different approaches that would drive them down the road to abstraction. There’s still debate as to who really did ‘invent’ abstract art. That’s if it wasn’t Neanderthals or Victor Hugo…

At the vanguard, were several artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a pre-war art group who shared artistic vision and exhibited together, based around an occasional journal also titled Der Blaue Reiter. Most notable among these for exploring aspects of abstraction were Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky — who is usually credited with producing the first truly abstract paintings, although it really was a result of discussions and exchanges of ideas with his fellow Blue Riders…

‘Improvisation XIV’ (1910) by Wassily Kandinsky [view license]

Wassily Kandinsky began to experiment with abstracting from landscape and by painting expressive, narrative pictures that were symbolic, though not taken from real scenes. His series of ‘improvisations’, exemplified here with his 1910 painting, Improvisation XIV, may imply that they were constructed rather than painted from observation, yet there is clearly a landscape within the balanced, rhythm of Fauve-like colours. The simplified tree, and treatment of forms across the canvas, is reminiscent of the landscape paintings of Paul Cézanne, so much so that it could be a study of Bibemus Quarry painted by Cézanne in 1895.

Around 1911, Kandinsky painted Cossacks, a deceptively simple and almost childish picture that is at once: narrative, expressionistic, romantic, fauvist, symbolic, allegorical…

‘Cossacks’ (c.1911) by Wassily Kandisnky [view license]

At first glance, it may appear to be abstract, but it remains representational. The Cossacks of the title were a militarised, though independent, community within Russia. Here, they have been reduced to cartoon-like blobs of colour with bold use of negative space on the right of the picture. The cloud of smoke rising from the barrage of long rifles on the left is a fiery blood-red blob. The guns of either side bristle from the landscape that seems to be sliding into the valley… and is that the golden glow of a distant, burning city or the light of a new dawn?

At the top, the dynamic forms of two more sabre-wielding Cossacks seem to be carving up the land itself, a confusion of calligraphic lines perhaps represents their slicing or the cross-fire of battle over the rainbow that holds the picture together and forms a bridge between the two sides, both hopeful of a brighter future and an end to hostilities…

It’s not a painting of a battle, but a painting of some of the emotions and meanings of a battle. It depicts the violence and confusion, but is also romanticised. In this image, both sides are heroic in their fight for a better future and should instead be united by these hopes and not in conflict. Kandinsky is championing the bravery of the soldiers, whilst condemning war. At the same time it operates as a representational scene and as an abstract composition of colour and line.

‘Black Spot I’ (1912) by Wassily Kandinsky [view license] *

By 1912, Kandinsky was painting compositions that are considered to be abstract, though there still seems to be elements of landscape here, in Black Spot I. The title refers to a formal element within the painting and not what the painting may represent, indicating the prime importance of form and structure here. The use of line is bold and, in some ways, is reminiscent of some earlier Fauvist painters, but here the colour is not strictly contained by line and, in some areas, is set free entirely from line.

The relationship between line and colour becomes one of balance and interplay. The result is a dynamic composition that bypasses rational meaning, becoming directly expressive in a similar way to music. Some of his paintings so resemble the ‘thought-forms’ of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that it’s difficult to believe he had not seen their visual representations of music: