Houses at Murnau
Authors: Thomas B. Cole
Journal: JAMA (2013)

The most interesting feature of Houses at Murnau, by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), is not the row of toy-like houses along the hillside but the grassy hill itself, or more specifically the color field under the arc of the hill. Kandinsky often used color as a compositional element. In his youth, when he visited churches near Moscow, the shimmering colors of their interiors made him feel as though he was moving into a painting, and it was this sort of experience that he hoped to re-create. Moving into this painting, the eye takes note of the yellow facades of the buildings and comes to rest on the hill that dominates the foreground. To make the hill appear vibrant and organic, Kandinsky painted squiggles of yellow and green over a complementary background of burnt orange with flecks of blue shade. Dividing colors into their component hues allowed them to blend optically to create an illusion of movement, as though a gust of wind were bending the grass toward the light and back again. This painting is more representational than much of Kandinsky’s later work. It is easy to identify houses, hills, and a distant lake, but distortion is creeping in. The rooftops of the houses on the left are folded like accordions, and those on the right are writhing and breaking up. The blend of colors on the hill is soothing, but there is tension on the horizon. Kandinsky recognized that colors canhaveemotional and cognitive associations, suchasyellow for souror red for flame, andheborrowedwords fromother senses (prickly vs smooth, hard vs soft) to describe color perception. In his paintings he usedcolor tocreatedepthorcompositionalbalance.Kandinsky believed that color could be physically therapeutic and touch the soul.His ideas about colorwere influencedbyTheosophy, a mystical, quasireligious belief in connections between humanity, the material universe, and the divine. Drawing on theosophical concepts, he proposed a hierarchy of aesthetic comprehension represented by a triangle divided horizontally into sections of unequal depth. In this model, the lower levels are inhabited by people who find art incomprehensible. Their consciousness canbe raisedbyartistswhoseepast the limits of their own experience. At the apex of the triangle there may be only one visionary man, whose insights are merely glimpsed by his closest colleagues. No doubt he was thinking of himself in this role. Kandinsky developed his ideas about art and spirituality during his years in Murnau, a town near the Bavarian Alps. Born and educated in Russia, Kandinsky studied art in Munich, traveled through Europe and North Africa, and absorbed the influences of the French avant-garde in Paris before settling in Murnau with Gabriele Munter, a fellow artist, in 1909 (The Art of JAMA, September 18, 2013). Kandinsky and Munter came to Murnau for its colorful landscape features, the soft, indirect light of the hill country that intensified the colors of the houses and trees, and the solitude. In the peace and quiet of Murnau, Kandinsky could concentrate on his experiments with abstract composition. Houses at Murnau, painted the year Kandinsky arrived there, is more representational than abstract, but the painting does contain elements (such as color planes, hatched outlining, and the omnipresent triangle) that he would develop in future paintings. Of his many legacies, the idea that art could be abstract rather than representational has had the greatest impact on painters of successive generations. AfterKandinsky, abstraction flourishedandultimatelybecame the dominant mode of artistic expression in 1950s America. Representational art never went entirely away, but it becameunconventional.Abstract artwasable toconvey feelings and ideas or the simple beauty of paint on canvas. It was soulful and deep; by contrast, representational art was often jokey and ironic—but there was always room for irony in art. In 1917 the French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (or an anonymous collaborator)mounted a urinal on a pedestal and called it Fountain. He didn’t make the urinal, but he found it, turned it on its side, and identified it as a work of art. Hardly anyone else agreed that itwas art, butDuchamphadmadehis point that some artists were taking themselves too seriously. He hoped to “de-deify” them. Duchamp may not have been thinkingofKandinsky specifically, butKandinskywas aneasy target. In the tradition of German aesthetic philosophy Kandinsky could be given a pass for elevating visionary artists above the“obstinate cartloadofhumanity,”because strong positionsoncontroversial issueswereoften takenwith theexpectation that theywouldbe challenged anddebated in a civil manner.Moreover, if Kandinsky turnedout not to be the chosen one, his model of a hierarchy of human endeavor might still bevalid.Today,however,Kandinskyandhispyramidcome off as condescending. Thepyramid implies that art has intrinsic value and that some art is better than others. This judgment is supported by expressions such as fine art, applied art, commercial art, decorative art, craft, and kitsch. The pyramid also implies that there is a way to define what art is. In the 1940s and 1950s, fine art could be identified by its originality, its emotional or intellectual appeal, a hand-made quality, and a lack of reference to consumer culture. Abstract paintings easilymet these criteria, particularly if the effort of the artist (brush strokes, tape marks, etc) could be detected in the finishedwork. Recognizing their intrinsic value, collectors bid up the prices of abstract paintings, and fine art be-