From Beyond Kandinsky Blog
Two interesting "articles", one of which is linked to a pdf
RS/Blogger Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
The
year 2011 marks the centennial of the publication of Wassily Kandinsky's classic
text, On the Spiritual in Art. Inspired by this anniversary, this
project set out to explore the place of the spiritual in contemporary art and to
propose a challenge to the current devaluation of the inner life that prevails
within the art world in our market-driven era.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The
comments from Barbara Braathen that Taney posted yesterday have spurred me to
post some information that I meant to put up during the first session, but
didn’t have time to. I’d like to throw out some ideas and imagery related to
Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater, and consider how/if they
might have influenced Kandinsky.
Kandinsky
was very open about his appreciation for Helena Blavatsky. He was a lot more
elusive about Steiner. I just took a quick look back through the Collected
Writings on Art, and couldn’t find a single mention of Steiner anywhere in
the texts. However, his name comes up several times in the editors’
introductions, and—most importantly—they cite Kandinsky’s attendance at several
of Steiner’s anthroposophical lectures in 1908.
Steiner’s
lectures covered a broad range of theosophical topics. He would often elaborate
on the occult connection between things like the planets and parts of the body,
in a manner reminiscent of the systems of correspondence that became such a huge
part of Renaissance magic (as in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult
Philosophy, or the 1620 magical calendar from Frankfurt that was once
falsely attributed to Tycho Brahe). During these lectures, he would illustrate
some of his ideas with colored chalk. The early drawings were lost, but in 1919
one of Steiner’s pupils got the idea to tape black paper to the surface of the
chalkboard, so that the drawings could be rolled up after the talks were over.
Over 1,000 of these drawings survive, along with notes and transcripts of the
lectures. (I've included a couple here. To see a few paired with some of
Steiner’s text and with commentary by a contemporary anthroposophist, check out
this web
page.
I’ve
always been wary of giving too much weight to the Kandinsky/Steiner connection,
but when I was going back through On the Spritual in Art, some resonances
started to strike me. In the chapter where Kandinsky sets out his ideas on the
movement and emotional tone of the colors, there’s a footnote in which he
reinforces his assertion that yellow is inherently aggressive and has an
unpleasant “sound” by citing the sourness of lemons and the shrill song of the
canary. Earlier in the book, he discusses synesthesia (without actually using
the term), but he seems to treat it as a spiritual potential inherent in at
least the most sensitive of us, rather than the medical or psychological anomaly
that many people consider it to be. I was reminded of Steiner’s way of
connecting things, his frequent discussions of how the soul is affected by
material and spiritual phenomena, and the way that colors were often a crucial
part of this. His discussions of planetary influences on the body were often
illustrated with specific colors for each planetary ray, and there’s a beautiful
chalkboard drawing in which he uses a few quick slashes of light blue, yellow,
and red to assert a connection between cosmic thoughts, memories, and dreams,
and birds, butterflies, and bats, respectively (see above).
Steiner
also spoke about the ability of color to alter spiritual perception. He claimed
that meditation on a specific color would render that color transparent, so that
one could see the spiritual entities lurking behind or within it. Such
statements were couched in language that often sounds a lot like Kandinsky’s
recurring image of the soul as a piano, with color as the force that hits the
keys and vibrates the strings.
Though
I don’t want to stretch comparisons too far or claim too much, I should probably
also mention Steiner’s development of the hybrid art form eurythmy.
Eurythmy attempted to blend colors, sounds, and spiritually significant gestures
into a new dance form that would directly affect the deeper levels of the
viewer’s soul. (Some of Steiner’s pencil sketches for eurythmy can be seen at this link, along with a few color images created using
Steiner’s notes. For an example of eurythmy in action, check out this
video.)
By
1926, Kandinsky had shifted his focus away from color and toward shape and form;
this was the year that Point and Line to Plane was published. His only
other published work that year was a piece called Dance Curves, in which
he turned four photographs of the dancer Palucca into simplified schematic
drawings (see below), with the idea of showing how the precision of her
movements carries deep significance for those sensitive enough to recognize it
(he states this idea much more vaguely and obliquely than I have, and the entire
article—which is very brief—is pretty opaque). Though I’ve never seen anything
to connect Dance Curves to eurythmy, the emphasis they share on precision
and meaning in the body’s movement has always kept me speculating.
Not
everyone is comfortable with this sort of tale-spinning. There are writers who
try to downplay the Steiner-Kandinsky connection, under the assumption that it
makes it too easy for Kandinsky to be dismissed as a serious artist. For a
discussion of this, see this essay by artist, writer, and Studio International
co-editor Janet McKenzie, written on the occasion of the 2006 Tate Modern
exhibition “Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction.”
Finally,
I should mention the 1901 book Thought Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater.
Besant inherited the leadership of most of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society
after the latter’s death, and Leadbeater was a clairvoyant who claimed the
ability to see the shapes and colors of people’s emotions. Their book begins
with a detailed chart that lays out the spiritual meanings of 25 colors (for
example, red-orange is listed as “pride”), and then discusses the ethereal forms
of a wide range of subjective phenomena, including things like ”greed for
alcohol” and “listening to the music of Mendelsshon.” The book is illustrated
throughout, and some of the more complex images begin to approach the complexity
of some of Kandinsky’s paintings. (One of my favorites is the illustration for
"appreciation of a picture," shown immediately above.)
Once
again, without trying to claim too much, I'm very interested in the way that the
specificity of Besant and Leadbeater’s system looks a lot like Kandinsky’s ideas
on the distinctive “feel” of various colors. At least one writer of books on
Theosophical history (Gary Lachman) has stated that Kandinsky owned a copy of Thought
Forms, and that it was one of the most influential sources of his
speculations on color.
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