Kandinsky, Painting, and the Spiritual in Modern Music

Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan, 1885-86 (oil on canvas) by Paul Cezanne. Metropolitan Museum of Art

It’s also the idea at the heart of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a short book by the painter Wassily Kandinsky, first published in December 1911. Kandinsky asks questions that still resonate strongly in our own time. What is the purpose of art? What is the role of the artist? His own answer is clear: as society becomes more materialistic, art must become more spiritual. Kandinsky has no time for art as something merely pleasing, to be admired in galleries. Painting that simply reproduces the outward appearance of things is, for him, the lowest kind. In the words of his fellow painter Paul Klee, “the purpose of art is not to reproduce the visible, but to make visible.”

Kandinsky’s book has to do with the upheavals of contemporary art in the early years of the twentieth century. He touches on the painting of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso; the music of Schoenberg, Debussy, and Skryabin; the writing of Maeterlinck and Mallarmé. But he frames this historical moment in the widest possible view. The history of humankind, he insists, is one of slow spiritual progress, moving ever upwards like a broad triangle. At its tip are the solitary visionaries, frequently misunderstood, just as Beethoven was in his own time.

Music plays a central role here. In striving towards a more spiritual form, Kandinsky writes, art finds in music “the best teacher.” Why? Because music, without any obvious subject matter, is free to explore our inner life. As the art critic Walter Pater put it in 1873, “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” But we would be wrong to imagine this was just one-way traffic. If painters and writers took their inspiration from music, it often worked the other way around. Claude Debussy, for example, found his musical path by setting poets like Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine whose work, in turn, had been shaped by music.

For Kandinsky, a more spiritual art is a more abstract art, one that cuts through the inadequacy of representation to open to the wonder and mystery of the world. In doing so, it opposes the shallow materialism of modern society. But here we encounter the first of several paradoxes at the heart of modern art. In order to cut through the materialism of the everyday, art focused more intensely on the materiality of its own medium. It explored color, sound, rhythm and gesture as having a sense of their own. As Paul Klee wrote, “more important than nature and nature study, is one’s attitude to the content of one’s paintbox.

By the time his book appeared, Kandinsky was already leaving representation behind to foreground the intensity of subjective perception, above all through his vivid use of color. What strikes us in his paintings is not what isn’t there (the precise and objective representation of a landscape) but the richness of what is—the vibrancy of the juxtaposed colors, the bold sweep of the shapes across the canvas, the bright energy of the scene. Consider the case of Murnau with Church I (1910). You can still pick out the church tower, the flower bed and fence in the foreground, the distant mountains on the horizon, but that’s not the main thing. A photograph could have supplied that information better. What matters is the intensity of vision that sparks something correspondingly intense in our own reaction.

This priority of color is found across the work of a generation of painters from Monet to Matisse, Derain to Delaunay. Klee wrote ecstatically about his experience in Tunisia in 1914: “Color has taken hold of me; no longer do I have to chase after it. Color and I are one. I am a painter.” But composers too were increasingly captivated by the “color” of sounds, the qualities of musical tone and timbre. It may be a cliché that the music of Debussy and Ravel is so-often associated with Impressionism, but for good reason. Consider one of Monet’s many paintings of boats while listening to the opening of Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan (1905). Ravel’s indolently circling patterns are as self-sufficient as Monet’s play of light on water. Their glittering repetitions anticipate the famous sunrise in Ravel’s later ballet score, Daphnis et Chloé (1912). There is no memorable theme here, no musical argument, no character, and no action. What draws us in and carries us along is a swelling wave of sound that emerges from gentle shimmering before expanding to an overwhelming climax achieved through a refined handling of orchestral tone and texture.

This turn to sound itself marks a subtle revolution in music that runs through the twentieth century, joining Debussy and Ravel to later composers like Pierre Boulez. You won’t find Boulez talking about spirituality in art—few composers were so resolutely secular—but he understood music to be an exploration of the furthest reaches of the human mind. Like Kandinsky, he too saw art and music as shaped by the irreversible progress of history. Listening to works like …explosant-fixe… (1993) or Sur Incises (1998), it’s not hard to hear echoes of Debussy or Ravel in the shared fascination with sonic color and the scintillating play of electrifying energy. This is a world in permanent flux, ungraspable, absolutely distant from the solid materialism of things.

Color, wrote Kandinsky, causes “a spiritual vibration” which provokes a “corresponding vibration of the human soul.” He sets out this theory in a series of diagrams and in explaining the effect of different colors he frequently reaches for musical parallels. Thus, a deep red is like “the sad middle tone of a cello” and violet is like a cor anglais or a bassoon. A fine amateur musician himself, for him “color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.”

Kandinsky might have had in mind his fellow Russian, the composer Alexander Skryabin, with whom he shared an interest in synaesthesia (hearing sounds as colors, and vice versa). Skryabin’s tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1911) is scored for large orchestra, piano, choir, and “color keyboard,” the last being an instrument invented by the composer. Each note of the chromatic scale is assigned a different color (“chroma,” of course, means color) such that when a key is depressed it causes the corresponding colored light to be projected into the concert hall.

For Kandinsky, the most important corroboration of his ideas came from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. In January 1911, Kandinsky attended a concert which included Schoenberg’s groundbreaking Second String Quartet, Op. 10 (1907–8). His immediate response was a new painting, Impression III (Concert), but he also wrote to the composer to introduce himself. It was a meeting of minds and artistic vision that formed the basis of a lifelong friendship. As Kandinsky set out his theory of color in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Schoenberg was not only writing his Theory of Harmony (1911) but exhibiting his own paintings in Vienna. He titled his paintings “Visions” just as Kandinsky started referring to his own as “Compositions.”

Both were part of the wider quest for a fusion of the arts inspired by Wagner’s idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total, or complete work of art. It was, however, theatre and dance that offered the boldest experiments. In placing the human body centre stage, and exploring a more natural, less restrained vocabulary of movement, dance was also key to the modernists’ embrace of “primitivism.” And here we meet a second paradox. A movement associated with the new and experimental, modernism was also shaped by a fascination with the sense of something ancient, lost to a contemporary world. It’s an idea vividly portrayed in two massive canvasses by Henri Matisse—Dance and Music (both from 1910)—evoking a kind of prehistoric collective art through its repetitive simple figures and bold colors. Paul Klee, writing in 1902, expressed it perfectly: “I want to be as though newborn, knowing absolutely nothing about Europe; ignoring facts and fashion, to be almost primitive.”

His words might equally have been spoken by Isadora Duncan, born in California but central to the development of modern dance in Europe. In place of the highly refined language of classical ballet, Duncan explored natural movement, often elaborated through improvisation. For her, dance was the “divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement.” She partly drew her inspiration from the depiction of dancers in ancient Greek and Egyptian art. It’s not impossible that Debussy’s piano prelude Danse des Delphes (1909) was inspired not by a bas-relief in the Louvre (as historians tell us) but a performance by Isadora Duncan.

The most famous example of dance as the meeting place of the arts was of course the Ballets Russes. The contradiction of a highly refined modern art cultivating something powerfully primitive is placed centre-stage, nicely caught in Debussy’s witty observation, after a performance of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (1913), that here was something “primitive but with every modern convenience.” The creation of Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes were a key artistic presence in Paris from 1909, bringing together many of the leading figures of modernism across the arts.

The music of Maurice Ravel, whose Daphnis et Chloé (1912) was commissioned for the Ballets Russes, may seem a long way from the mythic primitivism of Stravinsky’s Le sacre. As a young man, however, Ravel was a member of “Les Apaches” (The Hooligans), a loose association of writers and artists contemporary with the more famous group of painters known as “Les Fauves” (The Wild Beasts). It was here Ravel met the writer Tristan Klingsor (note the Wagnerian nom de plume) whose collection of poems titled Shéhérazade provided the texts for Ravel’s orchestral songs of the same name in 1904. Klingsor’s poems had been inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Shéhérazade so, once again, here is a case of music shaping poetry which, in turn, shapes music.

Debussy’s Jeux was another Ballets Russes commission, performed in 1913 just a few weeks before the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre. A year earlier, Vaslav Nijinsky had choreographed Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (1894), written in response to Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem. Debussy apparently hated Nijinsky’s interpretation, with its angular and highly stylized movements (an imaginative recreation of the kind of movements depicted on ancient Greek vases). Outwardly, these two ballets could not be more different—the Faune is a tale of a satyr and two nymphs evoking an ancient Greek pastoral, the second is based on a game of tennis. And yet, Jeux can be seen as a kind of updated, stylish version of the earlier work, a similar tale of desire simmering between a trio of characters on a sultry afternoon.

The same tension between ancient and modern is found in Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane (1904), not a dance piece but a work commissioned to show off the new chromatic harp. The title has often intrigued audiences, but perhaps the point is that there is no essential difference between the sacred and the secular, the spirit and the body or, at least, in art the gap between the two is bridged. The harp is perfectly placed to do so here, evoking an ancient Greek lyre while showing off its thoroughly up-to-date chromatic capabilities.

Kandinsky used the term “primitive” to denote painting of the medieval period, but the idea of “primitivism” has a much wider resonance in early modernism. It denoted almost anything that stood outside of a materialist society that denied the existence of anything it couldn’t measure. Modernists were captivated by anything that was less rational and more instinctive. Painters were suddenly interested in folk art, non-western art, medieval art, the art of children. Composers were fascinated by the exotic sounds of non-western instruments, like those Debussy heard at the Paris Exhibition of 1889.

Another part of this “return” to something more immediate and direct was to seek a more immediate relation to nature. The annual summer exodus from the city to the countryside was a pattern of life for a fashionable and affluent urban class. But the importance of these months outside the city, for composers like Mahler or Webern, and painters like Kandinsky and Klee, cannot be overestimated. Debussy’s credo that “a sunset is worth more than the Pastoral Symphony” expresses the idea succinctly, that art was reinvigorated by going back to nature with open eyes and ears. An experience of the raw force of nature was channelled into the work of many composers, none more so than Sibelius and Nielsen. The latter’s Fourth Symphony, The Inextinguishable (1914–16) makes the point powerfully, a work that refuses any program except for the elemental energy at the heart of things.

Not every artist or composer saw things the same way. Take the case of Richard Strauss. His tone poem, Tod und Verklärung (1889), signals an obvious concern with the spiritual. The title (“Death and Transfiguration”) echoes Wagner’s Liebestod und Verklärung—the original title for the concert music extracted from his opera Tristan und Isolde. Strauss was of course central to the development of program music, a genre which Kandinsky dismissed. But then Strauss’s career underlines many of the contradictions of modernism. After taking his music to the very edge of Expressionism with his operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), he then stepped back to the lush historicism of Der Rosenkavalier (1911). His Alpine Symphony (1915), with its narrative scenes clearly marked in the score, is unashamed in its musical depiction of characters, landscape, and events. But the picture is more complicated than a crude binary of progressive versus conservative. In a diary entry from 1911, bound up with the genesis of the Alpine Symphony, Strauss reflected on his difference to Mahler, repudiating what he saw as Mahler’s metaphysics of denial and choosing instead to celebrate the materiality of nature as an affirmation of life.

Of course, it was not just art that had a sacred and spiritual task, but thereby the artist. Parsifal is a knight engaged on a sacred quest, a solitary figure devoted to a higher purpose. A recurring figure in art, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Kandinsky, the knight comes to symbolize the artist. When Kandinsky and his more radical colleagues formed a new breakaway group in 1911, they called themselves Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), referencing an earlier painting of Kandinsky’s depicting a knight on a white horse. But, as Kandinsky put it, “the artist is not only a king because he has great power, but also because he has great duties.” Both Kandinsky and Schoenberg understood their task as a spiritual calling. As Schoenberg reflected, looking back in 1948, there would have been easier artistic paths than that of atonal music, but “the supreme commander had ordered me on a harder road.”

In this, their model was undoubtedly Beethoven, or at least, an ideal of Beethoven as a solitary genius, finding musical expression for the great spiritual struggles and triumphs of mankind in works like the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets. This was the vision at the centre of the “Beethoven Exhibition” staged in 1902 by the Vienna Secession which included not only Max Klinger’s brooding sculpture of the composer, but Klimt’s Beethoven frieze, depicting the very same journey of spiritual progress through art Kandinsky sets out in his book.

For the leading figures of modernism, Beethoven was a fellow modernist avant le lettre, breaking free from the expectations of his patrons and audiences to follow the “inner necessity” of his creative task. Here was a composer who seemed to embody the motto of the Viennese Secession: “To every age its art, and to art its freedom.” Long before Skryabin’s tone poem, Beethoven himself embodied the figure of Prometheus, wrestling the gods for divine fire. His Fifth Symphony (1808), then as now, epitomized the capacity of music to explore the inner dramas at the heart of human life, presenting an essentially spiritual journey, a wordless story of struggle, suffering, overcoming and affirmation. Something similar is heard in the Fifth Piano Concerto, Emperor. Written in 1809 against the backdrop of Napoleon’s invasion of Vienna, you won’t hear any trace of the cannon fire going on all around Beethoven’s home; indeed, nothing could be further from the extraordinary inwardness of the tender slow movement.

Nowhere was the idea of music as a spiritual art more powerfully manifested than in the symphony. Long before Kandinsky made his move towards abstraction, the symphony had already thrown off the expectation that instrumental music, in order to be meaningful, should accompany words or be the servant of drama. Mozart was no modernist, but his symphonic music was utterly modern in this respect. Take the slick, energetic sense of purpose of his Paris Symphony (No. 31), written in 1778, a work of transparent clarity, typical of his cosmopolitan style. Like Mozart’s Prague and Linz Symphonies, or Haydn’s London Symphonies, the title neatly underlines that Viennese Classicism was urbane and international, effortlessly crossing barriers of language and nationality.

The symphony exemplified “the condition of music” to which Walter Pater pointed, a model of art not tied to the outward representation of the world. Take the case of Felix Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, Reformation. Composed in 1830, it commemorates a key event in the Protestant Reformation three hundred years earlier; in its use of a device of religious music (known as the “Dresden Amen”) it also wonderfully anticipates Wagner’s use of the same theme in Parsifal. But its significance as a “spiritual” work, in Kandinsky’s sense, has far less to do with its theme and much more to do with the power of music to express what no historical statue or painting could.

After 1918 everything changed. In the aftermath of the First World War, there was little appetite for the irrational, the primitive, or the urgings of the inner voice. The over-heated years of the fin-de-siècle were replaced by a sense of order, detachment, and objectivity. Kandinsky had spent the war years in Moscow, but he returned to Germany in 1921 to take up a position at the Bauhaus. If Concerning the Spiritual in Art was a manifesto of pre-war modernism, his next theoretical statement, Point and Line to Plane (1925), was a far more objective reflection on the geometric purity of abstract art. <Johnson 9.jpg>

Music similarly retreated from the heady expressionism of the pre-war years and embraced a more sober neo-Classicism. This was no simple return to the past. Its play with older music may be stylish and witty but it was also often wistful, its deliberate asymmetries underlining a break between the present and the past. Was this a rejection of earlier ideas of spirituality? Yes, and no. It was a rejection of a spirituality conceived in terms of hyper-subjectivity, but thereby a return to a more collective expression of the human spirit. In looking back to the music of Bach, neo-Classicism re-embraced the idea that art had a collective and communal function and spoke in a shared language.

Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1938–40) is an excellent example, distancing itself from any idea of music expressing the composer’s own life. It was written in the shadow of the death of Stravinsky’s wife and daughter from tuberculosis, his own diagnosis with the same disease, and his wartime exile from Europe. While none of this is expressed in this self-consciously constructed work, there is nevertheless something melancholic in its use of earlier music. In the second movement, the oboe recalls an obbligato solo in a Bach aria, as if recalling the past from a more troubled present. Even the light-hearted Finale reflects an awareness of its own historical displacement. “What is it to be modern?” it seems to ask, before ending with an oddly wistful tone. The same quality is present in a more acerbic manner in Stravinsky’s later works whose more overtly spiritual subjects are underlined by the use of Latin texts and echoes of Renaissance music (Palestrina and Monteverdi). The “sacred ballet” Abraham and Isaac (1962–63) is typical of these late serial works which seem to search for something timeless amid the self-consciously temporal rush of modernity.

“On or about December 1910, human character changed.” Virginia Woolf’s striking line was written in 1924. A century later, we might smile at her deliberately drôle precision, while conceding it points to something real. The origins of modernism may lie in the nineteenth century, but the critical years were those between 1907 and 1913. It was then that Kandinsky’s painting crossed the threshold into abstraction and Schoenberg’s music cut loose from tonality, when Debussy explored the color of sound and Stravinsky reaffirmed the primeval force of rhythm.

A century later, it’s clear something really did change in these years, and that it changed profoundly. Not least, because it often still bewilders us. Some listeners may balk at the very idea that all this has anything to do with the spiritual. More than a century on, it’s sometimes hard to square the idea with works that can still seem difficult, dissonant, and ungraspable. Written “on or about December 1910,” Kandinsky’s book nevertheless offers us one way to understand the upheavals of the arts in the early years of the new century. It reminds us—we who also live in a materialist age—that the purpose of art is not to merely to reproduce our everyday habits, but to provoke us to see the world afresh. By drawing us into vivid experiences of color and sound, modern painting and music alike challenge us to feel and think through our senses, to allow ourselves to be transported, to see the world anew, just as Parsifal does that Good Friday morning. — © Julian Johnson