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In general, people who
know of Wassily
Kandinsky (1866 –
1944) know him from the
perspective of his
painting life, and many
also recognize him as
the instigator of
abstraction in
painting. In fact, he
also had a theatre
life, and is still
today among the most
daring of those who
have created abstract
works for the stage.
In his day, Kandinsky's
plays and his thinking
about the theatre were
hailed by innovators as
theatre-altering as
Hugo Ball, founder of
Dada, and Oskar
Schlemmer, founder of
the Bauhaus Theatre.
Kandinsky's "stage
compositions" also
brought him into
contact with other
seminal theatrical
figures such as
Diaghilev, Massine,
Stanislavsky, Breton,
and many more.
It is exciting to bring
"into the fold"
Kandinsky's work and
influence beyond
painting, and even
beyond his
commodification by the
art world.
What follows is meant
to give readers a kind
of reference guide, a
chronological
scaffolding for
understanding the
mostly extra-painting
articles to come in
this series: where he
was, what he did, who
he knew—that kind
of thing.
Hoping it contains
interesting surprises
for those just coming
to Kandinsky, as well
as for the expert and
the devotee.
*
Kandinsky's life, like
his thinking about art,
was a process of
unifying or merging a
range of sprawling,
complex elements. He
was a Russian who lived
primarily in Germany,
then spent the last
years of his life in
Paris. At the opening
of his career in
Germany and at the
close of it in France
he was considered a
Russian artist, but his
Russian compatriots
associated him with the
romanticism and
subjectivity of the
German art scene. He
held citizenship papers
in each of these
countries at different
times, speaking each of
their languages. He
traveled in many more
countries than he lived
in, and studied still
more. Ultimately, even
when he had a choice,
both as an artist and a
person he claimed the
right to be a true
"world
citizen."
Along with the
sensibilities that he
culled from around the
world, Kandinsky's
work life unified his
various areas of
training and interest.
He was armored as a
critic and organizer by
professional training
in law and economics.
He was supported as a
teacher of "the
science of art" by
the methods of
systematic inquiry he
used doing ethnographic
research as a
university student. As
a painter, he learned
anatomical drawing and
color theory from one
teacher, Anton Ažbè,
and the flow of forms
from another, Franz
[von] Stuck, blending
these two influences
into an art that
extended beyond the
realms of both.
At left: Sketches for dresses for the painter Gabriele Münter, early 1900s. At
right: Gabriele Münter in dresses designed by Kandinsky. In the Kandinsky in
Munich catalogue, 1982, from the Collection Städtische Galerie im
Lenbachhaus, Munich.
Kandinsky also looked for ways to unify—to "synthesize"—his
other interests. He was an accomplished amateur on the piano
and the cello. He wrote poetry. At the turn of the century he
sketched period peasant costumes, and designed dresses,
embroidered purses and hangings, and jewelry. At various times
during his life he also designed wall murals, furniture, vases, and
dishes. These interests in the sets, costumes and props of
everyday life, as well as in music, poetry and the dramatic impact
of a visual image, reveal a temperament that we can see might
find satisfaction in the theatre.
In fact, it was to the theatre that Kandinsky turned for a place to
synthesize his experiences and abilities. Over a period of 35 years,
in Germany, Russia and France, as dramaturg, dramatist and self
-appointed demiurge of the art world, Kandinsky pursued his
elusive, monumental vision—what he called the Synthesizing, or
Unified, Art of the Stage.
Painting students at Anton Ažbè's school, Munich, 1897.
(L to R) A. Seddeler, Dmitry Kardovsky, Wassily Kandinsky.
When Kandinsky came to Munich from Moscow to study painting
in 1896 at the age of 30, he had already been struck by the power
of the theatre, by a production he had seen of Wagner's
Lohengrin. Maybe it was because of this that his activities in
Munich brought him into contact with many people who were
involved in performance. In 1900, he co-founded Phalanx, an
association of young artists who exhibited their works together.
One member of this group was Alexander von Salzmann, who
later engineered the revolutionary lighting designed by Adolphe
Appia for Jacques-Dalcroze's School at Hellerau. Peter Behrens
both exhibited with Phalanx and played an influential role in
Munich's experimental theatre circles. Behrens worked closely
with Georg Fuchs, the great theatre reformer, who was also to
become more than tangentially associated with Kandinsky a few
years later.
Other members of Kandinsky's society were concurrently
involved with a group of avant-garde cabaret performers called
Eleven Executioners (Elf Scharfrichter). One was a sculptor
named Husgen, who designed masks. Another was Ernst Stern,
who designed the group's sets and posters, and who eventually
designed for Max Reinhardt's theatre in Berlin. It is interesting to
note that two other members of the cabaret group were the
playwright Frank Wedekind, who sang, and Reinhard Piper, who
was to become Kandinsky's publisher. The Phalanx association
continued through 1904.
In 1902, Kandinsky wrote some art correspondence for a journal
that was edited by Diaghilev, called The World of Art. In this
context, Kandinsky came close to knowing more of Anton
Chekhov than just his plays; Chekhov's letters include one to
Diaghilev in 1903, in which he refused Diaghilev's invitation to
become editor of the journal. Although the art correspondence
was his only writing for Diaghilev, Kandinsky followed the
publication closely, and surely knew Diaghilev's work in the
theatre. Aside from the fact of Diaghilev's prominence in the
Russian avant-garde, Kandinsky took an interest in the work of
Leon Bakst, who was a painter and also a set and costume
designer for Diaghilev. Later events also involved Kandinsky
directly with Fokine, Diaghilev's great choreographer.
In 1908, Kandinsky was already thinking about writing for the
stage. In 1909 he met Thomas von Hartmann, a young Russian
composer who was studying in Munich. Hartmann wrote later
that Kandinsky was dissatisfied with the theatre in general, and
the opera in particular, from 1909; in any case, they began to
experiment together.
Their first idea was to stage one of Andersen's fairy tales. The two
of them often developed their ideas with Hartmann improvising
at the piano while Kandinsky described what was happening on
the stage. Kandinsky sketched a medieval set for the fairy tale,
and they created a play text that seems to be the same manuscript
called Paradise Garden, which was found in his papers. But that
same year, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes created a sensation in Paris,
featuring exotic designs by Bakst. After experimenting with
translating their fairy tale into a ballet, Kandinsky and Hartmann
discarded their idea and started again.
At this time, a Russian dancer named Alexander Sakharoff joined
the collaboration. The three of them made it a priority to know
something of one another's creative disciplines, and already
having some understanding of music in common, Hartmann and
Kandinsky set out to learn about dance, starting with ancient
Greek dance, while Sakharoff studied the paintings in the
museums. In this way, the next project they approached was a
staging of Daphnis and Chloe, for which Kandinsky again
sketched a set for the opening scene, "a marvelous trireme with
warriors, by no means a realistic picture, but it conveyed an
astoundingly strong impression of Daphnis' terror."
We hardly ever hear about the association of Kandinsky,
Hartmann and Sakharoff without a quotation from Kandinsky's
own description of how they experimented, trying to find the
currents that connected their respective arts:
From among several of my watercolors the musician would
choose one that appeared to him to have the clearest musical
form. In the absence of the dancer, he would play this
watercolor. Then the dancer would appear, and having been
played this musical composition, he would dance it and then
find the watercolor he had danced.
Kandinsky thought that whatever the three of them found by
studying together would not only prove the inter-relatedness of
their arts, but would also teach him something about painting.
Twenty years later he wrote: "It is more profitable for an artist to
acquire specialist knowledge of some unfamiliar subject, provided
he is able to develop the... capacity for analytical-synthetic
thought, than to be narrowly 'educated' in his own subject."
Kandinsky wrote four plays in the years 1908-9. These were Stage
Composition I, Voices, which came to be retitled Green Sound; Giants, which was revised and retitled Yellow Sound in March of
1909; Stage Composition III, Black and White; and Stage
Composition IV, Black Figure.
Georg Fuchs opened the Munich Artists' Theater in early 1908,
and that might have given some impetus to Kandinsky's stage
projects. There is no doubt that Kandinsky knew Fuchs' writings
on innovative theatre, which were related to the groundbreaking
ideas of Adolphe Appia (Swiss) and Edward Gordon Craig
(English). Fuchs' work was the talk of Munich art circles, and two
of Fuchs' articles even appeared in the same journal, Apollon, that
Kandinsky contributed art reviews to in 1909-10. Kandinsky's
own writings on the theatre resemble some of Fuchs', but we will
never know whether Fuchs actually influenced Kandinsky, or just
corroborated what he already felt to be true. Having collected his
own ideas for as many as twelve years, Kandinsky finished writing
his first book, On the Spiritual in Art in 1910. It was published the
following year. This early book already contained a discussion of
"new dance," with reference to Isadora Duncan; it also introduced
the principles of "the theater of the future" that Kandinsky would
invoke for the rest of his life.
Friends of The Blue Rider on the balcony of Münter and Kandinsky's
apartment at Ainmillerstrasse, 36, Munich, 1911. L to R: Maria and
Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler, Wassily Kandinsky (seated), Heinrich
Campendonk and Thomas Hartmann.
Of all of the plays Kandinsky had written, he singled out Yellow
Sound to work on over the longest period of time. He finished it
in 1912, and published it the same year in the Blue Rider Almanac, an inter-disciplinary collection of pieces he edited with his great
friend, the painter Franz Marc. Before the text of Yellow Sound,
Kandinsky included a full essay, "On Stage Composition." In it,
Kandinsky talks about his theories of dramatic art at some length,
particularly making clear the distance between his own
conception of the "synthesizing" stage art and Wagner's
gesamtkunstwerk, or "total" work of art—a difference that
remained key to Kandinsky's theatrical ideas.
In 1913 Kandinsky planned to illustrate the Bible with, among
others, Franz Marc, Paul Klee and the Expressionist painter and
playwright, Oskar Kokoschka. In the first year of his
correspondence with Schoenberg (1911), Kandinsky had already
asked for news of Kokoschka several times, and had mentioned
seeing his paintings three years earlier, that is, when Kokoschka
first began to exhibit. 1913 was also the year that Kandinsky's
autobiographical Reminiscences appeared; it included a
description of his pivotal encounter with Wagnerian theatre. Sounds, an awe-inspiring volume of thirty-eight prose poems was
also published, and remains to this day an incomprehensibly
hidden treasure of modern literature.
The famed Dadaist Hugo Ball and Kandinsky had met in 1912
when Ball came to the Munich Artists' Theater as dramaturg after
studying and teaching in Max Reinhardt's drama school. In early
1914, Kandinsky introduced Ball to Hartmann, who had just taken
Kandinsky's script and set designs for Yellow Sound, along with
his own music, to Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in
Moscow. Stanislavsky—whose tastes in theatre experimentation
ran in a different vein, and whose theatre had just been producing
Turgenev, Molière, and Goldoni—had not shown any interest in
it.. Ball proposed Kandinsky's Yellow Sound for production at the
Munich Artists' Theater. It was planned to be performed with
Hartmann's music and Alexander Sakharoff dancing the leading
role. During this year, Kandinsky wrote his next known stage
composition, Violet Curtain, generally known as Violet. Perhaps
the energy for this new play came from his peers' recent
encouragement for Yellow Sound.
Wassily Kandinsky for his stage composition Violet, Picture 2, 1914. Pencil,
watercolor, ink on paper. Detail. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Also in 1914, Ball made plans with Kandinsky, Marc, Hartmann
and Fokine for a book to be titled The New Theater. This was to
be a sort of Blue Rider Almanac of experimental theatre.
Kandinsky was to write an article on his version of the "total work
of art," to be included with articles and stage designs by the
others. Klee and Kokoschka were to contribute designs and plays
respectively. They hoped for this association of artists to expand
into an International Society for Art, a society for modern artists
of the theatre, painting, music and dance. In a letter to
Schoenberg at this time, in anticipation of a visit from him,
Kandinsky wrote: "Here there are all sorts of theater plans, which
you have already heard about from Marc. You are therefore
awaited with particular eagerness."The "eagerness" of this letter
makes it all the more heartbreaking that every one of these plans
for play production, book, international society—and even
Schoenberg's visit—were aborted by the sudden outbreak of
World War I.
In an odd twist of fate, the resident Kandinsky and the touring
Stanislavsky, both in Germany when war was declared and, as
Russians, both suddenly now enemy aliens, found themselves
being deported together. Stanislavsky and his entire theatre
company had been held at gunpoint, and Kandinsky given 48
hours to leave. Care of a clever ruse devised by a Russian
Orthodox priest Kandinsky knew, Kandinsky and Stanislavsky
were able to escape being put on a German boat, which could
have been dangerous, and instead left for Switzerland together on
the same neutral Swiss boat!
*
Part 2 to follow:
Kandinsky's Theatre Life, 1914 to his death in 1944, and beyond…
Cover Image behind type:
"A Fluttering Figure" 1942, oil on wood
26 X 20 cm. PompidouCenter
Note: An earlier, different version of this article was developed for Dramaturgias journal, Brazil.
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