Abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky’s works revolved around Russian folklore and culture, portraying his belief in art’s ability to transform the self and society. By Uma Nair

The newly-opened Guggenheim Museum Bilboa in New York is now home to a stellar exhibition by abstractionist Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky. The most enchanting works here are his early woodcuts. Scholars say that before he abandoned the figurative idiom, Kandinsky created evocative works on paper, largely in black and white.

Lawyer-turned artist

A very few people are aware that Kandinsky had traded a very promising career in law for a position of an art director at a printing firm in Moscow. The next year he came to Munich, carrying with him the knowledge of classic printmaking techniques like woodcut, etching and lithography.

The woodcut, in particular, challenged the artist to reduce compositions and narratives to simplified, expressionist forms, often using just black ink or limited palettes.

In 1907, Kandinsky produced numerous original woodcuts featuring women in traditional Russian costumes, embodying the romantic, fairytale imagery he favoured early in his career. Among them, Birches (Schalmei), Women in the Woods (Frauen im Wald), Two Birds (Zwei Vögel), and Church (Kirche) — as well as another woodcut, Horsemen — were reissued as photogravures with the title, Xylographies, in the Parisian magazine, Les Tendances Nouvelles in 1909.

Church (1907)

The title, ‘Church,’ draws attention to the pervasive musical elements of the portfolio. Kandinsky’s fascination with the emotional power of music inspired his later abstract compositions, and was a lifelong interest for the artist. In this woodcut, we see a composition that blends the architectural setting of a church with an onion-shaped dome with two women in the foreground. The women are standing on each side — left and right — and both are lost in their own contemplation. The details and elements of the children, the sky and the street — all become a part of a panoramic spread that juxtaposes each detail and anchors them with a singularity.

Scholars say that in this series of  woodcuts, Kandinsky prepared one block for the artwork’s lines and another with its coloured areas, pressed both onto the same paper, and then hand-painted the resulting image through watercolour. Kandinsky’s lifelong and passionate interest in music was a great inspiration to his later abstract period. Although these works seem traditional to the contemporary audience, the reduction of forms was an important step forward for his early career.

Kandinsky’s woodcuts are experimental in technique but fully assured and characterised by juxtapositions and combinations of events. The woodcuts ranged in style from Kandinsky’s early fairytale idiom to fully-fledged abstracts of great power and beauty.

For him, 1907 became an important year. He produced a body of woodcuts that was published as Xylographies in 1909 in the Parisian periodical, Les Tendances Nouvelles. In the works, we see a current of nostalgia for traditional Russian folklore and culture — the onion-shaped domes of Church, the costumes of the women and an ambient sense of fullness.

Hence, Church is an important woodcut in the lifeworks of Kandinsky as it reveals how his Russian roots continued to move and inspire him. He believed that great artists were like prophets but they had to be driven by a spirit. This woodcut testifies his brilliance, passion and love for the everyday idiom, which we so often take for granted.

Inner necessity

Drawn primarily from the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation’s rich holdings, this comprehensive exhibition traces the four geographic sections of the aesthetic evolution of Kandinsky, one of the foremost artistic innovators of the early 20th century.

He set out on a crusade against conventional aesthetic values and discovered a new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” in a dream of a more spiritual future through the transformative powers of art. As his calligraphic contours and rhythmic forms revealed scarcer traces of their representational origins, Kandinsky began to advance abstraction and elicit what he called the “hidden power of the palette.”

Pioneer of abstraction

For Kandinsky, even the most abstract forms retained expressive, emotive content. For instance, the triangles embodied active and aggressive feelings; the squares denoted peace and calm; and the circles represented the spiritual and the cosmic realms. As a pioneer of abstraction and a renowned aesthetic theorist, he is among the foremost artistic innovators of the early 20th century. In his endeavour to free painting from its ties to the natural world, Kandinsky's work was based on an artist’s “inner necessity”.

In Munich, in the 1900s and the early 1910s, he began exploring the expressive possibilities of colour and composition but he was forced to abruptly leave Germany with the onset of World War I in 1914. The artist eventually returned to his native place, Moscow, where his pictorial vocabulary started to reflect the utopian experiments of the Russian avant-garde. He emphasised geometric shapes in an effort to establish a universal aesthetic language.

Kandinsky subsequently joined the faculty of the Bauhaus, a German school of art and applied design, that shared his belief in art’s ability to transform the self and the society. Compelled to abandon Germany again when the Bauhaus closed under Nazi pressure in 1933, he settled outside Paris, where surrealism and the natural sciences influenced his biomorphic imagery. This exhibition extols his brilliance both as an artist and as a thinker.

Photo: Guggenheim Museum, NY