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Art Wassily Kandinsky's First non-objective water color Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. His interest in art and intellectual matters was stimulated by his sympathetic father, a man of unusually broad views and great talent in drawing. In his early autobiography, Kandinsky warmly acknowledges his indebtedness to this parent who consistently encouraged him and also to an aunt who fostered his interest in music, books, folklore, and what he called the profound essence of the Russian people. Kandinsky seemed to delight in lingering in the twilight area between pure abstraction and representational painting. He invented a nonobjective method of titling the works, distinguishing between impressions (which could have titles), improvisations (which were numbered), and compositions (which were preceded by a series of studies and which, as major works, were labeled with roman numerals). Kandinsky was characteristically modest about his achievements and about his historical role in painting.
Even as the first painter to create both a theory of abstraction and a set of canvases that were also abstract, Kandinsky recognized that abstract painting was an inner-necessity rather than a historical necessity. Kandinsky suggests that abstraction is inherently neither more valuable nor more effective than realism. Abstraction had merely been a necessary step in his quest for the pure effects of colors and lines, which can be observed in his First non-objective water color (1913). The elimination of the representation of objects removed misleading variables for the viewer. Pure abstraction found First non-objective water color makes pure effects of color and line. This allows the painter to experiment with the motions and emotions of the colors without the encroaching recognitions of abstraction.
At the same time, Kandinsky shows, in spite of his theoretical disclaimers of the priority of abstract art, an acute awareness of the historical importance of the steps he took toward an inevitable pure abstraction in First non-objective water color. Kandinsky's reflections make clear how he reaches his equation that realism equals to abstraction and abstraction equals to realism. By attributing degrees of abstraction and realism in First non-objective water color, he asserts that the relative relationship of the two depends upon the individual artist. Where the element of abstraction is diminished quantitatively in any painting, it is increased qualitatively. Presumably, the reverse equation is also true.
Hence, abstraction and realism are essential parts of the whole. Kandinsky concludes that the question of form is not a question at all. For if the equality of the two antipodes (realism and abstraction) places them on the same plane. Both forms are basically internally equal.
Kandinsky's idea of abstraction in the arts -- he speaks of dance and music as well as painting is unique. Instead of attempting to make one art the touchstone for all the others, Kandinsky bases his vision of the relations of the arts upon the inner-necessity of the artist. While Kandinsky understands the external differences between the arts, he declares that all the arts are responses to the same spiritual necessity. To him, this makes all the arts identical at the level of the spiritual and creates the internal identity of all forms. This step opens the way for the abstraction of these forms in First non-objective water color, which before had not seemed possible to him. It should be clear from the nature of Kandinsky's inspiration, the emotive purposes of his art with its mystical and even transcendental qualities, that his work First non-objective water color cannot be termed nonobjective in the current sense.
Kandinsky in his work was the first to release painting from its former bonds to the object -- as the Cubists did not do -- and thus set painting on a course which in many places it still follows. Although it was to be some time before Kandinsky would find a substitute for the object, his First non-objective water color seems to have marked the beginning of a period of conscious abstraction. First non-objective water color shows a clear relationship to the synthesis practices of Gauguin - the space flattened and the Fauve poetic pinks illuminating the work in an arbitrary and decoratively effective manner. Kandinsky began the series of Improvisations, spontaneous and lyrical arrangements in which subject matter is reduced to an absolute minimum and in which a kind of automatic response to nature or to the artists own emotion is the dominant factor.
This intuitive response is summarized by the painter in connection with his well-known First non-objective water color. Inner necessity is the basis of Kandinsky's paintings. The starting point, according to Kandinsky, is the study of color and its effect on men. He then proceeds to describe the different characteristics of color with regard to their potential emotional effect, after which he indicates that these are generalities which can hardly be expressed with accuracy in mere words.
Color in First non-objective water color does not stand alone; does not dispense with boundaries of some kind. Color is not only presented in terms of a definite shade of that color, but also delimited and divided off from other colors. Lines and colors in First non-objective water color are found to have an emotional relationship or affinity to each other apart from their individual or collective effect on the spectator. Thus vertical lines tend toward white, and horizontal toward black, sharp colors to sharp forms (yellow and triangle), soft colors to round forms (blue and circle). There is reference to so-called silent colors, to lines which cling to a surface without wishing to part from it, to warm angles and cold angles. Kandinsky's First non-objective water color is full of similarity between colors, temperatures, and certain states of feeling -- it is true abstraction.
John Constables The Hay Wain The Hay Wain painting, one of the landmarks in art history, was Constables third large picture. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1821, it was shown three years later in the Paris Salon where it excited the interest of the young French artists and won a gold medal for Constable. The search for certainty and regularity in the understanding of phenomena was a general feature in the intellectual life of the industrial revolution age. The unbounded trust in nature, the enthusiastic belief of having found in nature a kingdom analogous to perfect human conditions, full of peace and freedom, had disappeared not least under the impact of the industrial revolution understood as an outbreak of elemental natural forces. Constable felt that nature was not so much the liberator of his own original and uncorrupted naturalness, but rather felt himself opposed to nature; he was attracted on the one hand, but conscious of the basic differences between her and the human ideal. Nature was no longer either simple or a harmonious unity: it was full of mysteries and contradictions, which could only be resolved by science.
Constable painted his The Hay Wain from nature in order to preserve a memory of the revelation of nature in her true forms which came to him in the sudden inspiration of creative feeling. That is why in Constable the relation between the sketch and the completed picture is so different from the relation between the two in the work of those masters who invented landscapes from the resources of their own imagination. They put in their sketches the general outlines of something which needed development and elaboration. Constable on the other hand preserved in The Hay Wain his own feeling and the vision of nature which had come to him for future restoration. From this we get a new explanation of the wild and nervous style of those Constables sketches that catch the broken shifting forms of clouds and trees in motion. Constable had discarded the shapely brush-strokes which had characterized all fine painting before his time.
Constable style in The Hay Wain is due to the excited feelings of the painter. It is no more possible to retain the idea that Constables feeling is deep but not emotional. For there is far more expression than mere form in Constables The Hay Wain from nature and this expression is so strong that things almost lose their interconnections and organic structures, since it is the expression of the artists emotional excitement in which nature is experienced; what appears is more a personal excitement than things in motion. In The Hay Wain, Constables clouds came into the foreground of the picture, rather than remaining in the distance as they should have done, in the nature of things; Constable made various attempts to master the difficulties. Sometimes he painted the clouds with such thick color that the shadow cast by this heavy mass of color produced the illusion of plasticity. Sometimes the clouds became ornamental, and again, when they stood out brightly against the dark foliage of the trees they pushed themselves forward out of the background into the foreground; in the full-sized sketch finally they lost all precision: it is impossible to say what sort of clouds they are supposed to be.
With Constable industrial revolution makes for art another turn in development, which still awaits its chronicler -- entered upon a new phase. His The Hay Wain and other sketches are the first and most memorable steps of a painting which finds itself bereft of all the art vehicles of earlier ages. In the primitive epoch nature was the corrective for tendencies which in themselves were completely independent of nature. To the great realists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was a new element which, above all, had to be reproduced. That which excluded a destructive literalness was not the will of the individual, but the prescriptions of the guilds.
These lost their authority even in seventeenth-century Holland, and were entirely broken down by the French Revolution. For the new industrial age the reproduction of nature was the one artistic aim that remained. This purpose threatened to destroy art as soon as it was achieved, because then the powers of the artist were robbed of their last discipline. Strange as this neglect may seem, the rapidity with which Europe assimilated Constable is even more remarkable. The movement began in Paris. France had the necessary conditions for the part.
Not the culture of her painters -- this sprang from a tradition alien to Constable and was rather of a nature to make her hostile to him -- but a purpose. Industrial age needed what Constable had to give. Bibliography: Friedenthal, Richard. Letters of the Great Artists, Vol. 2; Random House, 1963.
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