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Der Katalog zur Ausstellung bei Amazon.de: Kandinsky, the path to abstraction

There´s a tendency to think of Modernism as principally reflecting the rapid technological changes that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century exemplified by Futurist images of fast cars or the model for Tatlin´s famous unbuilt tower. But there was another strand. One that responded to the breakdown of conventional religion and the social and political upheavals that were taking place across the western world (including Russia) and looked to art (and some might say to psychoanalysis and quasi-religious cults such as Theosophy and spiritualism) to give meaning to contemporary existence in a way that Christianity had once done.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866 and trained in Munich. He believed along with other "modern’ intellectuals and artists of the time that there was a qualitative hierarchy within human experience (this was a view that prevailed within the doctrine of Theosophy, to which both Kandinsky and Mondrian were attracted), that works of art were somehow united by an essential expressive or spiritual value. He believed that "our souls" were "only now beginning to awaken after the long reign of materialism". For him, as for Nietzsche, the artist was hero, the "prophet of his environment", who could help "the forward movement of the obstinate cartload of humanity."

The son of a wealthy tea merchant he studied law and economics at Moscow University before turning to art, influenced by two seminal experiences; seeing Claude Monet´s series of painted haystacks and a performance of Richard Wagner´s Logengrin. As a result he realised that colour expressed deep emotions beyond mere realistic depiction and that music was able to create and elicit an emotional response even though it was totally abstract and unconnected to anything actual or real. This major new exhibition at Tate Modern illustrates the path that Kandinsky took from his early days as a naturalistic painter employing vibrant colour (suggesting a love of Russian folk art and an early interest in avant-garde movements such as Fauvism) in order to describe traditional scenes such as boats with their elaborately carved prow gathered on the Volga, through to the language of abstraction.

Many of his early works were inspired by the South Bavarian landscape where he spent time with his lover Gabriele Münter. Here the heightened sense of colour, the broody greens, yellows, the dusky violets and midnight blues and flattened perspectives of some of his most beautiful paintings reflect an interest in the primitive and the belief that the unschooled artist and children had unmediated insight into the inner things of life. In 1911, in response to criticism, he mounted an exhibition with the German artist Franz Marc, which was to be the beginning of the influential Blue Rider Group. The rider on the crest of the mountain is a familiar figure in Kandinsky and appears to stand as both folk hero and artist; a sort of Nietzschian superman. In his seminal treatise On the Spiritual in Art published in 1911 he divided his work into three categories: impressions, observations of the natural world; improvisations which were spontaneous outpourings of a mood or feeling; and compositions, which were grander and analogous to the symphonic form and allied to the theories of the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg.

His work immediately preceding the First World War conveyed in its violent, swirling fluidity a world on the brink of collapse. The cacophony of colours and brush strokes suggested the "inner sound" of things. He was to describe his semi-abstract Cossacks (1910-11) acquired by the Tate in 1938 as the "first truly modern painting in the famous museum."

Greatly affected by the Russian Revolution, when his work was considered too individualistic and bourgeois, Kandinsky produced no paintings for several years. After leaving Russia for Berlin in 1921 he took up a post at the Bauhaus school of arts and crafts. The final room at Tate Modern reveals a more hard edged cubism which leaves behind his earlier hectic swirls and where the emphasis is on more stable forms that transcend observations of the actual world. Kandinsky fervently believed that geometric form had its own inner harmony and that even completely abstract form could express this spiritual reality.

Sue Hubbard is a poet, novelist and art critic for The Independent where this article was originally published.

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