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The Murnau pictures continue into the second gallery, with Kandinsky growing more experimental. The colours in ‘Murnau — Kohlgruberstrasse’ are almost lurid yet the picture’s design is so strong that it balances the intensity and he gets away with it. The colour patches in ‘Study for Houses on a Hill’ are decidedly non-naturalistic, and the forms in ‘Kochel — Straight Road’ are becoming distinctly angular and geometric. ‘Boat Trip’ of 1910 offers a more developed abstract mood in the treatment of water and landscape. Kandinsky had obviously been looking at Bavarian folk art now (he particularly liked the devotional glass paintings), for its influence can be discerned in his flattening of forms. The simplifications grow more extreme. Look at the symbolic and pictorial clarity of ‘Improvisation 9’, a lyrical outburst of colour but carefully structured to express a deeper meaning.
Active as a writer and co-ordinator of artistic movements, in 1912 Kandinsky formed with Franz Marc ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ (The Blue Rider), a loose association of artists centred on the almanac they published. Asserting the spiritual content of all true art, a theme Kandinsky expatiated on in his main theoretical text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, they also promoted the collaboration of art forms (music was especially important to them) and a new internationalism that would break down the crippling individualism of an essentially materialist society. At this point, Kandinsky divided his paintings into three types: ‘Impressions’ (observations of the natural world), ‘Improvisations’ (spontaneous expressions of mood or feeling), and ‘Compositions’ (more ambitious expressions of his inner vision, closely related to music).
Kandinsky made only ten Compositions, of which three were destroyed in the second world war. In the third room of the exhibition are two sketches for ‘Composition II’, one of the lost paintings, featuring interlocking schematic figures including a horse and rider, a sign Kandinsky used for the transformative power of art. Recognisable motifs such as this, together with mountains, churches, boats and angels with trumpets, recur in works of this period, though becoming increasingly apocalyptic in tone. Room 4 is a small room of works on paper, including a powerful study for the cover of the Blaue Reiter Almanac and a decorative painting on glass of two girls. Room 5 takes us into more familiar territory with ‘Cossacks’ (1910–11), the Tate’s own picture, the apparently spare arrangement of lines in ‘Lyrically’, which is actually a horse and rider dashing across a pale landscape, and the rather lovely ‘Nude’. A couple of ‘Improvisations’ here mingle landscape and figure in a beguiling manner. The visitor gets a strong feeling of being in the presence of the world and the spirit.
There are four more galleries to examine, equally demanding and exhilarating. ‘Composition VII’ (1913) in Room 6 is a bit of a monster: it’s a heated lyrical fantasy with the colour edging once more towards the garish as it did in earlier years. The less frenetic paler ones are easier to study: ‘Landscape with Red Spots I’ is a beauty, as is ‘Improvisation 34’ and ‘Sketch for Deluge II’. Though calmer and more emphatic in their abstraction, motifs such as the church tower of Murnau and mountains can still be discerned. ‘Improvisation 30 (Cannons)’ is what it suggests, and achieves it with a quality of touch and colour that is ravishing. Gorgeous passages of paintwork continue in Room 7; in, for instance, the whole lower third of ‘Fugue’ of 1914, in which stripe and patch abut evocatively. There is so much visual activity that these paintings of Kandinsky’s high period need time. The pictures in Rooms 8 and 9 hold less interest for me — though there are fine things here such as ‘Circles on Black’ (1921) — as the forms hardened and he approached the cosmic geometrical Suprematism of Malevich. What is repeatedly astonishing is that Kandinsky orchestrated these incredibly complex compositions with such panache, and made them almost always legible and coherent.
As Kandinsky wrote in the Blaue Reiter Almanac (usefully republished by the Tate in a paperback study edition at £12.99): ‘The veiling of the spirit in matter is often so thick that, generally, only a few people can see through it to the spirit. There are many people who cannot recognise the spirit in a spiritual form. Today many do not see the spirit in religion, in art. There are whole epochs that deny the spirit, because the eyes of man cannot see the spirit at those times. So it was during the 19th century and so it is for the most part today.’ That was written nearly 100 years ago, and, deluged in materialism as we are, it’s still hard to find the spirit. This exhibition is wonderfully uplifting. Kandinsky and his fellow artists believed that a great new era had begun, that the world was on the threshold of spiritual awakening. That unquenchable optimism holds us still with its intensity. It seems to make things possible. It offers just the right kind of calming tonic for a society which alternates between cynicism and hysteria. A revelation.
The exhibition travels to the Kunstmuseum Basel, where it will be on display from 21 October 2006 to 4 February 2007.
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