Kandinsky

Abstract art was not `discovered' by any single artist. Several painters can be seen as working towards total non-representation in the early years of the century, and examples can be cited of `abstract' works from even earlier (for example, drawings by Victor Hugo or Alexander Cozens), when their full implications could not be recognized. Nevertheless, once the abstract initiative was launched, the idea that momentous breakthroughs had been made quickly took hold, and was seen as akin to an objective scientific discovery. Claims and counter-claims were made as to who was the true `inventor,' to the extent that works were even falsely back-dated! The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky claimed, or has been credited with, the `creation' of abstract art. At the core of this film is a dramatic recreation of Kandinsky's account of returning to his studio one dark evening, and being astonished by an unknown masterpiece of abstract art leaning against the easel - a picture which turned out to be one of his own landscapes fallen on its side. `Now I knew for certain that the object spoiled my pictures.' While this film's narration does indeed emphasize the notion of an inspired breakthrough to Abstraction, the picture it conveys in more purely filmic ways is a rich and complex one. Cuts and fades from Russian folk art, fairytale illustration and icons to Kandinsky's work suggest the intense spiritual content that he hoped not to lose but to intensify as he became more abstract. The dramatic torch-beam lighting, which in the scene of the fallen painting creates a sense of Kandinsky's search and discovery, is also evocative of the supernatural mystery he felt in art. His paintings, propped on the somewhat cruciform easel, echo the devotional images and altars in peasant homes. The film gives a strong feeling of art in the context of everyday life rather than the impersonal museum, and we note how Kandinsky extended his paintings over on to their frames, as if to break the delimiting boundaries of art. (Several Modernist painters, such as Seurat, have felt the same impulse, and for similar reasons, as has a contemporary artist like Howard Hodgkin, who is one of many artists still powerfully influenced by Kandinsky.) At another level, the intimate relation between art and life is underlined in the film where shots of the Bavarian countryside and domestic architecture strikingly match Kandinsky's seemingly unreal colors and images in his earlier fairytale pictures. The film shows him loath to abandon those images and their associations. The camera tracks move in to reveal two peasant figures in the midst of a seemingly abstract composition, or pan a second time over a passage of free brush-marks that opened thefilm, and in which we now clearly discern three horsemen. One of the factors that enabled Kandinsky finally to shed figurative imagery was the example of music, which could, while inherently abstract, carry strong spiritual content. The music running through this film serves, subliminally, to make the point that the artist's orchestration of visual shapes is like the composer's manipulation of sounds.

`...has the rare quality of knowing how to present the pictures within their own context.'UNESCO

For more information see section 19.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.