Page 19 - summer 22

on the violent. Music like the other arts had become something of a battle-field of

Modernism.

5. Wassily Kandinsky
Russian painter Kandinsky described how he discovered abstraction, in Munich. It
was in 1910 or 1911 (his memoirs are vague on dates even one as important as this).
“I was returning immersed in thought from my sketching, when on opening the studio
door I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent
loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject,

depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches.
Finally, I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was – my own
painting standing on its side on the easel. One thing became clear to me: that
objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was
indeed harmful to them.” This led him to the conclusion that, “the aims (and thus the
means) of nature and art are essentially, organically, and by universal law different
from each other.” His early works still have recognisable natural forms beneath the

colours, but nature was eventually expelled from his canvases.

Kandinsky’s vision of abstraction was mystical, based partly on Theosophy, as was
Mondrian’s. Malevich too saw painting as a matter of pure spirit: painting as almost a
form of prayer. While Kandinsky was gregarious, Mondrian was an austere individual
and took the famous abstract grid-pattern associated with his group (De Stijl or The
Style, also known as Neoplasticism) so seriously that when a member dared to
introduce a diagonal, Mondrian immediately broke with him. On the other hand, for

Robert Delaunay, abstraction was not about spirituality but scientific colour theory.
Modernism came in many ideological guises.

Kandinsky summed up his work as “my desperate struggle to free art from the ballast
of the objective world.” As to the vexed question, how do you respond to and
interpret an abstract painting and what did it all mean? - Kandinsky replied that the
more interpretations people had of his abstracts the better. Is this a problem or a
strength for abstraction?

6. Le Corbusier
Charles-Eduard Jeanneret-Gris changed his name to Le Corbusier (the Crow: it was
fashionable in Paris to adopt a one-word name). He was born in a Swiss city famous
for clock-making; his ancestors were religious heretics; and both machinery and
rebellion figure in his work.

Le Corbusier is very quotable …