(upbeat piano music)
Male voiceover: We're going to look at an extremely large painting
by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky,
working in Munich in 1913.
This is a painting that's in Moscow now.
Female voiceover: It's a year before the first world war began.
Male voiceover: Exactly. This called Composition VII.
Female voiceover: Kandinsky actually used a lot of really abstract titles.
He painted a number of compositions.
He painted a number of improvisations.
Male voiceover: This is the kind of title ...
Female voiceover: He's borrowing from music.
Male voiceover: Yeah. This is ...
Male voiceover: Right, as if this was orchestration.
Female voiceover: It is orchestration for him.
There are various things that are important to Kandinsky
and one of them is the way that color is
endurably connected to music and to other senses.
We see certain sounds and we hear certain colors.
Male voiceover: It's almost [unintelligible] aesthetic experience, right?
Female voiceover: Yes.
Male voiceover: There's a kind of alliance.
There's a kind of natural pairing of color and sound,
or color and shape.
Female voiceover: I thought it was all the senses,
a connecting of all the senses.
Male voiceover: It can be.
I think there are different experiences.
Female voiceover: I think, like, this soup tastes blue.
Male voiceover: Exactly, or the letter B is yellow.
Female voiceover: I have a story about that.
When I was three and I went to the doctor and my throat hurt,
the doctor said, "How does your throat feel?"
I said, "Red."
I remember shouting, "Red."
I just remember feeling that it felt the color red.
Male voiceover: There it is.
Female voiceover: That was my main way
of expressing how my throat felt.
Maybe there is this connection between the senses
and maybe there is a sense ...
I think Kandinsky kind of talks about this,
maybe not exactly this way,
but that our brain sort of ruined that.
That we grow up and we understand convention,
more and more disassociated from those sort of primal connections.
Male voiceover: Kandinsky spent a lot of his life
trying to reclaim that, though. Right?
Female voiceover: Right.
If we look back at the painting.
I keep looking at it and then looking away,
and then looking at it again
and trying to make sense of it.
I think one of the things that's difficult for about Kandinsky
is that I don't really know what he's doing a lot of the time.
Then, if I try not to think about what he's doing so much
and more about what it looks like
and maybe something about what it sounds like.
He named his paintings Composition or Improvisation.
He was also friends with one of the great early modern composers,
the Viennese composer, Arnold Schoenberg.
Schoenberg works with atonal sounds
and atonal systems and compositions.
If you listen to Schoenberg's music and you look at Kandinsky's painting,
I think it makes so much more sense.
Male voiceover: I think we have a little bit, right?
Female voiceover: I think we do.
(soft orchestra music)
Male voiceover: When I listen to Schoenberg
and when I listen to atonal music,
I often feel like there is a real attempt to shape sound
and let it exist somehow as this sort of abstract
almost representation of itself.
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative)
Male voiceover: I do see a kind of affiliation between that
and what some of the artist of this period are doing,
especially somebody like Kandinsky.
Female voiceover: I think the separation
of the representation from the natural world,
whether it's sound and music separated from a narrative composition,
or whether it's ...
Male voiceover: But, music composition ...
sort of high music, what we now call classical music, is often disassociated.
There are examples, of course Beethoven sometimes,
the 6th Symphony will be mimicking some sort of storm.
Very often there isn't that direct narrative.
There is a kind of inherent abstraction.
Female voiceover: In music.
Male voiceover: In music.
When you get to the atonal,
more conscious reference to the sound of music itself,
to the representation of music, almost.
Which I see is sort of more paired
to this more subconscious abstraction in painting.
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Male voiceover: But, you've just called on, I think,
a really important and really significant kind of distinction
between painting music,
which is painting as always trying to craft something that it's not.
Music, it has been much more comfortable historically, I think,
with it's inherit abstraction.
Female voiceover: Music, it so specifically changes mood
and it allows you to sort of stay in that different space
and it evokes emotion.
It sort of brings you to that very particular place.
Listening to the Schoenberg, it feels really uncomfortable to me,
to my ears.
It's not something that's pleasant.
I start to feel physically discomforted.
I just don't really like it,
but that's part of what the idea is.
Painting, at this point, the modernist, in the early 20th century,
are trying to cause a kind of disruption.
Male voiceover: Yeah.
Female voiceover: I think that's a really interesting question.
I mean, what it is about atonality or dissonance
or in the Kandinsky paintings, forms that don't look so obviously harmonious?
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Female voiceover: Like in this painting where there's shapes and lines
moving in different directions,
kind of a sense of parts clashing together
and coming together in that kind of dissonant way.
Male voiceover: Like a disruption of space.
Female voiceover: What is it about modernism
that sort of asks for the disruption of melody and harmonious sound
and sees atonality as a more effective representation of itself?
Female Voiceover: Kandinsky is really trying to evoke
his particular subjective experience of a color
or of a shape or of whatever else he's looking at.
He's sort of creating that subjective moment,
making it look specifically non referential and non naturalistic.
It's not about making a bridge look like a bridge.
It's about, what do you feel like when you're crossing a bridge,
what does that do to you.
If you look at the topic, I mean, is that a horizon line up there?
I don't know.
What is he ...
Is this a landscape?
Figure out what anything is.
I think that that's his point.
Male voiceover: It does feel like it's a painting about
a kind of conflict of the forms themselves. Right?
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Male voiceover: I think you're right.
I think he sort of pushes past our desire to associate
this will landscape or still life or some sort of representation,
even if it's abstracted.
We sort of get ...
He's very successful, I think, in sort of pushing us to another point
where we actually can take seriously this notion of form and color
beginning to have conflict in and of itself.
In a sense, making the abstract legitimate.
Female voiceover: Read against yellow, blue with green.
Female voiceover: Yeah.
Male voiceover: Yeah and in someways,
that's what the music that we just listened to was doing as well.
The very term, atonal, is speaking of this
kind of this kind conflict between sound.
Female voiceover: Something about the modern world though,
that doesn't feel like it matches.
Male voiceover: In that part of it.
Female voiceover: Right. Female voiceover: In classical music there's a narrative in it.
Female voiceover: Right. There's a narrative
and there's a resolution, even if it's disrupted.
Male voiceover: Yes.
Female voiceover: That sense of things coming of the center, not holding, right?
Male voiceover: Yeah.
Female voiceover: To use Yates,
of things coming apart.
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Female voiceover: Of the world not having a narrative
that explains it, that makes sense,
that represents human beings position in the universe anymore.
Male voiceover: It's so seductive to then say,
okay this is 1913, the first world war is about to break out.
Female voiceover: Right. Female voiceover: Right.
Male voiceover: All of those players are there.
I think we have to be very careful about doing that,
but never the less, this is a world that is really
sort of at a moment of crisis.
Female voiceover: I think the idea of apocalypse in inescapable here.
We haven't talked about it,
but in looking at it, it feels like Kandinsky is looking
with ideas of apocalypse, that he's looking to kind of destroy and then renew,
which is a really seductive idea for the artist at this time.
Male voiceover: Yeah.
Female: [Unintelligible] like destroy what's there.
Female voiceover: What is that?
Female voiceover: Because in order to make something new,
you have to destroy what's already there.
Male voiceover: Also this notion of just this ...
Female voiceover: Wipe it all away.
Female: Mm-hmm, wipe it away.
Male voiceover: Absolutely, and create a utopia ...
Female voiceover: Yeah.
Male voiceover: ... that would replace it.
Female voiceover: To me, I think, one of things that's really amazing
is that this is before World War I
and so much changes after World War I.
I think when they realize [unintelligible].
Female voiceover: Wipe everything out is not such a good idea.
Female voiceover: No, it actually doesn't do anything necessarily good.
Male voiceover: Right, and now we have the technology
that actually allows us to do that.
Female voiceover: Yeah.
Male voiceover: We have machine guns.
We have ... yeah.
Female voiceover: Look what happens.
People are maimed and horrible disfigured
and it's actually not as pretty.
Female voiceover: People don't come back from war.
Female voiceover: No, they don't.
They don't have visions that give them access to new truths.
They just sort of see, basically, how horrible people are to one another.
I think this is sort of before that.
There's a kind of utopian idea of what apocalypse will bring,
that it will bring some kind of inner truth.
Male voiceover: Is there also sort of a religious ...
Female: There's a spiritual.
Male voiceover: I mean, a kind of spiritual aspect here.
Female voiceover: Definitely. Female voiceover: Yeah.
Female voiceover: Kandinsky wrote on the spiritual in art in 1911,
two years before he paints this.
He evokes a lot of connection between color and art and faith and spirituality,
having that core belief in something.
Female voiceover: For him, the modern world has lost that spirituality,
that innocence, that connection to emotion ...
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Female voiceover: ... and sort of primal emotion
and the apocalypse might restore that to human beings, ...
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm, absolutely.
Female voiceover: ... what culture, in a way, has stolen from us.
It's a very primitivist idea.
Female voiceover: Mm-hmm.
Female voiceover: I find this idea, the colors, the ...
Male voiceover: The movement.
Female voiceover: ... the connections of everything,
the things moving apart and coming together,
I mean, it's ... you know.
When I allow myself to have colors and lines and shapes
just sort of suggest feelings and tastes and smells,
then I think this painting becomes really enjoyable.
Male voiceover: There's a kind of incredible freedom here
that, you used the word expressionist,
it's so different from later Kandinsky, where things become
so much more systematized in a way, and clarified.
There's a wonderful sense of invention here.
Female voiceover: It's large, so it would have been really immersive.
Male voiceover: Yeah.
Female voiceover: One wonders at the extent to which
he was trying to give us a kind grand statement of.
Male voiceover: A symphony.
Female voiceover: I guess the longer that I look at it,
I can understand more of it,
but I have a hard time really enjoying it.
Male voiceover: It's a tough painting.
Female: It's a tough painting.
Female voiceover: It is a tough painting.
Female voiceover: I think it's meant to be tough.
Maybe that's ...
Male voiceover: That's a tough moment.
Female voiceover: It's interesting that it's still tough.
Female voiceover: Duchamp and Warhol
and the whole century of modernism and post modernism have passed
and this is still a difficult art.
Male voiceover: Schoenberg is still tough.
Female voiceover: Yeah, Schoenberg is still tough.
Male voiceover: Yeah.
Female voiceover: That says a lot.
Male voiceover: It does.
Female voiceover: There's still a lot of power.
(upbeat piano music)