Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, oil on canvas, 1913 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Juliana Kreinik, Dr. Steven Zucker

http://smarthistory.org/Kandinsky-CompositionVII.html

(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)