Concerning the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular

 

 

Concerning the Spiritual in Art and in Painting in particular

Writer: Wassily Kandinsky. Field: theory of art. Composition: Essay. Eight parts.

Main theme: Art's relationship to the human soul.

Secondary themes: Spiritual triangle. Form. Expressionism. Language. Soul. Inner resonance Colour. Nihilism. 

Historical context: In 1910, humanity's search for meaning was at a standstill. Capitalism had given rise to many inequalities and created the conditions for future conflicts. The brilliant minds of the various European countries form a kind of cosmopolitan elite that is appalled by the illusions and misdeeds of nationalism. The artist-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called for the formation of a European humanity that would transcend nations, and drew a stark medical conclusion for Europe: European civilisation was suffering from a particularly degenerate form of nihilism (the value of nothingness): passive nihilism: incapable of creating valid forms of humanity. Kandinsky is fairly close to Nietzsche in his diagnosis. But he attributed nihilism to the rather vain materialism of consumer society: "the nightmare of materialist doctrines, which has turned the life of the universe into a stupid and vain game, has not yet dissipated. Returning to oneself, the soul remains oppressed". The quest for salvation requires the redemption of the soul. In materialistic times, the soul lies below what the artist calls the "spiritual triangle". This formula, which has a mystical ring to it and as such is more or less unjustified, remains at the heart of the artist's quest for redemption. Kandinsky wanted salvation. But this can only ever come through art. He opposed Hegel's idea that art was a thing of the past with the idea of spiritual renewal through art. The dimension of art is not political (in contrast to the conceptions of some German philosophers and poets such as Schiller or, to a certain extent, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche), it is 'spiritual', in other words religious in the mystical sense of the term.

Why read this essay today?

The idea that redemption can be achieved through art is one that has permeated Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. It's a rather preposterous idea, and one that is not widely shared today. We leave it to a few teenagers who have not yet entered the world of work (what we call "real life"), to the unemployed who wish to do so (who don't live in "real life" anyway) and to a few marginalised people. The spiritual situation has hardly changed since Kandinsky's time, and the artist deplored this state of affairs. He did, however, believe that the upheaval of the world should lead people inwards through a "spiritual turning point". You never know what lies behind a turning point: the road you are on is no longer straight. To turn is to change one's outlook, to move towards new perspectives. And these perspectives are those of abstract art, which is an art in which the soul can rise to the summit of the spiritual triangle:

Our era is one of great separation between the real and the abstract, and of the blossoming of the latter. But when the new 'realism', transformed by new processes and by a point of view that still eludes us, comes into its own and bears fruit, then perhaps a chord (abstract-real) will resound that will be a new heavenly revelation.

Curiously enough, escaping from reality is supposed to bring us back to it to some extent. Art is a way of making life more alive, the real more real. The important term is resonance, which is described as "inner resonance". Kandinsky links this term to the Belgian poet and playwright Maeterlinck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a year after the publication of the painter's text. Inner resonance is inseparable from a form of symbolism in which two disjointed elements come together to create a higher type of reality. The desire to bring together two apparently opposing elements (abstract-real; form-colour) seems to be the keystone of the painter's project. To reach the top of the spiritual triangle is to push symbolism to its highest degree: that of ecstasy, where reality ends up resonating, in other words, encompassing the subject within it.