Notes on Kandinsky's Bauhaus Paintings and the Great Synthesis of the Arts

Introduction

When Nazism impacted the German art world in the late 1920s and 1930s, artists, especially those at the Staatliches Bauhaus, were deemed "political undesirables." Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian painter, faced political pressure as he aimed to depict a weltanschauung or "world view," merging art, media, and practices.

Kandinsky's "Great Synthesis of the Arts" sought to reveal the collective historical narrative artists contributed to. He pursued this at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. His paintings like Black and Violet (1923), Development (1926), Fragile (1931), and Gloomy Situation (1933) reflect this synthesis. Iconographical analysis shows his hope experienced a decline due to Nazism, the termination of his teaching career, and the Bauhaus's dissolution.

Kandinsky emerged with the Blaue Reiter, a German Expressionist movement reflecting World War I's fear and anger. Around 30, he abandoned law for painting. His early works (1900-1910) were impressionistic landscapes and woodblock prints with Russian Orthodox iconography, transitioning to abstraction by 1911. Publishing On the Spiritual in Art, he explored line, color, and shape's spiritual effects, creating Composition, Impressions, and Improvisations, influenced by music with vivid hues and black lines.

In 1923, Point and Line to Plane accompanied a stylistic shift to a graphic style with hard lines, geometric forms, and bold colors. Post-Composition VIII (1923), his titles became more abstract, referencing colors or moods. He explored various media like watercolor, gouache, cardboard, paper, and canvas, employing modern tools like water atomizers and stenciling.

Invited to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1921, two years after its 1919 establishment, Kandinsky found a hub of art and artists. The Bauhaus merged the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Originally named "Staatliches Bauhaus" by founder Walter Gropius, it aimed to merge functionality with aesthetics. Initial staff included Johannes Itten, Lionel Feninger, and Gerhard Marcks.

The Bauhaus faced hostility, leading to staff turnover. By 1925, the Weimar public forced its relocation to Dessau, transforming it into the Bauhaus School of Design in 1926. In 1928, Gropius was replaced by Hannes Meyer, who emphasized function over aesthetics and architecture over fine arts.

Meyer was replaced in 1930 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who sought a balance between aesthetics and function. Financial setbacks increased the emphasis on function and production. The Bauhaus closed again in 1932, relocating to Berlin. There, Mies van der Rohe tried to revive Gropius's inclusive Bauhaus. However, the Nazi Regime stripped its funds and dissolved it by 1933.

Kandinsky's paintings capture his Bauhaus experiences. Analyzing his works involves reading geometric forms and color as signs of complex thoughts and emotions, reconciling divergences from his texts. His 1920s paintings display an increasingly graphic style with dark hues and black, conforming to the Bauhaus's constructivist philosophy.

According to Kandinsky, color, combined with form, affects the senses like music, evoking emotions and images. This project follows a historical narrative involving Kandinsky, the Bauhaus, and life in Nazi Germany, split into three parts.

Chapter One provides an overview of Kandinsky's career up to 1933, starting with musical, scientific, and religious influences. It traces his trajectory to On the Spiritual in Art (1911), imparting the meaningfulness he found in color and form, supplemented by Point and Line to Plane (1926). The chapter concludes with a summary of the history of the Bauhaus as Kandinsky experienced it.

Subsequent chapters examine pairs of paintings in relation to Kandinsky's two phases at the Bauhaus: the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter Two begins with events at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus, such as public interference, antagonism between Gropius and Itten, and the transformation into the Bauhaus School of Design. These events add perspective to Kandinsky's Black and Violet and Development, which function as images of hope through the interactions of planes, colors, and lines. Chapter Three analyzes Kandinsky's Fragile and Gloomy Situation, revealing a less hopeful artist due to the rise of the Nazis and Mies van der Rohe's decision to fire Kandinsky.

The four paintings exemplify Kandinsky's use of meaning-infused form, establishing a narrative of his pursuit of the Great Synthesis of the Arts. He only achieved this strictly in painting, long after the Bauhaus's closing. This project offers a glimpse into Kandinsky's pursuit, the initial hope in the 1920s, and the loss of this hope in the 1930s.

Literature Review

The foundation of Kandinsky scholarship is his writing, especially On the Spiritual in Art (1911), crucial for understanding his paintings. It supplies the main points of Kandinsky's theories about color and form, which he applied to his own works. A decade later, Kandinsky supplemented these ideas with his book Point and Line to Plane (1923), detailing the significance of the line and the point.

Kandinsky argues the meaningfulness of forms via four main points.

1. Color can be warm and cold, light and dark, with lightness and darkness in both warm and cold colors.

2. There is a horizontal movement between yellow and blue, and between black and white; however, the black-white spectrum remains inactive because of its lack of warmth and coolness.

3. Movement toward light or dark represents resistance inherent in colors. Color's movement toward white represents eternal resistance and the birth of ideas; movement toward black eliminates resistance and represents the death of possibilities. Lightening yellow with white increases its effect, as does darkening blue with black.

4. Black and white imply metaphysical realms. Yellow implies a lack of boundaries, while blue implies depth. White symbolizes a world "so far above us that no sound from it can reach our ears…It is a silence that is not dead, but full of possibilities…the nothingness that exists before birth." Black represents a world of "…nothingness…an eternal silence without future, without hope…Musically, it is represented by a general pause after which any continuation seems like the beginning of another world …finished, complete for all time."

Color excites a physical and emotional response. Eyes can be spiced up and cooled down by colors; colors can be tasted and heard. Influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, Kandinsky paid attention to the "inner sound" of color: warm colors played warm notes; bright colors play high notes that are disturbing; cool colors play deep repose. Responses to color are determined by its relationship to form.

A harmonic composition juxtaposes coloristic and linear forms that "…have an independent existence as such, derived from internal necessity, which create within the common life arising from this source a whole that is called a picture." Color-form relationships had the potential to disrupt the harmony of an artwork. He advised against restricting yellow to a geometric form. A yellow triangle best exemplifies this notion because the sharpness of the color yellow is emphasized when used on the triangle's directional form.

An artist could convey a unified composition where actions, thoughts, and feelings are visualized in a spiritual atmosphere of color, conveying antithetical sign-formations like "Suicide…hatred…egotism…'patriotism'…