Graphic Content: Graphic Art of German Expressionism at the MoMA

“Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth,” German artist Franz Marc once wrote. “All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.” When the German Expressionists searched for a way to get back to basics and recover for the present what they saw as the lost primitive passions of the past, they turned to printmaking and the graphic arts as the ideal medium. In German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through July 11, 2011, the glory days of German Expressionism, both before and after World War I, live again. The content of these graphic works—life, love, war, peace—inspires, informs, and even offends, but never fails to touch something inside you with the “genuine” force Marc wrote about that “guarantees its truth.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Graphic Content."

[Image: Franz Marc. Riding School After Ridinger (Reitschule nach Ridinger). 1913. Woodcut. Composition: 10 9/16 x 11 3/4" (26.9 x 29.8 cm); sheet: 12 13/16 x 14 3/4" (32.5 x 37.5 cm). Publisher: unpublished. Printer: Maria Marc. Edition: One of an unknown number of posthumous impressions. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1940.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art for providing me with the image above and other press materials for German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, which runs through July 11, 2011.]

Animal Magnetism

When I left the Gustav Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie at the end of 2007, I came away with two calendars to grace my office walls for 2008: one by Klimt, of course, and another by Franz Marc. Born February 8, 1880, Marc’s work remains little known by the mainstream public, and I’ve always failed to understand why. Few paintings make me smile the way that Marc’s The Yellow Cow (above, from 1911) does. Pardon the pun, but it’s “udderly” ridiculous in the way the sallow sow leaps across the scene with a beatific grin upon her face. For all his close study of wildlife, Marc is not about photographic realism but spiritual realism. With bold, unreal color, Marc brings to life the inner life of God’s creatures, including this cow, who seems to transcend the bonds of gravity with pure joy. Marc belongs to the Expressionist movement in color and time period, but he has little of their existentialist angst. When the German Expressionists “discovered” Vincent van Gogh and adopted him as one of their own, many of them copied van Gogh’s depiction of his personal demons. Marc, on the other hand, took away from van Gogh the lesson of the felicity of unadulterated color, extending the technicolor fantasies of van Gogh into an almost abstract sphere and focusing on fauna rather than flora.

There’s a great sense of dignity in works such as Marc’s The Little Blue Horses (above, from 1911). Marc painted a whole series of blue horses, a major one of which was sadly destroyed in bombing during World War II. It’s truly amazing how Marc could depict different animals with distinctly different attributes and moods. Marc’s The Tiger is all dark, beautiful menace, while The Cat and The Hound show the gentleness and familiar type of beauty of a household pet. In 1911, Marc formed the Der Blaue Reiter group with Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. I think the collaboration worked because Marc provided the patient, calm balance to the intensely driven Kandinsky, who wanted to revolutionize art with his words and images. Marc also wrote down his ideas on art, but I’ve always found his images to be much more articulate in their depiction of “dumb” animals.

Marc died in 1916, only 36 years old, during the Battle of Verdun of World War I. Just weeks before, Marc and several other prominent artists received word that they would be removed from the front lines, but Marc died before he could be moved to safety—yet another casualty of the senseless of combat. Before he entered the service, Marc’s art had taken an almost Cubist turn in works such as The Fox (above, from 1913). The sly, red fox seems to almost hide within the shard-like pattern of Cubist planes Marc constructs around him. The fox manages to poke a recognizable nose out from the jumble, almost taunting us to track him down in the Cubist jumble. Despite his record of service in World War I, Marc found himself on the Nazi’s list of “Degenerate Art” in 1937. Perhaps the Nazis found the eyes of Marc’s menagerie accusatory, challenging them to ask who was really acting like an “animal.” Throughout 2008, I had many people look at my Marc calendar and wonder who did such works. Perhaps in the near future people won’t have to ask that question.

Pyramid Scheme

Always trying to express the inexpressible in the simplest terms, Wassily Kandinsky tried to depict spiritual progress as a triangle or pyramid to be climbed in his 1912 landmark work of art theory, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. "The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost,” Kandinsky writes. “The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment." Born December 16, 1866, Kandinsky is often accused of writing “incomprehensible gibberish” when it comes to art, but his influence on modern art and the advent of abstraction is undeniable. Kandinsky wanted to link music and art together as two non-rational media following the same spiritual set of rules. Composition VI (above, from 1913) aspires to the state of music in eschewing all recognizable subject matter and becoming pure expression of color and line. Once Kandinsky opened the door and explained his ultimate destination, much of the art world slowly followed him through.

Like Picasso, Kandinsky goes through many different stages in his art right up to the end of his life. Always evolving, neither artist is easy to pin down. However, Kandinsky differs from Picasso in that Picasso sheds his earlier styles for the most part before moving on to the next thing. In Kandinsky’s art, you always sense the baggage of earlier techniques coming along for the ride. The theoretical dialogue Kandinsky maintained with the art world at large represented only a sliver of the larger dialogue running inside Kandinsky’s own head. Fugue (above, from 1914), another musically titled work, reflects the turmoil of all these ideas working simultaneously like point and counterpoint in Bach. Kandinsky founded Der Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc, August Macke, and others and even later taught at the Bauhaus with Paul Klee, bouncing his ideas off of these other artists continually, but I always get the sense of Kandinsky as the ultimate loner in the crowd, stuck inside of his own head despite his best attempts to communicate.

I’ve tried to read Kandinsky’s theories on art but usually come away with only a vague notion and a pounding headache for my efforts. As much as he tried to diagram and chart abstractions such as the spiritual and art itself, they always remained slippery ghosts. Kandinsky’s best explanations for his ideas remain his works themselves. A work such as Several Circles (above, from 1926) seems such a simple thing that even a child could manage, but the perfection of arrangement and the balance of contrast and color belie any idea of accident or chance. Kandinsky always knew what he was doing, thinking and overthinking every element. For him, every shade of color held a storehouse of meaning and every line could change your life with a single turn. “All Profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence,” Herman Melville writes in Pierre. “Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Silence is the invisible laying on of the Divine Pontiff's hands upon the world. Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate. Silence is the only Voice of our God.” Standing before Kandinsky’s works, buttressed by his great scheme of words and aspiring to the condition of music, we realize that silence may be the only voice that truly speaks for them.

Language Immersion

Some people believe that the best way to learn a foreign language is language immersion, the method by which a person tries to operate entirely in a second language. Such immersion stretches the mind to actually think in that second language and make the leap from simply translating everything mentally from their mother tongue. When European artists of the nineteenth century began to encounter the world of Japanese prints, they immersed themselves in that second visual language and stretched themselves artistically to incorporate that wholly alien look into their work. It’s difficult for us today to imagine that initial impact of Japanese art on Western art, but two new books edited by Nobuyoshi Hamada, Wave, Cloud, Pine: Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design and Flower, Bird: Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design (published by PIE Books and distributed in the United States by Rizzoli Books), help recapture the diversity and seemingly endless inventiveness of those Japanese artists that found a place in the souls of artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and countless others. Oddly wonderful works such as Utagawa Kunisada’s Catching a Giant Carp—What Luck! (above, early 19th century) opened up a whole new range of possibility for Western art as Japanese society itself opened itself up to the West.

Unfortunately for those who do not read Japanese, these two volumes contain very little English text. But in one of the few extended passages in English, Hamada explains the appeal of the Japanese approach to nature in art. “The wisdom of past generations lay in capturing this beauty in paintings and craft objects, so to be incorporated into everyday life, enjoyed, and cherished,” Hamada writes. “Unlike Western art, which treats nature as menacing and adversarial, the art of the East pursues harmony with nature and focuses on humanity’s perceptions of the natural world.” When Ito Jakuchu paints The Colorful Realm of Living Beings: Hydrangeas and Fowls (above, 1759), he elevates flora and fauna to the level of humanity, integrating Buddhist and Zen abstract concepts with concrete nature. For someone with the sensibility and sensitivity of Van Gogh, such works represented the world inside his head and heart that his hands still struggled to realize visually. Perhaps better than any missionary, these traditional Japanese designs conveyed the truths of Buddhism and Zen to Western audiences looking for an alternative to the Christian tradition tainted by centuries of politics and warfare.

Hamada breaks up the two volumes into the five categories of wave, cloud, pine, flower, and bird and entrances you with repetition. Between stunning color reproductions, Hamada intersperses preparatory drawings in fine detail that place the technique of the artists under a microscope. Right after seeing how an artist represents a wave’s motion in color in the context of a painting, we see the pure line itself in black and white. Hamada isolates the gesture and focuses on the human element in representation, specifically how the artist sought to reproduce the spirit of the wave and not the photographic reality. Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, which Hamada includes in his examination, looks like no wave ever seen by human eyes, yet the biting fierceness of a wall of water strikes us through Hokusai’s gestures better than via any snapshot. Once you get the visual language down, Hamada guides you through the multiplicity of uses Japanese artists put it to. Japanese prints may lead the wave of Japonisme in the Western mind, but Hamada proves that the gestures of those prints ripple throughout Japanese culture to furnishings, kimonos, pottery, postcards, and even photography. Even the patterns of rock gardens contain the elements of traditional wave patterns. Examples such as the wave pattern found in the Undulating Bargeboard of the Gokonomiya Shrine (above) demonstrate how these motifs reach every corner of Japanese life. Such integration just can’t be found in Western civilization, which may explain not only our historical disintegration and our fascination with the East.

As I paged through these works, I found myself reverse engineering so many works of Western artists into the Eastern images before me, consciously going against the grain of influence. When I saw Gan Ku’s Tiger (above, late 18th century), my mind immediately flashed to Franz Marc’s Tiger. Marc doesn’t copy Gan Ku’s animal and may never have even seen anything by the Japanese artist, but the same spirit of the animal itself shines through both works. The preparatory drawings with their distinctive lines reminded me of the drawings of Van Gogh, whose draftsmanship seemed so “wrong” to contemporaries yet seems so right to us today. There’s certainly a danger in trying to link these traditional Japanese patterns to their implementation in Western art, but there’s also a benefit in seeing just how deeply those motifs have taken root in Western visual culture since the late 19th century. Influence is often such an elusive trail to follow that such clear and documented lines of descent as the effect of Japanese art on Van Gogh’s generation is an irresistible path of research.

The lack of English text actually benefits a non-Japanese reader in some ways. The lack of verbal explanation frees the reader to surrender himself to the images themselves. Allowing the sequences of images to pass and engrave themselves on your imagination through repetition, you will find yourself inspired by these motifs and the artists that practiced them. Startling variations, such as the stylized, almost modernly abstract clouds of Tosa Misufumi’s Amanohashi (above, from 1855), will open your eyes to the amazing inventiveness of these artists working within an ancient tradition. Nobuyoshi Hamada’s two volumes of Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design are an ideal gift for any young artist learning how to see the world and shape an individual vision from a universe of possibilities.

[Many thanks to Rizzoli Books for providing me with review copies of the PIE Books titles Wave, Cloud, Pine: Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design and Flower, Bird: Traditional Patterns in Japanese Design and for the images above.]

Wild Kingdom

Few artists have captured the power and beauty of savage beasts like Eugene Delacroix. Born April 26, 1798, Delacroix painted inspirational scenes of the struggle for freedom such as 1830’s Liberty Leading the People and brought the exoticism of the Orient to France in works such as 1828’s Death of Sardanapalus. However, I’d like to focus on how Delacroix viewed the king of the beasts in works such as Tiger and Lion (above, from 1828-1829). There’s certainly a great eye for realistic detail, but what separates Delacroix from those merely copying nature is how he dramatizes it. The almost human cast of the eyes of the tiger and lion as they circle one another, each looking for an opening to strike, speaks as much of mankind’s bloodlust as any animal instinct. Oddly, Henri Rousseau saw this painting exhibited at the Paris Salon and patterned the kindler, gentler animals of his paintings after Delacroix’s anthropomorphized bestiary. As revolution raged in Delacroix’s Europe, however, it was difficult for the politically engaged artist not to believe that it was truly a jungle out there and to populate his art accordingly.

My favorite Delacroix lion appears in his 1841 watercolor above. The freedom and speed of watercolor as a medium permitted Delacroix to convey that same sense of movement and unbridled energy. I’ve always thought that Delacroix’s big cats address the tension of William Blake’s Tyger, Tyger even better than the poet’s own illustration. It’s also fascinating to me to consider that as Delacroix paints these creatures inspired by his experience of revolution and war, Edward Hicks is in America painting his Peaceable Kingdom series of doe-eyed lions laying down with lambs in a pacifist paradise. Looking ahead to future conflicts, I see some connection between Delacroix’s animals and those of Franz Marc, who similarly captured the power and tension embedded into the fabric of the tiger as a physical manifestation of the boiling pressures that soon would explode in the form of World War I.

I used to laugh at some of Delacroix’s later animal images, such as Lion and Alligator (above, from 1863). Some of the combinations reminded me of monster movie match-ups like Mothra versus Godzilla. In Lion and Alligator, the tiny reptile doesn’t stand much of a chance against the cruel claws ready to tear it apart. As much as I try to read this work politically, I can never decide if the lion represents the people, tearing into the cold, reptilian heart of royalty through revolution, or if the lion represents the established power, crushing the hopes of the little people struggling to be free. At the very least, it’s an image of inequality, a vast departure from the more evenly matched tiger and lion of 1828. Perhaps Delacroix had wearied of the battles strewn across his life and saw wars for what they essentially are—the bane of the voiceless caught in the crossfire—which is as true in nineteenth century Europe as it is in the twenty-first century Middle East.

The Protectress

When the Nazis threatened to destroy the works of Der Blaue Reiter group and other modern artists in their quest to eradicate what they deemed “Degenerate Art,” Gabriele Munter, a member of Der Blaue Reiter , spirited many of those works to her countryside home and hid them from certain destruction at great personal risk. Born February 19, 1877, Munter, along with Paula Modersohn-Becker and Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, represents the female contingent of German Expressionism. In 1901, Munter enrolled in the Phalanx School, the art school founded by Wassily Kandinsky, who would become not only her teacher but also her lover. Along with Franz Marc, August Macke, and others, they founded Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. In her painting Boating (above, from 1910), Munter paints Kandinsky standing in the boat, guiding the way as the woman (Munter herself?!) rows the boat. If there’s a great woman behind every great artist, Munter was certainly the one behind Kandinsky at this period of his career.

Munter learned not only from Kandinsky but from all the members of Der Blaue Reiter. She adopted her bold, spiritually charged palette from Marc. From Alexej von Jawlensky, she learned the technique of cloisonnisme, in which the artist darkly outlines all the shapes. Munter used that technique in her portrait of Jawlensky with fellow artist Marianne von Werefkin (above, from 1909). Munter paints her friends with unrecognizable abstraction. If it weren’t for her title, they could be any couple lounging on the grass. With such scenes Munter took common Impressionist subject matter and updated it for the Post-Impressionist world.

When World War I erupted, Kandinsky and Munter fled to Switzerland, escaping the fate of Marc, Macke, and so many other artists killed in the war. Kandinsky later returned to his native Russia and married another woman. Munter and Kandinsky reportedly never saw one another again. Despite that betrayal, Munter always remained true to the art of Kandinsky and her friends, even in the dark days of the Nazi regime. Her Yellow House With Apple Tree (above, from 1910) offers an idyllic scene of the happy home she may have once dreamed of having with Kandinsky. The bright colors and strong outlines that made many of her works seem like stained glass windows often acted as a window into her romantic, faithful soul.

Carnival of the Animals

Few artists tickle my sense of humor as much as Franz Marc, especially through works such as The Yellow Cow (above, from 1911). Born February 8, 1880, Marc specialized in painting animals of all kinds in unique poses against fantastic backgrounds in one of the more unique personal interpretations of Expressionism. The sight of The Yellow Cow exuberantly leaping across the picture strikes a note of simple, animal joy that precious few Expressionist works hit, thanks mainly to the social strain placed on the collective artistic psyche in the lead-up to World War I. Rather than fall into that same pit of despair, Marc chose to “talk” with the animals, developing a dialogue with the carefree existence of his pets and the more exotic animals he saw in zoos.

Marc, however, was not facile painter of a single emotion. Like so many other German artists right after 1900, Marc fell under the spell of the art and recently translated letters of Vincent van Gogh and sought to add a spiritual aspect to his art through the use of color. I’ve always thought of Marc’s The Tiger (above, from 1911) as a distant cousin to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” in its exploration of the dynamic of beauty and destructive power in a singe living being such as the tiger. With August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky, Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter and exchanged ideas on the philosophy of art with his fellow artists. To make an animal actually appear to think, as I believe Marc does in The Tiger, that artist needs to do a lot of thinking himself.

As World War I seemed more and more inevitable, Marc pondered the fate of the world, but rather than portray people facing the coming storm, he depicted animals in peril in The Fate of the Animals (above, from 1913). Through a series of almost prismatic lines, Marc creates a great sense of tension in The Fate of the Animals. The vibrantly colored animals seemed trapped within the forest, unable to escape their sad fate. Sadly, Marc himself seemed trapped by an inescapable fate. Just after an order had been issued to remove notable artists from combat, including Marc, he was killed by an artillery shell in 1916. Over a short span of just 5 years, Franz Marc created a body of work that showed an entirely new way of looking at Expressionism and a whole new way of thinking about animals and nature and, through them, humanity’s place in the world.

New York, New York

Over the holidays, Annie, Alex, and I visited Annie’s parents and took advantage of being so close to New York City to venture out to see some of the great art on exhibition there. Leaving Alex with his Gung Gung and Pau Pau at their office in New York, Annie and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show promised all the great works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and others along with a bunch of works normally not on view. It was fascinating to see works such as Rembrandt’s Man in Oriental Costume (aka, The Noble Slav) (above, from 1632), but it was a bit disconcerting to see it with the name “VANDERBILT” hung prominently over it. If you didn’t know better, you’d have through that someone named Vanderbilt was the artist.

I enjoyed seeing all the great Dutch works together and seeing the “in the style of” works emulating Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals. One tiny “wannabee” Vermeer still had the “Vermeer” plaque on the gilded frame, a historical marker showing that some collector once paid for a Vermeer and didn’t get one. The Met separated the show into two parts, the first containing most of the famous works and the second the lesser works that seemed more like an unnecessary appendage. (I had more fun getting sidetracked by works by David and Thomas Lawrence while traveling between he parts.) Throughout, however, the obtrusive and downright fawning acknowledgement of the original collectors of these works (and later donators to the Met) rankled with me. Annie doesn’t appreciate Rembrandt’s works as much as I do, wondering why everyone’s nose is so unattractively done, but she, too, felt that the homage to the donors went overboard.

(Philippe de Montebello, the current director of the Met, recently announced his retirement. I’d like to take this opportunity to declare myself interested in the position. I would be willing to do it for half of what Philippe was raking in, too. If appointed, I promise that never again would a show at the Met fawn all over the donors like The Age of Rembrandt. The Age of Butt-kissing would be over. I’m sure the board of trustees, composed mainly of wealthy donors, would welcome my new approach. My e-mail’s over on the right, if the Met is listening.)


Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907; Oil, silver, and gold on canvas; Neue Galerie New York; This acquisition made available in part through the generosity of the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer.

A few days later, Annie and I and friends Tatjana and Kyle headed out to the see the Gustav Klimt exhibition at the Neue Galerie. (My earlier review of the Klimt exhibition catalogue is here.) After touring Hoboken for 30 minutes in search of parking (finally winning a spot by basically intimidating someone else from taking it) and then descending into the labyrinth of New York public transportation, we finally arrived at the museum—a grand old mansion facing Central Park. I was surprised at how crowded the museum was on a Sunday afternoon, but Klimt’s appeal shouldn’t surprise me any more. Anyone who loves Klimt should venture to the Neue Galerie before the show ends this June. You’ll never have such a chance to see so many Klimt drawings, paintings, and artifacts in one place together.

Seeing a work such as Adele Bloch-Bauer I (above) in person made the whole trip worthwhile. Rightfully the focus of the show, Adele Bloch-Bauer I drew a huge crowd around her, all trying to get close enough to see the intricate workings in gold and silver that composed her dress, something no reproduction can do justice to. Fortunately, Adele Bloch-Bauer I will remain at the Neue Galerie after the show concludes, but seeing her in the context of Klimt’s other works only enhances the experience.

I had never been to the Neue Galerie before and loved the experience, so different from the feel of the larger survey museums such as the Met. We ate a quick, delicious lunch in the basement Café Fledermaus of authentic German food. I could have wandered around the amazing, sharply focused bookstore for hours, but left content with calendars of work by Klimt and Franz Marc for my office walls. The only bone of contention that Annie and I had with the Neue Galerie was their policy of no children under 12, which forced us to leave Alex again with his grandparents and uncles for the afternoon. It rankled even more when we saw two other couples with very small babies in tow, which I guess is allowed. (What are you going to do, make them put the baby in a locker?) I wish the Neue Galerie would reconsider their policy. If not, Alex will be visiting them in the Spring of 2018, and that’s just not right.

All in all, it was a wonderful time to be in New York City to enjoy family, friends, and great art.

P.S.—To the nice lady who approached me in the Neue Galerie with the words “You seem to know a lot…” before asking what the words “Gustav Klimt Nachlass” that appeared on many of the drawings meant. I didn’t know then, but I did some research when I got home. Those words were part of a stamp of authentication placed by the Gustav Klimt Estate on works left unsigned at Klimt’s death. After a famous artist dies, drawings are the toughest type of forgeries to fight, especially rough preliminary studies, unless you literally place a stamp of approval on the actual works.


[Many thanks, again, to Gung Gung, Pau Pau, and Uncles Johnny and Gary for taking care of Alex while Annie and I were at the museums. Special thanks also to Tatjana and Kyle for helping guide us through the arcane passageways of the New York subway system and for a great day in the city.]

The Baron of Color

The man Franz Marc once called “August Vonderfarbe” or the Baron of Color, August Macke, was born on this date in 1887. In works such as Woman in a Green Jacket (above, from 1913), Macke showed his penchant for bold yet harmonious color as a means of expressing his inner life. Through Marc, Macke met Wassily Kandinsky and joined the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, taking Kandinsky’s spiritual and almost mystical concepts of art and color and applying them to his own art. Like Matisse, one of his earliest influences, Macke demonstrates a pitch perfect sense of how to take apparently dissonant colors and make them work beautifully together, just as the central green jacket of the painting above serves as the central, key note of the entire composition.

In Girls Under Trees (above, from 1914), Macke's interaction with the Orphic painter Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 shines through. Delaunay’s style of colorful Cubism fills the landscape of Macke’s pastoral scene. It’s amazing to think of just how quickly Macke assimilated all of these different influences and yet continued to follow his own path. Equally amazing is his ability to continue to create such beautifully composed and balanced work as the equilibrium of Europe teetered in the days leading up to World War I. Unlike his friend Marc, who linked specific colors to certain emotions or states of mind, Macke never made his color choices so specific, choosing instead an overall effect. Perhaps this difference allowed Macke to maintain his composure as the world turned upside down.

Macke’s last, unfinished painting is aptly named Farewell (above, from 1914). In September 1914, just the second month of World War I, Macke died at the front in Champagne, France. In this final work, Macke, the lord of color, finally allows the dark days to intrude upon his painting. The somber figures wandering in the scene seem to be in mourning, as if returning from a funeral. Rather than the verdant backdrops of his earlier works, the landscape behind the dark-clad mourners seems unreal, made up of discordant shards instead of a coherent picture of the world. It’s interesting to wonder just how Macke would have finished his Farewell, which in its present state so aptly captures that moment of unrest in Europe as well as the unrealized promise of his tragically short life and career.

Abstract Spirituality

"The more frightening the world becomes” Wassily Kandinsky once said, “the more art becomes abstract." Born December 16, 1866, Kandinsky saw his world grow ever more frightening as fascism and war engulfed Europe in the twentieth century. Kandinsky responded to such madness with the first truly abstract paintings, such as Black Strokes I (above, from 1913). After studying and excelling at law and economics, Kandinsky didn’t begin studying art until after he turned 30 years of age. Perhaps coming to art later in life, after seeing and experiencing so much, allowed Kandinsky’s probing, analytical, yet highly spiritual intellect to see a whole new way of painting that a more classically trained artist could ever conceive.

Kandinsky actually began as a relatively conventional figurative painter. The Blue Rider (above) , which Kandinsky painted in 1903, shows his romantic side, with the lone, enigmatic horseback rider crossing the landscape. When Kandinsky and fellow artists August Macke and Franz Marc formed their group, Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky’s painting provided the name. Prior to World War I, Kandinsky’s style evolved into something more and more abstract, first resembling the strong, expressive color schemes of Marc and later losing the subject almost entirely in a complete loss of the recognizable subject. Kandinsky fled Germany just before the outbreak of war, returning to his native Russia, where their revoltion would soon turn everything upside down. Unable to fit in with the Constructivist and Suprematist movements en vogue in the new Russia, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1921, living there and teaching at the famed Bauhaus until 1933, when the Nazis closed it.

Upon his return to Germany, Kandinsky’s abstraction took a more scientific, analytical turn, as can be seen in works such as Yellow-Red-Blue (above, from 1925). The common attack on abstract works such as those by Kandinsky is that “anyone can do it,” but anyone looking closely at Kandinsky’s works can see the intricacy of composition and design. "Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult,” Kandinsky once responded to his detractors. “It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential." Kandinsky’s artistic “poetry” often took the form of art theory, most famously in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which likens life to a pyramid we each must climb with the assistance of the artist, if we permit them to help. We can’t register today the same shock that Kandinsky’s work delivered almost a century ago. Decades of abstract art have jaded us to the full impact of the artistic, political, and spiritual punch they once held. When the forces of darkness in the early twentieth century threatened to obliterate or, perhaps worse, appropriate art to their imperialist ends, Kandinsky’s turn to abstraction changed the rules of the game and denied them their prize. In looking to abstraction, Kandinsky held on to what was truly real in the human spirit.