‘Sound, colour, word!... In their innermost core these methods are wholly identical: their final goal obliterates external differences and reveals their inner identity.’ This is the clash of cymbals that sets in motion Wassily Kandinsky’s 1912 essay, ‘On Stage Composition’, which concludes the seminal abstract manifesto The Blue Rider. Theatre, he booms (with typical muscular optimism and polemical scale), was the final glorious terminus that abstraction must reach, were the movement to ever win its war against the infernal ‘black hand’: philistinism, cowardice, deafness to the spirit. Without the bravery to urgently need spiritual nourishment – and be willing to smash together the forms to get it, reputational damage be damned – we risked losing those senses we’d insulted with a century of indolence. ‘Necessity creates form,’ he warns. ‘Fish that live at great depth have no eyes.’
‘His way of thinking,’ as Elisabetta Barisoni, head of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice, explained to me, ‘might as well be imagined as taking place in a theatrical set.’ Currently at the helm of an exhibition at the city’s Centro Candiani, one tracing Kandinsky’s artistic interrelations and heirs, the curator makes clear that the artist formulated his ideas about the abstract project in the crucible of the theatre – it was a means that served ‘to better express the inner spirituality, a stage he created to allow the spirit to emerge in a more powerful way’. His, therefore, was a liberated, platonic theatre, one freed from the shackles of the previous century’s glut of useless form: one in which, as Kandinsky put it grimly, drama, opera and ballet ‘arose and became petrified, separated from one another by high walls’. The artist concedes that Wagner did his bit to chisel a chink in these partitions, layering the same movement in multiple ‘concrete forms’ – but, while he was on to something, the composer did not manage to bulldoze the concrete between them. It was time for Kandinsky – a dash of madness in his eyes – to get behind the wheel.
The artist identified the century’s three most high-profile dramaturgical prisoners: sound, time and colour. Music had been muzzled, made slave to character: in the theatre of abstraction, this prima lingua of the spirit would beat out the pulse of the play. Plot, too, held time in the stranglehold of narrative, smothering its proper musical propagation. Worst of all, colour had been unconscionably patronised: relegated to bit-parts in costume and scenery, itself a flimsy wall in a house of cards hardly fit to withstand the movement a proper play should quake with. By contrast, if Kandinsky had his way, ‘the coloured tone’ – and, in connection, ‘pictorial form (decoration)’ – would have ‘an independent importance, treated as a method with equal rights’. The great liberator stands proudly on the bones of Wagner’s apparent Gesamtkunstwerk and demands: ‘And what about colour? Can’t colour be an actor too?’
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And so, The Yellow Sound was born, striking the final blow of The Blue Rider’s abstract argument. It is the first, and most complete, of four ‘colour-tone dramas’ that Kandinsky would devise; it was scored by Thomas von Hartmann, the anarchic composer who proclaimed, with the same revolutionary fire of his fellow riders, that ‘external laws do not exist. If the inner voice does not rebel, everything is permitted.’ And indeed, to read it now, the play seems to brim too densely with all the cumulative potential energy of the manifesto’s contributors to be anything more than an abstract possibility. It was, however, on the very cusp of realisation, set to come to life in 1914 with the direction of Dadaist pioneer Hugo Ball.
There’d surely have been no better helmsman to pilot this abstract voyage on to the stage: the play – a carnival of colour symbolism, movement and music – is indeed nothing if not surreal. Split into ‘Pictures’, rather than scenes, its cast of characters comprises warped and fantastical forms. Amorphous giants – ‘as large as possible’, Kandinsky demands – are the standard bearers for the many potential lives of the colour yellow (whose tones, for the artist, could variously evoke and inspire cheekiness, excitement, even madness). Words are used sparingly, and only to ‘create a certain “atmosphere” that frees the soul and makes it receptive’. Colour is directed with sensitivity in the stage directions, emancipated as promised from its rather shallow bit-parts as comatose costume and stage dressing, and moved firmly into the spotlight. Time proceeds as music does, to quote Schopenhauer: according to a logic that ‘reason cannot understand’.
Outside the bounds of the play, however, time marched grimly on towards 1914. As World War I began, the play’s production – its set designs and compositions all on the verge of completion – was scrapped, and Kandinsky returned to Russia. Here, on the eve of revolution, he would marry his wife, Nina, intending to settle into life in Moscow – where he now enjoyed many prestigious appointments thanks to a new Soviet government keen for affiliation with avant-garde artists. But when the authorities’ aesthetic allegiance to abstraction began to sour in 1921, the Kandinskys moved to Berlin, where a position at the Bauhaus beckoned. Much had changed – amid all the professional and artistic upheavals, he’d also lost his only son, Lodya, aged three in 1920 – but there was still, perhaps, a glowing ember of an ambition deferred; a job left unfinished.
And if he were in search of intellectual friction to reignite his theatrical fervour, the Bauhaus was the place to find it: the air was thick with the smoke and mechanical bustle of experimentation. It was a few years, though, until Kandinsky joined the fray, as far as board-treading and its orchestration were concerned. In September 1927, Georg Hartmann – sculptor of automata and director of the Friedrich-Theater Dessau – approached him to select something to put on for the theatre’s next matinee. In the years beforehand, his Bauhaus colleague had noticed ‘compositions that – so superlative was the strength of line and colour – appeared in their dramatic contrast as if created for the stage’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, rather than a play, the artist chose to stage a piece of music: Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano cycle that expresses the composer himself moving through the 1874 memorial exhibition about his friend, the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann.
Much like Kandinsky had, the composer divided his cycle into ten ‘Pictures’, plus ‘promenade’ sequences to represent the act of walking between the paintings, consumed variously by spiritual absorption and grief-tinged reflection. Critic Harald Wetzel distils the cycle’s achievement perfectly, calling it an act of translation from Hartmann’s ‘Bildsprache’ into Mussorgsky’s particular ‘Tonsprache’. Seeing how its evolution from painting into music had only refined the work’s ‘inner identity’, Kandinsky hoped to clarify it even further through a third and final act of translation. And, if Georg Hartmann is to be believed, he succeeded: ‘The promised designs that Kandinsky presented to me, despite my high expectations, came as a surprise. For they not only constituted a break from the past representationalism of the stage design, but also with the laws of sequence: these were scenes that build up, so to speak, with the music.’
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In September 1927 Kandinsky was first approached with the pitch; 11 April 1928 was the final performance of Pictures at an Exhibition at the Friedrich-Theater Dessau. Set designs, costumes, meticulous and multiform choreography, he masterminded them all – and all this while also preparing for two other major exhibitions.
It’s hard to imagine how, even with the inevitable collaboration with his Bauhaus colleagues, this kind of turnaround might have been possible. For one, Paul Klee’s son, Felix – just 20 at the time – chipped in as assistant director: he brought, in all likelihood, his love of abstract puppets to the gig, detectable, one fancies, in the choreography of the play’s few human actors. The rest, however, is a story which is told chiefly through the language of colour.
That language is never more explicit than in the play’s ‘promenades’, which bookend and bisect the abstract variety show – falling circles waxing red and cooling to a sublime blue as restlessness melts into absorption. For the most part, though, these ‘Pictures’ wear their inspiration more nakedly. ‘The Market Square at Limoges’ is one of the richest, based on its musical counterpart by Mussorgsky, which was in turn based on a painting by Viktor Hartmann depicting saleswomen in a marketplace, arguing over the best spots from which to vend their wares.
Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet makes its influence subtly felt in the sculptural costumes worn by these faceless women, as automated in their movements as anything Georg Hartmann could devise. The city’s location, perplexingly, is represented not with scenery, but with an aerial city plan, which in turn feels like an affectionate nod to the Bauhaus’s typically stylised cartography. First and foremost, though, Kandinsky chose this approach for the ‘gripping urgency’ he felt it had, compared to any other form of representation. It’s no accident that his first prose poem, ‘Hills’, ends with the perspective-cancelling caveat: ‘All this I have seen from above and beg you too to look on it.’ It’s a matter of distillation: an ambition to bring all of a place – at its most abstract level – on to the stage, rather than just a single broken piece of it, from one (hopelessly external) point of view.
The instinctive impression that Pictures at an Exhibition is a bit of a Russian doll would be true in more ways than one. It’s a play which, above all, celebrates excellence in the artists of his country: a place where he helped establish 22 art museums in a few short years; whose palette made him fall in love with colour itself. Dr Wilhelm van Kempen, an art historian who saw the play in 1928, had this to say about Kandinsky’s design for Mussorgsky’s climactic ‘Great Gate of Kiev’ – based on a real architectural design by Viktor Hartmann which was actually affixed to the Russian landscape:
This finale is more than just a patriotic flourish: it’s a victory dance. His is a deeply rooted conviction – right down to synapse and sinew – in the theatrical animacy of shape and colour, the primacy of movement: a quest to simmer down all the key ingredients of spectacle into the richest possible jus.
The truth is that these stage designs – when one sets the elements in motion in the mind, casting rhythmic light and sending out a phalanx of imaginary black-clothed stage hands to convert image into animacy – bring one closer to what Kandinsky meant by abstraction than almost anything else. While the audience were, at the time, a little baffled – recognising Mussorgsky’s piano cycles but wondering what all the other nonsense was about – that speaks to how ahead of its time it was: here in Dessau, in 1928, was a piece of stagecraft that, were it put on today, would feel manifestly contemporary. It’s no wonder he’s since inspired such a diverse ecosystem of creatives. Art, architecture, sculpture, music, colour, dance – here, all forms collide. The result: ‘a dancing, a triumph, a radiance’.
To learn more about Wassily Kandinsky in his broader avant-garde context, see ‘Kandinsky and the Avant Gardes: Point and Line to Plane’, running at the Centro Culturale Candiani, Venice, until 10 April. For details, visit muvemestre.visitmuve.it
