Many artists in the first decades of the twentieth century experimented with new styles of expression, which departed drastically from the past. In visual art, such a departure can be said to have already begun since the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements in the late 19th century. But it is the twentieth century Modernist Movement that made the clearer break from the past Western tradition that dated back to the Renaissance or even the ancient Greek times.
Wold et al. captured the chief characteristics of early 20th century artistic expression by emphasizing the diversity, with a few underlying principles. The increasingly rapid and drastic changes in the Western world brought about by technological and scientific advances, as well as by political, economic, and social developments, demanded new artistic expressions from artists to reflect the impact of these changes on the spirit, emotion and the new sensibility of the people. Artists tried to express their interior psychological states rather than mirroring the exterior physical reality. What artists attempted to express was their conception of the world based on inner experience, not outward appearance. Toward this end, various styles appeared. The Fauvist group used brilliant colors in a wild manner to evoke desired emotional response; Cubist painters reduced nature to basic geometric patterns such as circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles, and to three-dimensional forms, such as cone, sphere, cube, and cylinder. The broadly defined Expressionism gave primary attention to the expression of intense, elemental feelings rather than a description of the visible world. Most works of these styles included distortion of color, line, and form, and often an almost violent application of paint to the canvas.
While distortion of nature and abstraction from the physical object became pervasive among many artists, it is Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) who is often credited as the founder of abstract painting and “who revolutionized the art of our century with his idea of a new pictorial language” (Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Kandinsky, TASCHEN, 2003). Born in Moscow in Imperial Russia, Kandinsky studied law and economy at Moscow State University in his youth and only began painting after he was 30 years old, driven by an “interior necessity.” (Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, first published in 1911) He tried to find his own distinct style of expression from the very beginning. His early work reflected his Russian heritage and a deep affinity to the Russian folklore (see The Blue Rider). In the path of transition to abstraction, the perspective is still discernible in his paintings during 1909-1910 period, but he now employed a striking palette whose powerful, impastoed colors serve more than the simple description of objects.
He then increasingly focused on the free and subjective exploration of the expressive power of color and form independent of physical reality. By 1910, Kandinsky had produced first entirely abstract painting where the physical object was dissolved completely. In his later years, his work became more geometric and constrained and he continued exploring the interplay between different shapes (lines, circles and triangles, etc.) and color.
In his abstraction, Kandinsky used color as the basis for artistic expression. With the dissolution of the object, color and form become primary means of expression in their own right. Kandinsky also wrote extensive essays on the psychological and expressive meaning of color, and associated color with sounds which range in varying intensity from high to low, and from shrill to muted. He also associated tone with timbre, hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of the sound, and attempted to establish what he called a theory of harmony for painting, comparable to that of music. “Music, as a form of art free from all obligation, thereby provided him with both a point of orientation and a yardstick in his observation on the ‘sounds’ of colors” (Ulrike Becks-Malorny, 2003).
In his influential essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky reflected that “a work of Art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way.” “It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere”, and “causes vibration of the soul”. The same can almost be said about experiencing an abstract painting, which asks the viewer to let the senses take it in with an open heart, and sometimes demands prolonged contemplation. When the artist’s inner voice expressed in their work causes vibration of the soul, the impact can be deeply profound and universal. Among all early twentieth century artists, Kandinsky was “the most logical and consistent in his pursuit of abstract means of expression” and he carried painting “up to and over the threshold of abstraction.”
References
1. Beckett, W. The Story of Painting. New York: DK Publishing. 1994.
2. Becks-Malorny, U. Wassily Kandinsky. Köln: TASCHEN. 2003.
3. Kandinsky, W. “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” in Classics of Western Thoughts, Volume IV: the Twentieth Century. Gochberg, D. S., ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1980.
4. Wold, M., Martin, G., Miller, J. and Cykler, E. An introduction to Music and Art in the Western World, Tenth Edition. Dubuque, IA: Brown & Benchmark. 1995