If there is one historical fact that every schoolchild remembers, it is that William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings in 1066 and so the history of England began. Art history students have their own version of the uncontested item of knowledge—that Kandinsky made the first abstract painting in 1910. Now a new exhibition at Tate Modern, which includes little-known works from private collections and loans from the Tretyakov in Moscow, adds some long overdue complexity to the modernist shibboleth of abstraction. But it doesn't, in fact, go as far as it should.
According to art history, Kandinsky pursued a revolutionary course, purging his work of the representational language that had defined all western art until then, and putting in its place pure colour, line and form to produce a new kind of art for the modern era. It wasn't that simple. As the exhibition shows, Kandinsky's abstraction was considerably more old-fashioned than the styles of many of his less abstract contemporaries—the cubists and futurists for a start.
Kandinsky's path to abstraction began with paintings of fairy tales and the lower Alpine landscapes of Bavaria. Like the romantics, he believed that the landscape contained spiritual truths; like the German Nazarenes and English pre-Raphaelites he idealised medieval legends; like the symbolists, he isolated and generalised elements from biblical stories and history paintings to produce a work such as Saints, a sentimental symbol of human goodness and spirituality. The same motifs crop up over and over again—churches, cemeteries, knights with lances, snow-capped mountains, fir trees. It's much the same vocabulary that Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic, employed almost 100 years earlier. The step forward that Kandinsky made was to conclude that the spiritual essence of these elements lay in their colour and shape, not their existence as things. He thought, rather simplistically, that if he could abstract the basic lines and colours of these naturally occurring phenomena and mythical stories, then he could create a spiritual language in art. He never left the old world of representation behind. The motifs of his abstract paintings resemble these things—little semicircles piled on top of each other look like the hills of southern Germany; long lines in black and white are like the lances of the knights of his earlier work; triangles in blue and green sit where mountains once stood.
In 1911, Kandinsky published one of the most famous artist's texts of the century: Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In it, he went a stage further than the simplification of forms; he argued that line and colour could function like music: "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." This was not as radical as it might sound—for centuries people had been drawing parallels between architecture and music. Kandinsky extended this idea to painting and then he set out which colours created what moods and emotions—"Blue is the typical heavenly colour… The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest." Kandinsky's colour language is simple-minded. Once again he extrapolated from real things and their traditional symbolism, hence the sky is blue, and so blue is heavenly. Next, Kandinsky imagined that he was organising all these colours and forms into compositions that aroused complex sensations in the mind of the viewer. The exhibition glosses over the daftness of this theory. Kandinsky's paintings don't only raise the specific question of what constitutes an abstract painting, they also raise a bigger aesthetic issue: how can an artist produce great art when the ideas upon which he has based his work are utter twaddle?
I have an answer to this. Of course, it is not difficult to wander around this exhibition and tire of the endless permutations of soft gaudy splodges and sharp, strong diagonals, which offer the contemporary viewer little more than a thrilling smorgasbord of colour. Kandinsky traditionalists may argue that this weariness is only to be expected, after the visual art equivalent of listening to 150 Mozart symphonies in an hour and a half. But there's another story here, even if it's not the one the artist intended. What Kandinsky's work shows is how difficult it was to paint an abstract painting. Once they accepted the notion of abstraction, then painters had to work out what to paint. This is Kandinsky's struggle—the central drama of his paintings. You can see the ferocious energy with which he set about this goal. He painted some of his large canvases in four days, and in the crude, quick brushstrokes you witness the drama of a man trying to create a new world without reference to the one he was living in. Kandinsky's paintings aren't truly abstract, but they tell the story of an artist striving for abstraction, and failing heroically. It's the myth of a man who is trying to leave the real world behind, even when he can't.
