Composition VI (1913) image wiki commons

The Kandinsky Code?

Has The ARTicle gone  all Dan Brown on us?

No, we wouldn’t do such a thing;  but Kandinsky was a fairly complicated chap, and his art isn’t just the colourful combination geometric shapes it might appear.
So what’s this “code” thing all about?
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866; he was part of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement in Munich (1911-14). From 1922- 33, Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus in Germany.
Kandinsky based much of his work on his beliefs in the pseudo religion Theosophy which was cooked up by a Russian woman called Madame Blavatsky; Piet Mondrian and other abstract artists were also believers . The basic idea of  Theosophy being that one day the material world would vanish leaving behind an “essence” of its former self, only the Geist or spirit would remain.  Of course, a favoured few would survive, and they would need a special language to communicate with each other. The only art would be abstract; which was nice and handy for an abstract artist like Kandinsky.  Much of Kandinsky’s work is based on trying to work out a visual language in which colours and shapes would have the same semantic meaning as words themselves. He condemned abstract art for its own sake; for him, it had to be linked to spirituality.  He believed that the likes of van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the Fauves had gone some way to freeing colour, but it was still subservient to representational form in their work.
He also believed that visual art should bring together other art forms, there should be a direct transfer from one sense to another; a painting should make you think of music, or dance; his idea was that all arts borrow from music.
In somewhat flowery language Kandinsky said that;

Colour is the keyboard; the eyes are the harmony, the soul the piano with many strings; the artist is the hand that plays, touching one note or another to cause vibrations in the soul.

We know from the work of the great Oliver Sacks and others, that those with synaesthesia  link colours to numbers and words and might ‘see’ colours and shapes when listening to music.  (see  the Dr Sacks video below for more info)

There is a lot of debate as to whether Kandinsky had neurological synaesthesia or if his work only showed the artistic state of synaesthesia that he, and other abstract artists were striving for.  Certainly, Kandinsky had a strong sense of an abstract language of colour and was able to visualise shapes, colour, tones, and location of objects because of his strong eidetic memory (photographic memory).  He said that all the forms he used ‘came from themselves’ and they would present themselves in front of his eyes , he only had to copy them.

He felt colour in the same way as others feel a sound; fingernails on a black board style of thing.
Kandinsky firmly believed that the artist was someone with a loftier spiritual vision than the average bloke on the Clapham omnibus, and abstract art was THE purer way of communicating this vision to people. He strived to produce specific responses in the viewer. This is all well and good but as ideas of theosophy are (largely) unknown, we are left with Kandinsky’s art, sans any theosophical code, and to a large extent sans meaning.

Whether  the viewers in his own time ever truly ‘got’ his art as he intended is debatable. Even if Kandinsky had neurological synaesthesia we know that it is NOT some sort of universal  ’language’ ; it is a very individual thing,  so his shapes and colours could have meant something completely different to a viewer with neurological synaesthesia.

To be able to interpret any abstract language or “code”; a viewer would need to ‘see’ the same language as the artist. In the end, abstraction did not become the universal language that Kandinsky and others hoped it would.
Where does that leave the 21st century viewer?

We are left with Roland Barthes edict that the artist is ‘dead’ as soon as the work is finished we are free to construct our own meaning.

Looking at: White on White Kasimir Malevich 1918

White on White image wiki commons

The work is by the Russian ‘supremacist’ Kasimir Malevich. It was painted the year following the October Revolution. It shows an asymmetric white square on a slightly warmer toned white field. Brush marks, and the uneven pencil line of the square can be clearly seen. It shows us the process of painting; it is not devoid of the human hand.

Malevich

But what does it represent?

To answer this question we need to look at Russian suprematism as a movement.

In 1915 Malevich started a new art form which aimed to move away from traditional art.  Malevich had seen many of Picasso’s works in Russia and had at first dabbled with cubism, which consisted of fragmented forms, but in 1915,  he broke away entirely from any (even marginally) representational form in his work. He wanted his work to be free from political and social meaning and to become purely aesthetic dealing with feelings. . In 1915 he wrote that;

In my desperate attempt to free art from the burden of the object, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square floating on a white field.
He exhibited the picture in Petrograd in 1915, placed in a corner of the room, a place usually given over for the display of Russian icons.

Malevich strived for a purity of shape, particularly the square, so by 1918, he wanted an entirely new visual language for a new world.

Malevich described the supremacist as striving for the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.

The visual phenomenon of the objective world is meaningless; the significant thing is feeling as such quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth the artist can be a creator only when forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature. Forms must not be given life and the right to individual existence.

He said that cubism was too grounded in reality  it  ”did not convey even an inkling of the presence of universal space.” 

If we think of traditional work as governed by reality, things on the earth  controlled by gravity etc.  Suprematism is like floating off into space, where we are freed from seeing reality as it is.

Malevich said the square was “a vivid and majestic newborn, the first step of pure creation in art.”

Colours also had meaning for Malevich, white meant motion,  black unlimited potential and red meant (of course) revolution.

That answers questions about the painting’s representation, it does not represent anything.

Because our visual system searches for patterns and attempts to see real objects in abstract shapes, it is natural that we try to make some ‘human sense’ of this work, but there is none to be had. Ironically, Malevich thought he was freeing the viewer from a search for visual meaning, and his work was egalitarian. We should not try to ‘make sense’ of it, just go with the floating square and see where it takes you.

White on White is pure abstraction. It takes us to the limits of abstract painting, it as about as far as you can go in a move to free art from any role of depicting or representing real objects. Unlike the works in our  Brushing out the Poor  articles it has no social or political meaning, intended or otherwise.

The Taking of Christ NG Dublin

When anyone writes about Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) they normally start with his biography. This is mainly because he was the bad boy of baroque. Caravaggio had a lifestyle today’s tabloid journalists would have loved. Caravaggio was often involved in ‘pub’ brawls and was accused of killing a man in one such brawl. From Vasari onwards some bios of Caravaggio have been somewhat dodgy. You know the sort of thing, short on fact and high on assumption. Okay, we know that Caravaggio ‘the man’ was no Saint, there is enough primary evidence for us to be sure of that, but some of the stuff they trot out in the bios of this guy would make a tabloid hack blush.

We don’t really need to know all that stuff anyway. We only need his art. We need to forget Caravaggio the hothead and look at Caravaggio the artist.

To my mind, this is one of his best works, this work tells us as much about human nature now, as it did in Caravaggio’s time; sadly, some things do not change.

The Taking Of Christ ; Caravaggio’s ‘lost painting’ was discovered, by chance, by a Dublin Art Historian/restorer only a few hundred yards from his workplace. The work was owned by Jesuit priests in Dublin, who thought the painting was by the Dutch artist Gerard van Honthorst (1592-1656) an admirer of Caravaggio’s work. As soon as the art historian saw this painting, he knew it had been wrongly attributed to Honthorst. There was no mistaking the depth of that dark ground for a Honthorst, when it comes to chiaroscuro, no one does it better than Caravaggio.

Enough of all that stuff, what of the painting itself?
Why, you may ask, is this painting important in today’s secular world ?

Well, for a start this is Caravaggio at his best. The painting has a breathtaking beauty that draws us right into that fateful scene. It is a close up, no full-length figures here. It zooms right in on the action, no added saints, angels, or little fat kids with wings lounging about on clouds. These are the bare facts of the bible story. It shows us Judas betraying Christ with a kiss.

The painting depicts a night scene, illuminated just enough for us to see what is going on, Caravaggio demonstrates again that he is THE master of chiaroscuro. Feast your eyes, if you will, on the soft folds of Christ’s garments and compare them to the hard, cold, black metal of the soldier’s armour, look at how beautifully each rivet in the armour is painted; the detail in this work is stunning.

The grubby hand of Judas is firmly around Christ’s shoulder to ensure there is no mistake. With this act Judas is saying; this is the man you want guys.  Judas is dressed in orange, in early renaissance painting (1330-1470) orange would have symbolised corruption and would have been a symbol for Judas himself. I feel Caravaggio has captured the scene seconds after the fateful kiss. Judas moves slightly away from Christ, his dirty work done he can collect his blood money and shuffle off into the dark night, but we know he will not find comfort. The soldier’s outstretched hand grasps Christ’s garment. Gotcha!

Christ’s hands are in that rather strange position that signified grief and resignation to Caravaggio’s contemporaries. Christ’s eyes are cast downwards; his brow wrinkled, mouth slightly open. Yes, this is in resignation to his fate, but also disappointment and hurt at Judas’s betrayal, as if he can’t quite believe that Judas, one of his disciples, would do such a thing to him. The pain on Christ’s face is heartbreaking.

All the figures except Christ are in profile; we do not see the face of the solider arresting him, a metaphor for the faceless thousands who chose  to ignore injustice and claim they are ‘just doing their job’.   A figure on the left flees the scene in haste and horror, not wanting to be involved, it has nothing to do with him.  He cannot get out  fast enough, one outstretched arm is out of the frame of the painting, his cloak swirling in a cloud of blood red over the heads of both Christ and Judas. Red was a renaissance symbol for greed and for slaughter of the innocents. Judas has  sealed his own fate too with that kiss. The bad news for the fleeing man is that the soldier in full profile has hold of that red cloak with both hands; not so fast chum, you can help us with our inquires. The fleeing figure is thought to be St John the Evangelist: but I think it could just as easily be the disciple Peter, who is about to deny Christ again; I told you Guv, I don’t even know the bloke, honest.

Above the soldier’s head, we see another grubby hand holding a lantern which does little to illuminate the scene from above. This hand, with its filthy fingernails, belongs to a man on the right of the painting who is thought to be Caravaggio himself.  Caravaggio stands in for all those who know an injustice when they see one, but choose to ignore it.  In this instance, the bystander’s (Caravaggio’s) undisguised voyeurism is telling.

This painting is not just about the ‘Taking of Christ’,  it is also about the innocent wrongly accused, it is about the betrayed, especially those betrayed by people they love,  it is about the political scapegoat. It is about any injustice you care to name, either in the present time or in history. We are not shown where the action takes place, there is no clear location,  so it could be any place where people – like Caravaggio as the bystander- have turned a blind eye and allowed injustice to continue.

Caravaggio tells it like it is.  He refuses to dress it up with glowing angels in fancy clothes or sanitise the scene. He gives us the scene in its bleak reality, dirty fingernails and all.

Just as it should be.

For more info see

http://www.nationalgallery.ie/en/Collection/Selected%20Highlights/selectedhighlights/Caravaggio.aspx

From what we know of him, Gainsborough  never really liked his rich patrons, in fact, some say he loathed the upper classes.  From his letters it would seem that he was patronised in every sense of the word. Indeed, he wrote to friends that most of his clients only had one part worth looking at and that was their purses. Gainsborough put up with these rich people for the money, it didn’t mean he had to like them. The rich had made him a celebrity artist, if you were ‘anyone’ in Georgian society you trotted along in your best togs  to have your ‘likeness’ painted by him, and could then show it off to your pals .  Gainsborough certainly churned the work out, he is reputed to have produced head and shoulder portraits in under 2 hours.

Lets have a look at the sort of people he painted. Around 1750 he painted a newly married couple from his native Sudbury. The double portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in London, it is of course the snappily titled,  Mr and Mrs Andrews.  It is known that Mr and Mrs A were both from wealthy families and the marriage brought their wealth together.

Gainsborough -National Gallery London

It is quite an odd picture and unfinished. The couple in question are painted on the left side of the picture, the other half of the painting is taken up with a view of their land,  a view of ‘merrie’ England, were all was supposed to be harmony, and the land owner liked to be seen as part of the countryside he owned.  But, has Gainsborough painted them as though they are ‘part of the land’? I don’t think so, they seem to be almost  ‘superimposed’ onto a landscape, they jar the eye, they do not belong.  She looks silly  and awkward sitting on bench outside in a silk frock.
The Marxist writer John Berger says; They are not a couple in Nature as Rousseau imagined nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and expressions.  Certainly, she has an odd expression, he just looks a bit dim and bored. There is not a worker to be seen, the invisible worker strikes again. However, the worker has left evidence of his existence in those lines in the land. Those lines show  that Mr A was up to speed with cutting edge technology, oh yes, he had  Jethro Tull’s seed drill.  The seed drill in its self was contentious, the already landless labourers were worried it would make them redundant.  Landowners like Mr Andrews were after bigger and better profits the plight of their workers and the rural poor wasn’t really on their minds, and Gainsborough knew this. Maybe that is why he has painted Mrs A with such an unpleasant look on her face.

Mr and Mrs Andrews do not belong to the land, the land belongs to them. The land  had been taken away from the common man, and grazing rights etc. along with it.  The industrial revolution had sparked change for all.  But,  a different kind of revolution, a kind  that struck fear in  the hearts of the likes of Mr and Mrs A was not far away,  in 1789 the French Revolution had begun, after famines caused by agricultural practices and climate change – the little ice age. Later in 1791 Thomas Paine would write the rights of man, Mr and Mrs A must have feared they were on the way out.

The national Gallery blumph says that the unfinished space on Mrs A’s lap is left for a child. Wait a second though,  is Mrs A holding a clue to what  Gainsborough may have been intending to paint?
She is holding a bird’s feather, it might be from a bird Mr A has just shot, so why not put it in the painting ?
It would make her look like a countrywoman wouldn’t it?
Some say the reason the dead bird was not included and why the picture was unfinished, was because Mrs A knew the common reading of a  dead bird in a picture. In Dutch art of the time it stood for a hen-pecked husband or a domineering woman. The National Gallery, wisely, play it safe

see the painting at the National Gallery   http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/thomas-gainsborough-mr-and-mrs-andrews