Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian born artist who later acquired French citizenship, was a pioneer of abstraction in art. Kandinsky was born in Moscow to a merchant family and spent his childhood in Odessa (in modern-day Ukraine). His father encouraged him to draw when he was young; however, he did not immediately pursue art as a career. Educated in law and economics, Kandinsky turned down a teaching position to become an artist at age thirty. In 1896, he moved to Munich, where there was an avant-garde artistic community, to study painting. The artist’s early works were influenced by the Fauves, the Expressionists, and the Cubists. He was part of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, and edited the Blaue Reiter Almanac with fellow painter Franz Marc. Early in his artistic career, Kandinsky was concerned not just with the practice of art, but with art theory as well. Critics have pointed out that Kandinsky’s 1903 painting, The Blue Rider, demonstrates a significant move toward abstraction. 

A number of early experiences shaped Kandinsky’s decision to devote his life to art. In 1895, Kandinsky was powerfully moved by an exhibition of Monet’s Haystacks: “That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I duly felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour” (quoted in the Culturium). While the arts had been a part of his bourgeois upbringing, Kandinsky was particularly affected by a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He wrote, “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me” (quoted in Brenda Lynne Leach, Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 52). He also wrote, “It became absolutely clear to me that art in general was much more powerful than I had thought, and that, on the other hand, painting was capable of developing powers akin to those of music” (quoted in Leach, p. 52). According to Leach, this experience influenced Kandinsky’s ideas about Gesamtkunstwerk—the idea of a complete work of art that combined art forms in drama, music, text, color, etc. (p. 52). Wagner’s cycle of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelung, which combined music, word, and visual art, had a great effect on Kandinsky with respect to the total work of art. 

Kandinsky believed in a synesthetic relationship between music and painting. Synesthesia is the perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in other sensory or cognitive pathways. For example, for Kandinsky, color had vibrations like music: he could hear color and see music. This confluence of the senses as well as its relationship to Gesamtkunstwerk, abstraction, and spirituality in art was addressed in Kandinsky’s 1911 treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The artist was a theorist as well as a painter. The treatise is a defense and promotion of abstract art, an affirmation that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality, and an argument that color could be autonomous, apart from the visual description of an object. Kandinsky’s views on spirituality were shaped by the Russian Orthodox religion as well as the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, a theosophist who emphasized the creative imagination and geometric symbolism in relation to the nature of divinity. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the artist contended that painting could move the soul in the same way as music. He wrote: “A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.” He further emphasizes his point: “And the natural result of this striving [towards the abstract] is that the various arts are drawing together. They are finding in music the best teacher. With few exceptions music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomenon but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound.” He also explicitly compares painting to composing music: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmony, 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.” In 1911, Kandinsky and other members of Der Blaue Reiter went to a concert of the Viennese avant-garde composer and artist, Arnold Schoenberg. The two men formed a friendship and theoretical kinship regarding the relationship between visual art and music. 

Klänge was created at the height of the Expressionist Blaue Reiter movement, a time when Kandinsky was changing his style, and experimenting with form, color and “painterly means” (Stedelijk Museum). According to Napier, 1909-14 were crucial years in the artist’s move toward abstraction. She writes: “As the orientation of Kandinsky’s work shifted, a change occurred in his compositional procedure: the logical demands of an extrinsic subject matter gradually began to give way to an organizational theory founded upon inherent properties of color and form. In principle, the transition was from an ‘absolute’ mode of composition that derived from sources outside the work to one that arose from the artistic materials themselves and the way these materials produced and modified their own terms of organization” (pp.1-2). In this artist’s book, Kandinsky was attempting to create a synthesis of word and music, and word and image, a work “poised between painting and poetry, image, and word” (The Culturium). In addition, the artist was interested in the relationship between abstraction and figuration. Woodcuts are interspersed with text, encouraging the reader/viewer to posit a relationship among them. “Sounds offers moods and rhythms rather than tangible narratives with each phrase quivering like a note, breaking free from the logic of prose and punctuation before dissolving into cadential chords. In parallel, the accompanying woodcuts offer simplified figures and abstract motifs that resonate with the poems’ inner rhythm[s], amplifying their tonal essence to an exquisite symbiotic effect” (The Culturium). “Just as his art had begun to take on extreme abstraction and vibrancy in the pursuit of a ‘purity,’ the poems which he wrote to accompany them in the suite followed a similar ‘abstraction.’ Words are repeated to the point where they lose their meaning and become ‘pure’ sounds, quite removed from the world of logic and language” (Goldmark Art). The abstraction of language is akin to young children’s early attempt at speech; through constant repetition and babbling, words are emptied of their meaning so that only pure sound remains (Becks-Malorny, Kandinsky, Taschen, 1994, p. 24). In the poems, Kandinsky often breaks words apart to emphasize their sound and visual form. Experimental typography further serves to make the words in Klänge abstract. The text is a “verbal improvisation,” closer to music than to literature (The Culturium). Below is an example of one of Kandinsky’s poems in Klänge: 

WHY? 

“No one came out of there.” 

“No one? 

“No one. 

“One? 

“No. 

“Yes! But when I came by, there was one standing there. “At the door? 

"At the door. He stretched out his arms. “Yes! Because he doesn’t want to let anyone in. “No one came in there? 

“No one. 

“The one who stretched out his arms, was he there? 

“Inside? 

“Yes. Inside. “I don’t know. He just stretches out his arms so no one can get in.

“Was he sent there so No One can get in? The one who stretches out his arms?” “No. He came and stood there himself and stretched out his arms. “And No One, No One, No One came out? “No One, No One.” 

“The poems and woodcuts of Klänge exhibit a repeated experimentation with the limits of the conventional objective world: the poems are alternately narrative and expressive in quality; the woodcuts—which, as a medium, were of special importance in Kandinsky’s emergence into abstraction—range from early Jugendstil-inspired (and still highly representational designs to vignettes that are purely abstract in form” (Napier, p. 9). The woodcut technique, which makes details difficult, almost forces the abstraction in Klänge’s images. Kandinsky said of the poems and woodcuts: “In these woodcuts, as in the rest—woodcuts and poems—can be found traces of my development from the ‘figurative’ to the ‘abstract’ (the ‘concrete’ according to my terminology—which is, in my opinion at least, more precise and more expressive than the usual)” (quoted in Napier, p. 2). Kandinsky interspersed abstracted and totally abstract imagery throughout his book; there is not a sequential progression from the representational to the abstract, which coincides with the poetry. A horse and rider is an important recurring motif throughout the book; it is a symbol for moving beyond the merely representational and for spiritual and artistic progression.

Kandinsky summed up his project thus: “We fought for painting, but painting alone will not suffice. I had the idea of a synthetic book that removed half of the old, narrow conceptions, breaking down the walls between the arts … and finally prove that the problem of art is not a problem of form but a problem of spiritual content.” While Klänge was not commercially popular at the time of its publication, it was extremely influential to artists of Kandinsky’s day and today it is regarded as a seminal work of modern art by artists, art historians, and literary historians. It is the embodiment of Gesamtkunstwerk and a testament to Kandinsky’s power as an artist.