I’ve been reading a lot of old artists’ writing on art, perhaps because I don’t jive with the all-too-often self-help artistic posts or productivity based books I see today. Or art in service of capital and capital alone.
Anyway, I recently read Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, a darkly humorous take on art critics. One of the characters loves Wassily Kandinsky and his treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, Kandinsky’s lambasted essay is torn apart because “art died after 1906” alongside the death of Paul Cézanne. I was on a long flight, and we love the public domain, so I read this treatise. I put away disturbing thoughts on how we’re dealing with “truth” now and who even is a critic anymore (influencers? my god), in favor of Kandinsky’s wild synesthesia-fueled ride.
While it’s bound by the realms of a Eurocentric perspective and time, published in 1912, early examples of color-based synesthesia in Concerning the Spiritual in Art jumped out. I’ll skip some of the more wordy and esoteric parts, but you can read it in full here and in a more modern translation here.
Kandinsky’s push for abstraction is grounded in his own experiences, and he shares his synesthesia experiences at length. By the end, I realized that we see Kandinsky’s abstract art. He saw full-on symphonies.
Every work of art is a child of its time
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this treatise really set the scene for Western art in the 20th century. It served as an antithesis to the 19th-century’s art for art’s sake. To Wassily Kandinsky, art for art’s sake served material purposes. That is, consumerist.
The masses stroll through the rooms and state their opinion; some canvases are “nice,” others, “splendid.” The man who could have said something to the other man, did not say it, and he who could have heard, heard nought. This condition in art is called, “L’art pour I’art.
[…]
The artist seeks material reward for his skill, his power of invention, or vision. His purpose becomes the satisfaction of vanity and greed. Instead of intensified, co-operative work amongst artists, they scramble for possessions. There are complaints about too much competition and overproduction. Hates, partisanship, cliques, jealousy, intrigues are the result of this aimless, materialistic art.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Kandinsky believed art, instead, should serve spiritual or humanistic purposes. Filling people with emotion, not leaving their souls hungry. “Hungry souls leave as hungry as they came.”
How does one create mystical art? He states how three mystical elements are brought about through three mystical ways:
- Every artist, as a creator, has to express his own personality (element of personality).
- Every artist, as a child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age (element of style composed from the message of the epoch and the language of the nation, as long as the nation continues to exist).
- Every artist, as a servant of art, is impelled to present art as such (element of pure, eternal art, which is constant among all people, nations and ages, and is evident in the works of every artist, every nation and every epoch, as the main element of art, irrespective of time and space).
To him, doing this required eschewing imitation of nature. He’s not called a trailblazer for abstract art for nothing.
Kandinsky turned to the inner world, in particular, synesthesia, though he did not call it such.
Psychic Color
For Wassily Kandinsky, colors related to sounds and music. An “inner sound” or vibration often derived from an object’s name. (Also, surely, formed by the culture of the person experiencing synesthesia.)
There are eyes which can visualize what science of today “has not yet explained.” Those ask themselves: “Will science, proceeding along the road it has followed for so long, ever attain a solution to these puzzles, and, if it does, will men be able to trust this solution?”
Now, synesthesia is studied and discussed, but I can only imagine taking the leap and writing about it, and then publishing your own personal experiences with it. Then starting an art movement. Sick moves, Kandinsky.
Moreover, upon viewing colors, Kandinsky experienced physical effects, or an “emotional vibration”. He tuned his inner ear and studied colors and the effects they had on his person. Then wrote about them.
Therefore, colour is a means of exercising direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer, while the soul is a piano of many strings. The artist is the hand through which the medium of different keys causes the human soul to vibrate.
Cold colors, mainly blues, retreated from the viewer, while warm colors, especially intense yellows, brought viewers in. Colors could look sharp or soft. Red seemed to be a mystery. Again, I’m skipping a lot of philosophy; people have summarized the treatise in many places, but let’s dig into how he saw individual colors. (Assume all the following are quotes with minor edits.)
Red
- Vermilion attracts and stimulates like the flame eternally craved for by all men
- In music, it sounds like a trumpet accompanied by the tuba, a persistent, imposing, strong tone
- In its medium shades such as vermilion, red gains in the persistence of Intense feeling; it is like a relentlessly glowing passion, a solid power within itself, which cannot easily be surpassed
- Red may cause a spiritual vibration, analogous to that caused by a flame, because red is the colour of flame
- Some colours appear soft (rose madder)
- Warm red may prove exciting, or painful, even disgusting, through possible association with blood
- Hearing the word “red,” we feel no boundaries in our imagination; if necessary, it must deliberately be imagined
Orange
- Orange is red brought closer to humanity
- This basic red, however, must be cold because the warmth of red cannot be mixed with the cold of blue (regardless of procedure), something concerning the aspect of spirituality
Yellow
- The bright yellow of a lemon hurts the eye after a while, as a shrill trumpet note may disturb the ear. The eye becomes restless, is unable to fix its gaze for any length of time, and seeks distraction and rest in blue or green
- As a matter of fact, the initial movement of yellow is the tendency to advance toward the spectator, which can be increased to a degree bordering on intrusion by increasing the intensity of yellow
- On the other hand, yellow, in any geometric form, if gazed at steadily, disturbs its observer, hurts him but also stimulates him. It displays all the characteristics of power expressed by a colour which finally carries an aggressive and insistent effect to the mind
- Yellow is the typical earthly colour and never contains a profound meaning. With an intermixture of blue, it takes on a sickly colour. When compared with the frame of mind of some individual, it would be capable of the colour representation of madness — not melancholy or hypochondriacal mania but rather an attack of violent, raving lunacy
Green
- Absolute green, which is the most restful colour in existence, moves in no direction, has no corresponding appeal, such as joy, sorrow, or passion, and demands nothing
- This persistent lack of movement is a quality which has a quieting effect on the tired souls of men, though it becomes tiresome after a time
- Passivity is the most characteristic quality of absolute green, carrying with it a certain emanation of this quality of richness and self-satisfaction
- Absolute green in the realm of colour can be compared to the so-called bourgeoisie; it is an immovable, self-satisfied element, limited in every sense and, in many ways, resembling a fat, healthy, immovably resting cow, capable only of eternal rumination, while dull bovine eyes gaze forth vacantly into the world
(lol)
Blue
- When very dark, blue develops an element of repose
- When it sinks into black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. It attains an endless, profound meaning, sinking into the deep seriousness of all things where there is no end
- Rising toward the light, a movement little suited to it, it takes on an indifferent character, growing more distant to men like the high, light blue of the sky
- The lighter it is, the weaker it becomes until it achieves a silent repose by becoming white
- In music, light blue is like a flute, dark blue like a cello, and when still darker, it becomes a wonderful double bass
- The deepest and most serene form of blue may be compared to the deep notes of an organ
Violet
- Violet, a cooled-red both in the physical and spiritual sense, possesses an element of frailty, expiring sadness.
- It is similar to the sound of an English horn, the shepherd’s flute, or the deep, low tone of wood instruments (for example, a bassoon)
- Removing red through blue creates violet, which has the tendency to move away from humanity
Black
- Like a nothingness after sunset, black sounds like an eternal silence, without future or hope
- Represented in music as a final pause, which precedes the beginning of another world, yet signifying a termination as the circle is completed
- Black is something extinguished like a burned pyre, something immobile, corpse-like, which has no connection with any occurrences
- It is like the silence of the body after death, the end of life
- Outwardly, It Is the least harmonious colour yet; for that reason, any other colour, even the weakest, will appear stronger and more precise in front of it, while in the case of white all other colours are minimized in their appeal and some are dissolved completely and retain but a mute, weakened shadow of it
White
- White is a symbol of a world from which all colour, as a material quality and substance, has disappeared
- We cannot perceive any sound coming from it. There is a great silence which, graphically represented, appears to us as a formidable, indestructible wall, though infinitely cold, reaching up into eternity
- White affects us with the absoluteness of a great silence. It sounds inwardly and corresponds to some pauses in music, which, though temporarily interrupting the development of a melody, do not represent a definite end of the musical sequence
- It is not a dead silence but one full of possibilities. The white has the appeal of silence which has suddenly become comprehensible. It is a ‘blank,’ infinitely young, a ‘blank’ which emphasizes the beginning, as yet unborn
Grey
- Grey is, therefore, the immobility of desolation
- The darker this grey becomes, the greater the predominance of desolation, of suffocation
- When lightened, the colour becomes lighter, airier, breathing more freely as if in relief and with a new hidden hope
Read More:
- Interview about the novel Saint Sebastian’s Abyss
- Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists
- Full text of Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky
