This study will examine a group of five paintings to reveal how content and form combined in these works in a manner uniquely suited to propel Kandinsky towards a new type of art. These paintings, which I will refer to as «abstract-Orientalist» paintings, have never previously been examined as a distinct group through the lens of postcolonialism. There are more paintings from this period with Orientalist references, but unfortunately space dictates a narrow focus in the present article.41 Kandinsky assigned these paintings titles that include the words «African», «Arabs» and «Oriental».42 Today we understand the three terms above to mean different things with distinct geographic, political and historical connotations; for Kandinsky, however, and for his contemporaries, these terms were interchangeable and related not to specific geographies, but rather to a culturally constructed idea.43 Kandinsky’s manipulation of this idea in his early abstract art forms the subject of this study.
Kandinsky’s artistic objectives during these years centred around the desire to produce «spiritual» art. His book On the Spiritual in Art, written in 1909 but not published until 1911, was his major intellectual contribution in the period under examination here.44 In his book, he articulated the view that art is ’spiritual bread for the spiritual awakening now beginning’ and believed it could lead viewers, and ultimately society as a whole, to a «spiritual turning point».45 The intellectual landscape that Kandinsky inhabited was in the throes of responding to Nietzsche’s proposition, «God is dead!», which Kandinsky cited in his book.46 Raised in the Russian Orthodox tradition, Kandinsky was never an atheist, but like other cosmopolitan intellectuals across Russia and Europe, he was looking for a new solution to what J.J. Clarke has described as:
a pervasive cultural disquietude, an uneasy awareness of fault lines running deep into the strata of European cultural life, down through levels of politics, religion, and philosophy, giving rise to a sense of some fundamental breakdown at the heart of the West’s intellectual, spiritual and moral being.47
Kandinsky’s drive to produce «spiritual art needs to be understood in this context. And, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Kandinsky believed that «the West» that he inhabited was materialistic and spiritually corrupt. Like them, he turned to «the Orient’ to fill the spiritual void.48
Although Russian, Kandinsky lived in Germany during the period under examination here and had done since 1896. This paper does not seek to deny his Russianness, nor his feelings about Moscow which he described on several occasions in spiritual terms. Nevertheless, Kandinsky was raised in a multilingual, metropolitan household, grew up in rapidly modernising Russian cities, and spent his formative artistic years in Munich, studying the European artistic tradition. This paper proposes that when Kandinsky referred to «the West», he was referring to the modern, increasingly homogenous metropolises across Europe, extending into Russia, and his view of «the Orient» was framed in opposition to this construction of «the West».49
A key element of Kandinsky’s understanding of «the Orient’ was a three-month trip to Tunisia that he took with his partner Gabriele Münter in 1904—1905, during which he produced hundreds of sketches, approximately thirty tempera paintings and several oils on board.50 In addition, Kandinsky and Münter between them took more than one hundred and eighty photographs of their surroundings.51 This Tunisian material is important for two reasons: it shows that Kandinsky had already engaged with conventional Orientalist themes; and it provided a visual resource for his subsequent abstract-Orientalist works.
The Abstract-Orientalist Paintings
The most literal representation of Tunisia in Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings occurs in Arabs I (Cemetery) (Fig. 1) of 1909. It is among his earliest paintings to experiment with abstracted forms in a context other than landscapes. Dominated by bright, warm yellows and contrasting, cool blues, the painting provides direct references to Kandinsky’s trip to Tunisia, and evidence of his reliance on the artistic outputs from that trip. Roger Benjamin has identified two specific photographs which Kandinsky has «amalgamated’ in order to produce this image: Tunisian Village (Fig. 2), which provides the background of the wall with arch and doorways, the steps down, and the twisted, pollarded tree; and Ottoman Cemetery, Tunisia (Fig. 3), which provides the rows of turban graves.52 The four partially-abstracted figures appear to be loosely based on sketches and photographs from the trip. The two seated figures wrapped in burnous cloaks, one at the far left and one at the far right of the canvas, appear in multiple gouache paintings from the trip.
Two other paintings from 1909 show Kandinsky developing his Orientalist theme by reference to Tunisia while introducing increasingly abstract forms. He described this practice as follows:
I dissolved objects to a greater or lesser extent within the same picture, so that they might not all be recognised at once and so that these emotional overtones might thus be experienced gradually by the spectator, one after another.53
Improvisation 6 (Africans) (Fig. 4), shows two turbaned figures in the foreground, in front of a white building with a green dome and a series of abstracted shapes delineated either by black lines or by contrasting blocks of colour. The building resembles the Tombs of the Beys, in Kandinsky’s painting Tunis Street (Tombs of the Beys) (Fig. 5), with its blank white walls and green tiled, domed roof. The Pencil sketch for Improvisation 6 (Africans) (Fig. 6) bears an even closer resemblance (although reversed) to the Tombs of the Beys, showing not only the dome, but also the small turret in the corner, which Kandinsky subsequently omitted from the oil painting. The turbaned figures, meanwhile, recall those from his Pencil sketches of figures in costume and Pencil sketches of male and female figures (Figs. 7 and 8) and photographs including of Courtyard of the Dar El Bey Mosque with traditionally dressed visitors (Fig. 9).
A closely related painting is Orientals (Fig. 10) of 1909. The figure on the left with dark brown skin, small feathered hat (known as a cechia) and loose white trousers that become tight around the lower legs is identifiable from a photograph taken by the artists in Tunisia, namely the right-hand figure in Three dark-skinned men in elegant clothes in front of a café (Fig. 11). The composition suggests people sitting in a cafe, a common theme in Orientalist art and popular photography, and a subject Kandinsky painted in Tunisia, in his work Moorish Café.54
Arabs II and Arabs III (with Pitcher) both from 1911 show Kandinsky conflating his visual references to Tunisia with Persian and possibly Syrian influences in broad stereotypes of Orientalism. Before discussing these paintings individually, it is important to note that by naming the pair Arabs II and Arabs III (with Pitcher), Kandinsky made a deliberate link back to the first of his abstract-Orientalist paintings: Arabs I (Cemetery). Stylistically the three are dramatically different; the titular link suggests that his intention was to link the paintings by theme. The titles prepare the viewer to search out, even in the most dissolved forms, conventional images of «the Arab’, and, by implication, to make the association between Orientalist themes and spirituality.