In Arabs III (with Pitcher) (Fig. 12), only the title allows the identification of the almost entirely dissolved shapes in the upper left and right of the painting as riders on galloping or rearing horses ridden by men in white burnouses and wearing turbans. The reclining woman and the pitcher are, by contrast, easily identifiable. The reclining woman with her exotic veil and chin in her hand does not appear in sketches or photographs from the trip to Tunisia. It seems most likely that she was introduced as a visual cue to the Orientalist theme of the painting, particularly given that the «Oriental’ horsemen are almost entirely dissolved into abstract shapes. The presence of a reclining woman in Orientalist art is one with which Kandinsky and his viewers would have been familiar from innumerable Odalisques painted since the eighteenth century, all erotic fantasies based on assumptions around the availability of sexual encounters in «the Orient’.56
Ambivalence and Postcolonial Theory
Before proceeding further with an analysis of these paintings, it is necessary to address the treatment of postcolonial theory and its related terminology used in this study. The decades-long debate around «Orientalism’ has been highly charged. The term itself is burdened with a multiplicity of meanings, and will be largely avoided in this paper in favour of the adjective «Orientalist’ (in relation to art or themes) which is used here to reference an affinity with a genre of painting produced mainly in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries featuring largely imaginary scenes of people and places outside of Europe, often in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The term «Orientalism’ will be used sparingly to reference the postcolonial debate around the meaning of «the West’s’ engagement with «the Orient’. Other than the brief outline below, this paper does not purport to reproduce a history of the debate, but rather extends some of its most important ideas to an analysis of Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings.
Postcolonial interpretations of Orientalism began with the publication in 1978 of Edward Said’s book Orientalism. Said criticised the Orientalism practiced by «the West’ on «the Orient’ and analysed it in terms of Foucauldian discourse and the relationship between truth and power. For Said, the study of «the Orient’ is not and never was a neutral academic exercise in pursuit of truth.57 On the contrary, he argued that Orientalism is a manifestation of the power relationship that underlies the broader «Western’ imperial project, and as such it says more about the moral and political concerns of «the West’ than it does about any «Oriental’ reality.58 The proliferation of inverted commas in the preceding sentences reflects the sensitivity which surrounds these terms in the wake of the debate.59 For the purpose of this study, inverted commas will be used for these essentialised terms to represent the way in which they were used by Kandinsky (and others) in the period.
While Said’s work did not engage significantly with painting, his arguments were systematically applied to nineteenth century French Orientalist painting by Linda Nochlin in her article, «The Imaginary Orient’.60 Nochlin’s article translates the standard themes of Orientalist ideology into the visual language of painting: among them, the mystery of the East, the vice of idleness, the harmonious religious practices, and of course lasciviousness and the sexual availability of submissive women. All of these appear in Kandinsky’s Orientalist paintings and need to be examined both in relation to their status as century-old themes, and to their particular manifestation in his twentieth century modernism. Significantly, Nochlin also identifies four conspicuous absences in Orientalist art: the absence of history, in which the Oriental world is «a world without change, a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals, untouched by historical processes;’ the absence of the Western colonial presence; the absence of artistic interpretation, bringing with it the implication of scientific objectivity; and finally the «apparent absence of art’, the eradication of all artistic traces to create a «pseudo-realist’ painting.61 These, as shall be seen below, provide a method for interpreting the complex interplay of the conventional and the unconventional in Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist works.
The criticisms of Said have been manifold.62 A significant critique for present purposes comes from J.J. Clarke in his book Oriental Enlightenment. Clarke accepts much of Said’s analysis, particularly his exposure of hidden and suppressed ideological agendas, but he argues that Said’s analysis is too restricted in its dogmatic identification of Orientalism with the dominant imperialist ideology.63 Clarke asserts that in some cases it also represents, «a counter-movement, […] albeit not a unified or consciously organised one, which in various ways has often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive structures of imperial power.»64 It was not, he argued, simply a question of «power’ and «domination’; it was an attempt to confront the structures of knowledge and power and to engage with «Oriental’ ideas in ways that confronted the «painful void in the spiritual and intellectual heart of Europe’.65 Elements of this interpretation are anticipated by Kandinsky’s work.
Homi Bhabha has proposed, in his complex, multi-disciplinary chapter, «The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, an alternative to the binary oppositions identified by Said.66 Bhabha also largely agrees with Said’s thesis that Orientalism is a «regime of truth’ which creates «the Orient’ as a unified zone of the world.67 He produces a more subtle reading, however, with his focus on stereotyping.68 He is not interested in the stereotype as a wholly positive or negative characterisation; rather, he explores its inherent «ambivalence’: an expression of ««otherness» which is at once an object of desire and derision.»69 Looking at Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings as ambivalent images allows the complex nature of this important and underestimated group of paintings to be revealed. At one level, the Orientalist themes express Kandinsky’s yearning for the spirituality he associates with «the Orient’ while simultaneously exposing his tendency to reduce «the Orient’ to a homogenous, undifferentiated whole. And at another level, he relies on conventional Orientalist themes that play to the desires of his viewers while simultaneously rejecting artistic conventions through his dissolution of form.
Exhibitions as Catalysts
The intellectual catalyst for Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist paintings was, this study proposes, two exhibitions in Munich in 1909 and 1910, both of which he reviewed for the Russian art journal Apollon.
In 1909, Kandinsky visited «Japanese and East Asian Art». Featuring 1,276 works, this exhibition took place at what turned out to be the start of Kandinsky’s intellectual commitment to spiritual content in his art.70 He wrote about the exhibition:
Here, along with the truly Oriental gift for combining the subtlest details into an overall consonance, one finds landscapes of an extraordinary breadth and abstraction in the handling of colour and form, subordinated to a sense of rhythm that is the pure expression of a unique, wholly artistic temperament. Again and again, so much that is part of Western art becomes clear when one sees the infinite variety of the