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WASSILY KANDINSKY
Small Pleasures (1913)
Oil .on canvas
110cm X 120.6cm/431/4jn X 471/.in

Kandinsky was probably the first, the most important and, in the end, the most influential of the pioneers of abstract art. He was the focal point for the converging forces of German Expressionism, and the measure of its achieve-ment against a Paris-centered avant-garde.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow on 4 December 1866. He received a classical education at school in Odessa and went on to study law and economics at the University of Moscow. After this scholarly beginning, Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896 where he studied art under Anton Azbe and later Franz von Stuck. But he maintained crucial links with his mother-country and retained a con-stant, if residual faith in the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1901 he co-founded the artists' association Phalanx and spent the next two years organizing, traveling, painting and writ-ing while based in Munich. In 1911 he formed Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc, and in the fol-lowing year published his key text On tl-ie Spir-itual in Art and had his first one-man show. During the first years of the Great War he traveled in Scandanavia, before settling in Moscow from 1917 to 1921 where he was active in the artistic debates of the Russian state. He became an influential teacher at the Bauhaus school in 1922, and continued working there until it closed in 1933. Kandinsky spent the last years of his life in Paris. He died in 1944.

Kandinsky's painting falls into two notable periods of activity, but it is in the first of these - an explosive series of works from about 1909 to 1914, precisely the epic years of Cubism -that he sought to liberate line and color from the imposing weight of representation. These paintings are often pushed to the limits of dis-organization and amorphousness, their calli-graphy darting across color patches.

Paradoxically, in many ways, the pictorial rationalization of his language which ensued in the later works during his Bauhaus years was its undoing: line shape and color were straightened, geometricized and smoothed as if some semantic magnet had pulled them into psychological order. It was Kandinsky's tex-tual and pedagogic activity that became his most important contribution to the modern movement in the 1920s.

The influences on Kandinsky's 'impulse to abstraction' are notoriously difficult to assess. There is no doubt that the Munich milieu was crucially formative, but even during collabora-tion on the Blaue Reiter project, there is always the impression that Kandinsky is working out his ideas, a view confirmed by a lack of con-tinuity with Marc's work of the same period. Apart from textual influences, only Paul Klee had a direct visual impact on Kandinsky.

Having decided to become a painter re-latively late in life, Kandinsky gave most of his energies to this particular medium. TFiere is a problem involved in any consideration of hisoil technique, a problem which he himself drew attention to in a letter of 1937: 'I have listed six hundred and forty-five "oil-paintings" and five hundred and eight-four "watercolors". ... this division is a conven-tional one because in the case of oil there are often other media at work (eg tempera, water-colors, gouache, indian ink) and equally so with watercolors.'

It is extremely difficult to tell exactly how and when Kandinsky mixed his various media, but many of the great range of effects that he managed to achieve in his work from 1909 to 1914 seem in part attributable to the dilutions, combinations and 'impurities' which he conjured from his palette.

Small Pleasures was preceded by a number of studies and related works, the earliest of which, With Sun (oil and tempera? on glass) appears to date from about 1910. The composition of Small Pleasures is centered round two hills, each crowned by a citadel. On the right-hand side is a boat with three oars which is riding a storm under a forbidding black cloud. To the bottom left it is possible to make out a couple at a steep angle to the hill, and above them three horsemen arrested in full gallop. A fiery sun flashes out wheels of color.

The actual interpretation of these elements has been the subject of much controversy; especially since the recent discovery of an un-published essay on the painting written by Kandinsky in June 1913. This document appears to discourage the irony which some have read into an imagined discrepancy be-tween the title and the actual work, and re-duces the heavy apocalyptic signification of the imagery. Indeed Kandinsky writes of the 'joyfulness' of execution. It is legitimate then, to see the work as a celebration of Kandinsky's style during this period, as affirming the spir-itual and practical pleasures he manifestly de-rived from painting; he speaks of 'pouring a lot of small pleasures on to the canvas'.

While giving the impression of heavenly chaos, Small Pleasures is obviously not the pro-duct of pure spontaneity. The various modes of paint application, and the complexity of pigment selection and mixing are enormous. The way colors are washed and blurred together, and seldom contained by bounding lines is typical of Kandinsky's work at this time. The predominantly curvilinear aspect of the work, however, is undermined by the angular geometry of the citadel, perhaps pre-saging Kandinsky's Bauhaus style. There are few monochrome patches in the composition, underlining the local scale of execution, and part of Kandinsky's pleasure in the work was his reflection on a number of minor technical achievements. He wrote of the 'fine, very fine lines' scrupulously worked in with an extra-thin brush, and of his successful suppression of 'lustre' from the gold and silver areas.

At first sight Small Pleasures seems like an abstract but exuberant polychromatic display. in fact color, line and other formal components are expressive agents in the service of a highly charged apocalyptic imagery, which is revealed unevenly across the picture surface. Some of these symbols ore identified in the text.

The straighit -line construction of the buildings on the hill is conspicuously out phase with the apparent formal and colorist anarchy of the rest of the composition. They are an attempt to the reduce the features of the walled town to a geometric skeleton which yet contains its essential signifying features. The relation of color to this strur liowevei~ suggtst~ Kandinsky ions in interested in rigid infihling or strict equivalence: it i applied subordi and describes it, shape and form

Painting on glass was still a flourishing folk art in some of the villages around Munich and Kandinsky was evidently inspired by this technique. In many respects, All Saints
(1911) and Small leasures represent complementary poles of Kandinsky's activity
1910-1914. There is a bold, almost humorous realism in All Saints matched by the use of relatively unmixed clear cold-patches. This work is a pool of images and motifs which Kandinsky abstracted and abbreviated in his later work, the trumpeting angel, St George on horseback, and other saints. Small Pleasures too has a Kremlin on a Hill, and the fiery red sun, but two years later these motifs are veiled behind a frenzy of expressive painting devices.

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