Kandinsky was betrayed by Left and Right Marxist art thrived best in free societies

On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky’s slim opuscule timed for the group’s first exhibition, likewise made clear that the true purpose of art was to defeat the vacuous materialism of modern man. All the same, as that title suggests, there was a decidedly romantic strain to Kandinsky’s leftism that left his more dogmatic comrades cold. In 1908, Kandinsky had been fired by the German translation of Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, a nutty pamphlet by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater that preached the gospel of Theosophy, its esoteric message encased in the book’s frontispiece, a palette bearing the legend “Key to the Meaning of Colours”. The pair, it seems, believed in “auras”, essentially coloured emanations around human bodies that conveyed emotions. Today, we would call them vibes.

Proper, positivist Marxists, one imagines, would have impatiently clicked their tongues at this sort of claptrap, but not Kandinsky. All the stuff about the “vibrations of souls” somehow spoke to him. And so colours replaced objects in his painterly imagination. We may think, at first glance, that the Blue Rider pictures are no more than decorative wallpaper, but in fact, as Kandinsky’s writings show, many of them are essentially works of religious art, dealing with such premonitory themes as the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.

As it was, though, Soviet Russia’s revolutionary bureaucrats were after depictions of Large Projects, whereas Kandinsky wanted to paint Small Pleasures. They were in the business of dreary instruction, not Dreamy Improvisation. What was needed, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoli Lunacharsky felt, was “art of five kopeks”, not worthless art but art within the means of the masses. Accordingly, Kandinsky fell out of favour. He had been a bit player in the Revolution, and had done his bit curating provincial museums for the Bolsheviks, not to mention helped establish the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. Still, it was a tough racket being an Expressionist in a world of Social Realists. Routinely and puerilely assailed as bourgeois and boring, he leapt at the first chance to leave. In 1921, he moved to Dessau, throwing in his lot with Gropius’s Bauhaus, which remained a going concern until the Nazis shuttered it when they seized power. The remaining decade of his life was spent in Parisian wilderness. Kandinsky died an unhappy man in 1944.

That the Soviet Union effectively hounded out its most creative artistic talents, from Kandinsky in the Twenties to Neizvestny in the Seventies, was not inevitable. Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism. We would do well to remember the historical contingencies that led up to that outcome. The early Marx himself waxed eloquent about “the benefits of a liberal constitution, of a country where there is freedom of discussion, freedom of association, and where a humanitarian seed can flourish for the good of all Europe”. Here was a supremely convincing reconciliation of socialism and freedom. The proles were treated as intelligent grown-ups.

In later works, it is true, he betrayed a regrettable preference for de haut en bas technocratic solutions, the kind befitting the worst kind of Brussels Eurocrat. Still, it was left to Lenin to turn an instrument of proletarian emancipation into a tool of authoritarian centralisation. As for Lunacharsky, he was not such a terrible killjoy, but rather a mondain character with a lively past simply obeying orders; before the revolution, he had moved in rather choice circles in Paris and Capri.

Needless to say, the upshot was most damaging. By the time high Stalinism took hold, the intellectual and artistic energies of Soviet communism had more or less completely fossilised. The baton passed to Western Marxism. From the Frankfurt School in the interwar period to structuralism in post-war France and operaismo in post-war Italy, some of the most arresting developments in Left-wing thought occurred in the free West. More so than Soviet Marxists, their British counterparts recognised — in the words of Perry Anderson — that “to take liberties with the signature of Marx” was to “enter into the freedom of Marxism”.

The new Expressionists show at Tate Modern underscores just how important the freedom of expression was to the development of art. Indeed, it was no accident that Kandinsky thrived not in his native land but in relatively free Munich. The young Wassily knew a thing or two about unfree societies. His parents, clamouring for liberal reform, had been exiled to the tea plantations of Kyakhta on the Mongolian border by Tsar Alexander II. It was only in the 1860s, that radical decade that also saw the abolition of serfdom, that they were rehabilitated along with other dissidents; Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866.

University life was dull. Some respite came from a research assignment that took him to Vologda, whose pagan peasants enchanted him. Throughout his life, Kandinsky maintained his fidelity to the Orthodox Church, though the colourful and exotic never failed to fascinate him. A staid, bourgeois life awaited him after his marriage to his bookish cousin — one of very few women at Moscow University at the time — when a professorship in Roman law came through at Tartu University. But then a midlife crisis intervened, provoked by Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896. Kandinsky had a eureka moment of his own: academic life, he concluded, was bollocks. There was no certainty in the world. Thereafter, it was only the subjective world of art that mattered. Monet’s Haystacks and Wagner’s Lohengrin, both encountered in Moscow, further convinced him that art was his calling. More prosaically, a loaded uncle kicked the bucket that year. Aged 30, Kandinsky came into a sizeable inheritance that was his ticket out of the professions – and Tsarist Russia.

Munich could have been Mars. It certainly felt like another planet. This was a land where painters “had the status of generals”. So wrote the Irish painter John Lavery. It was also an oasis of tolerance, thanks to the urbanity of its ruling class. Jewish painters like Albert Bloch and Elisabeth Epstein, on the run from antisemitism, found a home there. So, too, did dissidents from the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, and the promiscuous Russian bohemians Marianne Werefkin and Alexis von Jawlensky. Their favourite hangout spot was the famous pink salon owned by Werefkin — an “independently wealthy” polyglot noblewoman according to the catalogue — that doubled as an atelier.

It was in this cosmopolitan, permissive milieu that Expressionism was born. For too long, the movement has been both celebrated and denigrated as a singularly German graphic idiom. Even Pevsner, who evidently wasn’t terribly fond of the Expressionists, thought it fitting to summon up the rare word of praise for their Teutonic moral seriousness. Yet as this exhibition shows, it was a fundamentally international cast — led by the Russian Kandinsky — that conjured up the movement.

Munich artists had already laid the groundwork for Kandinsky. Four years prior to his arrival, the Munich Secession had parted ways with the academicism and conservatism of the Munich School; its leading light, Max Liebermann, made it a point to paint working-class subjects. Kandinsky’s move to Munich in 1896 coincided with the birth of the journal Jugend, the house organ of modernism to which we owe the German term for Art Nouveau, Jugendstil.

Five years later, Kandinsky founded Phalanx, seducing the dissatisfied spirits of the Secession to the new splinter group. One of them, his pupil Gabriele Münter, he seduced in more than one sense; not long after, the two were off to assignations in Sèvres (where they came in contact with Gauguin, Picasso, Cézanne, Rousseau, Munch, and van Gogh) and Murnau, where they had a love-nest in the foothills of the Alps.

In 1909, Kandinsky had an epiphany: “subject matter is detrimental to my paintings.” The upshot was Composition II, a mad riot of colour that a contemporary critic thought was the work of “someone under the effects of morphine or hashish” — now sadly lost. By then, another fan of Theosophy, Hilma af Klint, had independently reached the same conclusion as Kandinsky, though few took her admixture of Eastern piety and camp Christianity seriously. She may have painted the first abstract pictures in 1906, but thanks to his Münchner Rolodex and his inexhaustible capacity for self-publicity (“I painted the first abstract picture”), the world remembers Kandinsky’s Picture with a Circle of 1911 as the first ever abstract painting.

Whatever may have been the lineage of abstract painting, the fact is that the Blue Rider was the most visible expression of it. There were others involved, as the curators are at pains to remind us (two in five paintings here are by women, and Münter is — deservingly — given more prominent billing than Franz Marc, usually seen as the most important of the Blue Rider sidekicks), but it was incontrovertibly Kandinsky’s brainchild, as the very name of the collective suggested. He made a painting called Der Blaue Reiter in 1903; more generally, he thought blue was a “heavenly” colour and enjoyed painting riders, especially St Georges slaying dragons, as it were the spiritual triumphing over the material.

All the same, it proved a short-lived affair. Two pop-up shows in 1911-12 and one almanac — more scrapbook than catalogue — was all it had to show for it. The cultural shadow it cast over 20th-century art, however, is another matter. Like J. D. Salinger and the Sex Pistols, the Blue Rider isn’t remembered for its output, but for revolutionising the field.

The curators of this exhibition have done a marvellous job reconstructing the eccentric, eclectic world of the Expressionists. They have, quite unjustifiably, received much pushback in the press for shoehorning “present preoccupations” and forcing a “woke” interpretation of their subject. But this is an historically illiterate view. Indeed, we tend to exaggerate the foreignness of the past. Depending on your politics, the past appears either more racist or less woke than the present. As the new Taylor Swift song goes, “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade we wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists.” Risible nonsense, of course. The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th. Likewise, it can hardly be denied Munich in the 1910s, and the interwar Weimar Republic, were a lot woker than our present, with their queers and queens. In the exhibition, we have a rather gamine Self-Portrait of Werefkin, who evidently was something of a gender bender: “I am not man, I am not woman, I am myself.” Then there is her portrait of the Dancer Alexander Sacharoff, noted for his “aesthetic hermaphroditism.”

Good for them. Or rather the going was good for them until the Nazis showed up. These days, the crackpots and would-be despots who have thanklessly tasked themselves with the policing of sumptuary, sartorial, and sexual habits would do well to remember which side of history they are on: the one applauding or censuring Degenerate Art. Britain in the Thirties evidently chose the latter. For the following year after the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, a show of the Blue Rider artists opened at the New Burlington Galleries in London. In the introduction of that catalogue, the curators declared “that art, as an expression of the human spirit in all its mutations, is only great in so far as it is free”. Hear, hear.

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Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

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