I was fascinated by the (unknown to me) Kandinskys on show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. They’re like a bright flare illuminating the darkness. What follows is progressively duller Soviet art.
I disagree with the author about communism. It’s inherently authoritarian. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” Ask yourself: who decides? The road to the gulag is clear.
Kandinsky started when he became independently wealthy and thrived in the salons of the rich. This describes so many subsequent leftist creatives.
Lancashire Lad
17 days ago
An article written by someone who’s absorbed all the right terms, treatises on art and historical events, whilst the nature of art and its embodiment of something fundamental to humans since we took to applying pigment to the walls of caves, eludes him.
Art can be written about, but not captured through language. It’s a sensory experience, both in the making and viewing. At its finest, it touches upon something deeper and more ancient than conceptual thought.
The idea of an artist being ‘betrayed’ by political factions simply emphasises the gulf hetween the political and the profound.
Although the title of this article implies it. Kandinsky was certainly not a Marxist.
Athough the author alludes to Kandinsky’s fidelity to the Russian Orthodox faith, he downplays its importance to Kandinsky’s work. His approach to composition was almost playful but was for Kandinsky, deeply prayerful. He described it thus, “When I ‘play’ in this manner, every nerve within me is vibrating, in my whole body, there is the sound of music and God is in my heart.”
Kandinsky was reacting, like many artists and writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, against the materialism of the new industrial society they lived in. His landmark book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” had a profound and wide ranging influence on his contempories. In this book he sees ‘spirituality’ as the inner source of meaning of things and he rails against the ‘no God, no soul, no meaning’ nihilism of the positivists in much the same way as Dostoevsky did some years before.
As happens so often now, the centrality of the artist’s Christian faith to their work is underestimated, and we are poorer and less well informed for it.
Rasmus Fogh
17 days ago
This is a side issue (to a good article, btw), but there is a fairly notable difference between the various queers and genderbenders of the 1920’s and those of the 2020’s. The 1920’s version were rebels, scandalising the staid bourgeois majority who otherwise continued to live and think mostly as they always had. The 2020’s version are taking over the institutions, doing their best to impose their queer views as the orthodoxy everybody is supposed to follow.
They were mostly confined to the inner circles of bohemia back then , not like today in the primary schools, city councils and corporate HR .
Allison Barrows
17 days ago
From time to time we get someone – usually a non-artist – declaring the “the true purpose of art”. And then they go on about other non-artists, like Kandinsky.
“Subject matter is detrimental to my paintings”. I beg to differ. The detriment is that he painted at all.
Michael Lipkin
17 days ago
Intoxication.
Why did the mass of German people choose one intoxication (Nazism) over another?
Should we all become artists so that the human desire to obliterate the self with intoxication is channelled into many crazed cults rather than one big one? Many artists were intoxicated by the Communist cult which differs little from the Nazi one but, as the author notes, these cults cannot contain the individualism of the artist.
Did the mass of German people feel excluded from the artistic intoxications available, hence their preference?
I once came across a series of Qanon videos, thought I would just watch the first one since these conspiracy things are always boring.
It was gripping, I binge watched the whole set. The amount of effort that had gone into creating them was extraordinary with vast sets of real and tendentious ‘evidence’ compiled to imply networks of elite degeneracy. At the end Trump the messiah had a ‘plan’ to roll this back and punish the evil ones. Modern art was used as prominent evidence of elite degeneracy in the films.
So others have chosen their intoxicant too.
Compromise (and this real democracy) is long winded and boring. Definitive answers (even if grossly wrong) give people the feeling someone is in charge. I can see how all encompassing ideologies can be seductive
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago
Interesting but then I spit out my coffee and sixth-form nonsense like this:
“Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism.”
And
“The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th”
As any good teacher would say: show your working! The first quote I have nothing to say about except that over 100 million murdered people and millions more victims of communism might disagree with you, and the second quote…since the American Civil War started in 1861 and was quite literally about a racist industry, is a strange thing to write.
Unless you mean the Holocaust and other progroms instigated by our friends the communists (see above) make the 20th C more racist than the 19th…but you’ve left a throwaway comment unexplained. These comments are an annoying distraction in an otherwise interesting piece
Sean G
16 days ago
As other readers have pointed out, there are a few assertions in this piece that need clarification. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it, and was glad to see Kandinsky’s work being highlighted here at UnHerd. Kandinsky is one of my artistic heroes. The current vogue is for miserablist, first-person, didactic art, and we could benefit quite a bit from reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which reminds us of its potential. The Hilma af Klint thread, by the way, is one worth pursuing. See the documentary Beyond the Visible. Thanks Pratinav Anil and UnHerd. I hope to read more pieces like this here.
…” miserablist, first-person didactic art…”..- any examples..? There is just so much art today – painted printed digitised recorded photographed filmed – where do you start to define what is “vogue”?
I was fascinated by the (unknown to me) Kandinskys on show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. They’re like a bright flare illuminating the darkness. What follows is progressively duller Soviet art.
I disagree with the author about communism. It’s inherently authoritarian. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” Ask yourself: who decides? The road to the gulag is clear.
Kandinsky started when he became independently wealthy and thrived in the salons of the rich. This describes so many subsequent leftist creatives.
An article written by someone who’s absorbed all the right terms, treatises on art and historical events, whilst the nature of art and its embodiment of something fundamental to humans since we took to applying pigment to the walls of caves, eludes him.
Art can be written about, but not captured through language. It’s a sensory experience, both in the making and viewing. At its finest, it touches upon something deeper and more ancient than conceptual thought.
The idea of an artist being ‘betrayed’ by political factions simply emphasises the gulf hetween the political and the profound.
Although the title of this article implies it. Kandinsky was certainly not a Marxist.
Athough the author alludes to Kandinsky’s fidelity to the Russian Orthodox faith, he downplays its importance to Kandinsky’s work. His approach to composition was almost playful but was for Kandinsky, deeply prayerful. He described it thus, “When I ‘play’ in this manner, every nerve within me is vibrating, in my whole body, there is the sound of music and God is in my heart.”
Kandinsky was reacting, like many artists and writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, against the materialism of the new industrial society they lived in. His landmark book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” had a profound and wide ranging influence on his contempories. In this book he sees ‘spirituality’ as the inner source of meaning of things and he rails against the ‘no God, no soul, no meaning’ nihilism of the positivists in much the same way as Dostoevsky did some years before.
As happens so often now, the centrality of the artist’s Christian faith to their work is underestimated, and we are poorer and less well informed for it.
This is a side issue (to a good article, btw), but there is a fairly notable difference between the various queers and genderbenders of the 1920’s and those of the 2020’s. The 1920’s version were rebels, scandalising the staid bourgeois majority who otherwise continued to live and think mostly as they always had. The 2020’s version are taking over the institutions, doing their best to impose their queer views as the orthodoxy everybody is supposed to follow.
They were mostly confined to the inner circles of bohemia back then , not like today in the primary schools, city councils and corporate HR .
From time to time we get someone – usually a non-artist – declaring the “the true purpose of art”. And then they go on about other non-artists, like Kandinsky.
“Subject matter is detrimental to my paintings”. I beg to differ. The detriment is that he painted at all.
Intoxication.
Why did the mass of German people choose one intoxication (Nazism) over another?
Should we all become artists so that the human desire to obliterate the self with intoxication is channelled into many crazed cults rather than one big one? Many artists were intoxicated by the Communist cult which differs little from the Nazi one but, as the author notes, these cults cannot contain the individualism of the artist.
Did the mass of German people feel excluded from the artistic intoxications available, hence their preference?
I once came across a series of Qanon videos, thought I would just watch the first one since these conspiracy things are always boring.
It was gripping, I binge watched the whole set. The amount of effort that had gone into creating them was extraordinary with vast sets of real and tendentious ‘evidence’ compiled to imply networks of elite degeneracy. At the end Trump the messiah had a ‘plan’ to roll this back and punish the evil ones. Modern art was used as prominent evidence of elite degeneracy in the films.
So others have chosen their intoxicant too.
Compromise (and this real democracy) is long winded and boring. Definitive answers (even if grossly wrong) give people the feeling someone is in charge. I can see how all encompassing ideologies can be seductive
Interesting but then I spit out my coffee and sixth-form nonsense like this:
“Indeed, there is nothing inherently authoritarian about communism.”
And
“The 19th century was, world-historically speaking, a lot less racist than the 20th”
As any good teacher would say: show your working! The first quote I have nothing to say about except that over 100 million murdered people and millions more victims of communism might disagree with you, and the second quote…since the American Civil War started in 1861 and was quite literally about a racist industry, is a strange thing to write.
Unless you mean the Holocaust and other progroms instigated by our friends the communists (see above) make the 20th C more racist than the 19th…but you’ve left a throwaway comment unexplained. These comments are an annoying distraction in an otherwise interesting piece
As other readers have pointed out, there are a few assertions in this piece that need clarification. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed it, and was glad to see Kandinsky’s work being highlighted here at UnHerd. Kandinsky is one of my artistic heroes. The current vogue is for miserablist, first-person, didactic art, and we could benefit quite a bit from reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which reminds us of its potential. The Hilma af Klint thread, by the way, is one worth pursuing. See the documentary Beyond the Visible. Thanks Pratinav Anil and UnHerd. I hope to read more pieces like this here.
…” miserablist, first-person didactic art…”..- any examples..? There is just so much art today – painted printed digitised recorded photographed filmed – where do you start to define what is “vogue”?