Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border

Posted: 28 Jan 2012  |  By: Joseph Brennan

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border
Elsa Smithgall
Yale University Press
ISBN 978 0 30017 078 8
135pp
RRP $49.95

Abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky believed colour to have both a spiritual and symbolic significance. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he wrote, “Colour is the keyboard … the artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations of the soul.”

While the importance of colour in abstraction may seem obvious, for Kandinsky it had a specific significance. Each colour carried with it a weight of meaning. In Kandinsky’s system, blue, for example, was heavenly, while yellow was earthly; white and black were more complex, embodying ideas, the former of a world void of material and substance (or in the case of the white border in the work concerned, as offering a “harmony of silence”), the latter of termination.

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence accompanied The Phillips Collection exhibition (June 2011). The book surveys the creative process leading up to the creation of Kandinsky’s 1913 masterpiece Painting with White Border (Moscow), now in the Guggenheim’s collection. It also includes a Phillips–Guggenheim joint essay by conservators concerning a recent side-by-side technical analysis of the work with his 1913 oil study Sketch I for Painting with White Border (Moscow), which is held in The Phillips Collection. Also examined is a second oil sketch from the State Russian Museum, in addition to more than a dozen preparatory studies in watercolour, pen, ink and pencil.

The work was inspired by a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, which was a particularly significant year in his career; it marked the moment that he began gaining widespread recognition, exhibiting regularly across Europe and for the first time in the United States. It was also the year of his first solo exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie Der Sturm, which travelled to venues in the Netherlands and Belgium. While the international response to his work was largely acclaim (particularly by intellectual and avant-garde communities), criticism in the German press led Kandinsky to pen his first autobiographical work (Reminiscences) and three essays on individual pieces, including one on Painting with White Border (Moscow). The importance of such writings to this particular work is explored throughout.

Franz Kafka, now regarded as one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century, was, by and large, poorly received during his lifetime, most of his works being published posthumously. Feeling isolated — from the mass and literate public alike — Kafka (himself ‘a hunger artist’) needed the assurance that only public recognition and approval could provide.

Kandinsky, too, sought legitimacy. Of the works that resulted from this intensely creative period — some fifty watercolours, fifty individual drawings and thirty paintings — most paintings were followed with at least one related study, these studies described in the foreword as “a laboratory for his experiments and discoveries”. That of these works Painting with White Border (Moscow) had more preliminary studies than any before it is testament to its significance to Kandinsky, and now to us, his admiring public.

Images from top:

Wassily Kandinsky, Red Oval, 1920, oil on canvas, 71.5 x 71.2cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand), 1913, oil on canvas, 140.3 x 200.3cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.