Lot Essay
War was declared between Russia and Germany on August 1, 1914. As a Russian national, Kandinsky was compelled to leave Munich, and with Gabriele Mnter he travelled to Switzerland, where they remained until late November. In December Kandinsky returned to Russia via the Balkans and until 1921 resided, with brief trips to Sweden, Finland, Odessa and Kiev, in his family's apartment building at 1 Dolghii Street in Moscow.
The war and its dislocations had a major impact on the artist's work. For long stretches Kandinsky did not paint in oils, and executed only watercolors and drawings. Revolutionary ferment in Russia, culminating with the Bolshevik uprising in October 1917, also became a major concern for the artist. Although he was a generation older than other leading artists of the period, and the son of a merchant and landowner, Kandinsky's sensibilities were liberal and sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. Having been active in several artist's organizations in pre-war Germany he was favorably disposed to taking a leading role in the sweeping cultural reorganization of the new Soviet Union. He became a member of the Visual Arts Section (IZO) of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment (NKP) and taught at the Svomas (Free State Art Studios) in Moscow. He later had a role in the International Bureau of IZO, which brought him into contact again with German artists once the war had ended.
These associations with younger artists of the revolutionary era clearly had an impact of his style. The present work reflects a transitional bridge between the free form abstractions of his pre-war Munich period and the harder, more geometrical style he evolved in the 1920s. Here his work employs a compositional device which the artist developed during the war years, the use of a border. He had first used this idea in Painting with White Border, 1913 (Roethel and Benjamin no. 456; coll. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), and refined it in the studies leading up to Painting on a Light Ground, 1916 (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 597; coll. Muse National d'Art Moderne, Paris). The positioning of a surrounding contour "creates an effect of pressure and partial release in relation to the composition within. Though the border serves as a ground alluded to in the title, it is also an outer enframement, which acts as the first of a series of spatial planes. This work thus epitomizes the complexity of what Kandinsky called pure 'compositional painting.'" (C.V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 16).
Kandinsky sought to move beyond the loose-limbed and improvisatory compositional structures of the pre-war paintings. The use of a border imposes a measure of compositional discipline, and defines the spatial context in which the artist's pictorial motifs spin out and intermingle. Making the viewer aware of the picture plane, the border also serves to flatten the appearance of compositional space. This is certainly a development made in response to the resolute flatness of Constructivist and Suprematist art in Russia during this period and initiates Kandinsky's gradual tendency toward more solid and defined planar forms. Ultimately, however, he would reject the experimental nature of much Russian avant-garde painting, and criticize its proponents for ignoring subject matter, which Kandinsky felt was the outgrowth of the individual artist's failure to respond to "self-characterization" and "inner necessity." Kandinsky's long-held intuitive beliefs about creativity were at odds with the new Soviet view of art, and by 1921 his alienation from the Russian avant-garde was virtually complete. In the fall of that year he accepted an invitation to visit Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Weimar. He took a teaching position there in the following year, departing from Russia a second and final time.
The war and its dislocations had a major impact on the artist's work. For long stretches Kandinsky did not paint in oils, and executed only watercolors and drawings. Revolutionary ferment in Russia, culminating with the Bolshevik uprising in October 1917, also became a major concern for the artist. Although he was a generation older than other leading artists of the period, and the son of a merchant and landowner, Kandinsky's sensibilities were liberal and sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. Having been active in several artist's organizations in pre-war Germany he was favorably disposed to taking a leading role in the sweeping cultural reorganization of the new Soviet Union. He became a member of the Visual Arts Section (IZO) of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment (NKP) and taught at the Svomas (Free State Art Studios) in Moscow. He later had a role in the International Bureau of IZO, which brought him into contact again with German artists once the war had ended.
These associations with younger artists of the revolutionary era clearly had an impact of his style. The present work reflects a transitional bridge between the free form abstractions of his pre-war Munich period and the harder, more geometrical style he evolved in the 1920s. Here his work employs a compositional device which the artist developed during the war years, the use of a border. He had first used this idea in Painting with White Border, 1913 (Roethel and Benjamin no. 456; coll. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), and refined it in the studies leading up to Painting on a Light Ground, 1916 (Roethel and Benjamin, no. 597; coll. Muse National d'Art Moderne, Paris). The positioning of a surrounding contour "creates an effect of pressure and partial release in relation to the composition within. Though the border serves as a ground alluded to in the title, it is also an outer enframement, which acts as the first of a series of spatial planes. This work thus epitomizes the complexity of what Kandinsky called pure 'compositional painting.'" (C.V. Poling, Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983, p. 16).
Kandinsky sought to move beyond the loose-limbed and improvisatory compositional structures of the pre-war paintings. The use of a border imposes a measure of compositional discipline, and defines the spatial context in which the artist's pictorial motifs spin out and intermingle. Making the viewer aware of the picture plane, the border also serves to flatten the appearance of compositional space. This is certainly a development made in response to the resolute flatness of Constructivist and Suprematist art in Russia during this period and initiates Kandinsky's gradual tendency toward more solid and defined planar forms. Ultimately, however, he would reject the experimental nature of much Russian avant-garde painting, and criticize its proponents for ignoring subject matter, which Kandinsky felt was the outgrowth of the individual artist's failure to respond to "self-characterization" and "inner necessity." Kandinsky's long-held intuitive beliefs about creativity were at odds with the new Soviet view of art, and by 1921 his alienation from the Russian avant-garde was virtually complete. In the fall of that year he accepted an invitation to visit Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Weimar. He took a teaching position there in the following year, departing from Russia a second and final time.