Wassily Kandinsky’s Betonte Ecken: a ‘harmony of clashing discords’

On Christmas Eve in 1921, Wassily Kandinsky and his wife Nina arrived in Berlin, never to see Russia again. The move to Germany offered the opportunity for a personal and professional reset: the couple’s infant son tragically died from malnutrition in 1920, and Kandinsky was painting little, his time increasingly occupied by a new job as a commissar for the Culture Ministry.

Kandinsky had been famous for being a pioneer of abstraction in the years running up to the First World War. Upon his arrival in Germany, this earned him an invitation from Walter Gropius to join the teaching faculty at the Bauhaus, the radical art, architecture and design school. Kandinsky took up his role in 1922, immersing himself in an avant-garde environment with the likes of Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Josef Albers as colleagues.

It was in this context that Kandinsky produced his masterpiece Betonte Ecken — a painting that marked a stunning new type of abstraction, one which would influence artists for the rest of the century and beyond.

A ‘total work of art’

Created at the Bauhaus between December 1922 and January 1923, Betonte Ecken met Kandinsky’s longstanding objective of generating a ‘harmony [of] clashing discords’. The painting was also linked to the realisation of his dream to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk: a ‘total work of art’ integrating different art forms to create a single spiritual experience.

The term Gesamtkunstwerk was popularised by the composer Richard Wagner, whom Kandinsky greatly admired. (In fact, hearing Wagner’s Lohengrin in Saint Petersburg in 1896 was what first inspired him to become an artist.) Kandinsky saw a strong synaesthetic affinity between music and painting: believing that the former could trigger visions, and the latter trigger sounds. In his influential 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art, he imagined this concept: ‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.’

Betonte Ecken is broadly structured in an X shape, along two diagonals which intersect at the central blue form and thrust outwards towards the canvas’s four corners. The structure is one of the earliest manifestations of the key principles that defined Kandinsky’s 1926 manifesto Point and Line to Plane: each formal element contributes in a specific way to the internal dynamics of the composition to express a spiritual reality. Kandinsky said he liked the compositional ‘tension’ that such a structure brought.

This tension is reflected in the work’s title, which translates into English as ‘Accented Corners’. It highlights the work’s centrifugal energy, and the way that the viewer’s gaze moves from the swell of activity in the middle out towards the edges.

‘[Betonte Ecken] is an explosive fusion of colour, line and form, everything you hope to see,’ says Alex Rotter, Global President of Christie’s. ‘Although abstract and geometric, traces of the real world flash in and out of focus: undulating hills, a steeple of Murnau, clouds, buildings and architecture.’

Early experiments with colour and form

It was in the early 1910s that Kandinsky, then in his mid-forties, first dispensed with the notion that colour and form be used to copy the physical world. As he put it in On the Spiritual in Art, they should ‘have an independent existence… derived from inner necessity’ instead. In other words, art should be created intuitively.

The result was a celebrated set of abstract pre-war paintings, of which Composition VII is a well-known example. These are characterised by kaleidoscopic clusters of expressive gesture.

By the early 1920s, Kandinsky’s paintings became abstract in a different fashion: geometric, boasting strikingly clean lines and sharply delineated forms.

The change was bold and unmistakable. Works such as Betonte Ecken reflected the influence of the Russian art movements of Suprematism and Constructivism, as well as the geometric aesthetic finding increasing favour at the Bauhaus. (The first of the school’s cubic, flat-roofed buildings was constructed the same year as Betonte Ecken was completed.)

Bauhaus ideals

The Bauhaus was located in Weimar, the city where — at the end of the war — the constitution for Germany’s new republic had been drawn up. It assembled painters, metalworkers, architects and many others to work together in the name of improving the material world.

This appealed to Kandinsky, inasmuch as every product made at the school seemed a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. He himself had written in On the Spiritual in Art that ‘from a proper encroachment of arts upon another, there will rise… art that is truly monumental’.

Not long after joining the Bauhaus, he created a group of murals that would adorn the entrance hall at the Juryfreie Kunstschau (‘Jury-Free Art Show’) in the autumn of 1922. This was an annual avantgarde exhibition held in Berlin, and the cumulative effect of seeing Kandinsky’s works together was to enter an immersive art installation avant la lettre.

According to the art historian Angela Lampe, writing in an essay about the murals in 2014, ‘the intention was for visitors to be able to forget themselves… to become submerged in a total pictorial space.’ Or, one might say, become submerged in the artist’s Gesamtkunstwerk.

With multiple geometric forms seen against an expansive ground, each painting bore a distinct resemblance to Betonte Ecken — which Kandinsky began almost immediately after the exhibition closed. (Sadly, the murals are now lost.)   

A storied provenance

Acquired in the summer of 1929, Betonte Ecken was the first known Kandinsky painting owned by Hilla Rebay. A German artist and collector, Rebay is remembered chiefly for her role as an advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim as he put together his art collection, steering him towards abstract painting in particular.

She even took the collector and his wife Irene to visit Kandinsky at the Bauhaus Dessau in 1930, writing to tell her host in advance: ‘we love your art so much’. Rebay and the artist enjoyed a long-lasting friendship, and she did a great deal to boost his profile in the United States; for example, translating his treatises, like On the Spiritual in Art, into English.

Rebay acquired several other Kandinsky paintings after purchasing Betonte Ecken, both for herself and for Guggenheim. Upon becoming the first director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (known today as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) when it opened in 1939, she also exhibited Kandinsky’s work.

Betonte Ecken eventually entered Guggenheim’s collection (he acquired the work from Rebay in 1938), and then the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, before being sold at auction in 1964. Its current owners purchased the work at a sale in 1986.

Created at a critical moment in Kandinsky’s career, Betonte Ecken signalled both a farewell to his gestural pre-war abstractions and the start of a period of non-objective painting for him at the Bauhaus where geometry dominated. The work would go on to have great impact on future artists, including the Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters such as Kenneth Noland and Op artists such as Bridget Riley.

‘There is no “must” in art, because art is free’, Kandinsky once said. In Betonte Ecken, he showed the breathtaking benefits of such freedom.