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Introduction
Part
1 left off in 1914,
when Kandinsky was
about to have his play
produced and was
planning a book on the
theatre. Instead, war
was declared and, as an
enemy Russian in
Germany, Kandinsky
ended up at gunpoint
before escaping on a
ship in the night, in
the company of Russia's
great theatre
innovator, Konstantin
Stanislavsky.
Part
2 takes us from then to
the end of his theatre
life and glimpses what
part of it survived him
soon after.
This
is not a biography of
Kandinsky's life, but
of his Theatre Life. It
lifts out of his
biography the
chronology, the main
shape of, his
involvement with the
theatre, with some
references to other art
forms in this
everything-but-his-paintings
story. Because I am
focusing on this
"breathless" theatre
outline, I haven't
given personal or
professional context
for what you will
read—not the
hundreds of his
artworks left behind in
WWI, not the
confiscation of his
property in the Russian
Revolution or the death
of his child in the
1921-22 famine, not the
many paintings of his
destroyed by the Nazis
in the 1930s, and then
more in Allied bombings
in WWII. This is a man
who died in 1944
knowing that a large
part of his life's work
had been lost and
destroyed. But he never
stopped doing what
theatre work he could
until months before his
death.
If
nothing else, I hope
readers will come away
sure that Kandinsky,
along with being a
ground-breaking
painter, was active in
his time in bringing
renewal to the theatre
in ways that can still
inspire us today.
Part 2
When
Hugo Ball opened the
legendary Cabaret
Voltaire in Zurich,
Switzerland in 1916,
Kandinsky's work
played a part. The
second night of the
Cabaret, for example,
featured
Kandinsky's poems
and a song by Wedekind.
These Dada evenings
included the works of a
fascinating combination
of artists: in the
following month
(March), for example,
"two humorous
pieces by Chekhov"
were performed, and
Hans Arp read from
Jarry's Ubu when
a Lautréamont text did
not arrive in time.
Debussy, Turgenev and
simultaneous poetry
were all presented
without regard to
critical distinctions,
as if artists were at
peace with one another
while the rest of the
world was at war. When
the Cabaret put out its
one journal issue, a
poem of Kandinsky's
was included.
The
Cabaret closed, and the
following year Ball and
Tristan Tzara opened
the Galerie Dada, which
had Kandinsky's
paintings among those
on the walls, and a
cafe called the
Kandinsky Room. The
connection between
Kandinsky and early
Dada has been virtually
ignored by
scholars—a great
loss to historians of
theatre, arts and
culture. Less than a
month after the March
opening, Hugo Ball's
diary shows he offered
a lecture on Kandinsky
that included this
passage:
Kandinsky
is one of the great
innovators, purifiers
of life. The vitality
of his intent is
astounding and just as
extraordinary as
Rembrandt's was
for his age, as
Wagner's also for
his, a generation ago.
His vitality embraces
equally music, dance,
drama, and poetry. His
significance rests on
the fact that his
initiative is equally
practical and
theoretical. He is the
critic of his own work
and of his epoch. He
is a writer of
incomparable verses,
creator of a new
theatrical style,
author of some of the
most spiritual books
in recent German
literature.
The
next week, three of
Kandinsky's poems
were read, and later
that night
Kokoschka's Sphinx and Strawman was
performed, with Hugo
Ball and his wife, poet
and cabaret artist Emmy
Hennings, in the title
roles. As late as 1919,
as Dada was coming to a
close in Zurich,
Kandinsky's poems
were still a part of
the brouhaha.
In
the meantime, on
fleeing Germany in
1914, Kandinsky had had
to travel through
multiple countries to
return to Russia. After
the October Revolution
of 1917, he was
involved in the
reorganization of
cultural programs under
the People's
Commissariat of
Enlightenment (NKP),
which had been created
by the Revolutionary
government. In 1918, a
Department of Visual
Arts (IZO) was
established under NKP,
and Kandinsky was
invited to become a
member. When a Theater
and Film Section was
added, Kandinsky was
made the director of
it. This section
published a
journal, Visual Arts,
of which Kandinsky was
named editor. He
published his essay
"On Stage
Composition" from
the Blue Rider
Almanac in the first issue of the journal.
In
1920 Kandinsky wrote a
series of articles for
the IZO NKP
journal, Artistic Life.
In one of them, he
urged the creation of
an international art
congress that would
include artists from
the fields of painting,
sculpture,
architecture, music,
dance, literature
(especially poetry),
and "all branches
of the theater,
including the intimate
stage, variety, etc.,
right up to the
circus"; all of
these artists would
collaborate on the
creation of a
"monumental art."
When
an Institute for
Artistic Culture
(INKhUK) was
established the same
year, with Kandinsky at
its head, he designed a
program for just such a
collaborative effort.
He presented his
program at the First
Pan-Russian Conference
of Teachers and
Students at the State
Free Art and Industrial
Art Studios, one studio
of which he had been
teaching since 1918.
This program assumes
that there is a
"science of
art." In other
words, Kandinsky
believed that there are
synthesizing principles
of art that can be
taught, and that these
principles, in
conjunction with the
principle of
"inner
necessity," are
the artist's means,
his goal in turn being
a synthesizing or
unified art form. While
the concept of
"inner
necessity" is the
basis of
Kandinsky's
originality, this
notion of
"synthesis"
is the crux of his
genius. Elsewhere I
have written about
Kandinsky's training of
the synthesizing
artist,
"synthesis"
being the second of
Kandinsky's great
guiding principles.
Six
months later, in
December of 1920, he
delivered a report to
the first Pan-Russian
Conference, a meeting
of all of the heads of
art sections under NKP.
In his report he stated
that his Institute was
founded "for the
purpose of studying ...
synthetic [unified]
art," and gave as
an example the early
watercolor/music/dance
experiments he had done
with Hartmann and
Sakharoff in Munich
[described in Part 1].
However, Kandinsky's
program was not
accepted by his
colleagues within the
Institute itself, and
he resigned shortly
thereafter. He adapted
part of the program a
few months later for
the Russian Academy of
Artistic Sciences.
There, he was chairman
of a subcommittee on
"physio-psychology"
and the visual arts.
This time the plan was
accepted, but it was
not carried out because
Kandinsky returned to
Germany before the end
of the year.
That
year, 1922, the Popular
Theatre in Berlin
offered to produce
Kandinsky's Yellow Sound.
But Kandinsky took
seriously the notion
that the theatre is
collaborative: he
turned down this
opportunity because
Thomas von Hartmann was
unavailable to work on
the music with him. In
1923, a theatre article
by Kandinsky entitled
"Abstract
Synthesis on the
Stage" was
published at the
Bauhaus, where he had
accepted a teaching
job. True to the spirit
of the school's
architectural emphasis,
this short article
takes off from a
discussion of the
relationship between
the audience and the
architecture of the
theatre building
itself, and concludes
with the briefest
summary of the
"theater
laboratory"
program he had
envisioned while still
in Russia.
In
1926 Kandinsky
published another
article, "Dance
Curves: The Dances of
Palucca," in which
he did an extraordinary
analysis of the
choreography of this
German dancer, Gret
Palucca. He also
addressed her work
again in his major
book Point and
Line to Plane of the same year.
1927
saw two publications of
Kandinsky's
theatre-related
writings. The first was
"And, Some Remarks
on Synthetic [Unified
or Fusion] Art,"
which, the casual
implication of the word
"remarks"
notwithstanding,
includes a historical
analysis of the gradual
separation of the arts
and suggests
possibilities for their
reunion, as always, in
the theatre. The second
publication was an
excerpt from his
play, Violet,
written thirteen years
earlier. Oskar
Schlemmer, who edited
the issue of the
Bauhaus journal in
which Violet appeared,
was also responsible
for the famous theatre
experiments of the
Bauhaus Stage Workshop.
At some point,
Schlemmer also became
interested in
producing Yellow
Sound; Kandinsky
wrote wistfully in a
letter of 1937,
"[b]ut once again
it didn't work
out... Such things have
their own
destinies." In
fact, we can see in the
Prospectus for the
Bauhaus Books that
publication of the text
of Violet in
its entirety was also
announced by the
Bauhaus, but it, too,
"didn't work
out."
In
1929, Schlemmer's
extraordinary Bauhaus
Theatre was pushed out
of the Bauhaus for lack
of "relevance," and to
make way for the
students to write their
own productions about
matters of social
justice. Schlemmer
wrote in his diary:
"Kandinsky openly shows
his sorrow at the end
of the Theatre in its
present form. I asked
him if he wasn't
tempted…
Kandinsky certainly saw
many of his own ideas
realized on my stage;
after performances he
would let me know
through his wife how
close I was to his
conception."
But
for Kandinsky, the next
project did "work out."
In 1928, Kandinsky
accepted an invitation
by the
Friedrich-Theater in
Dessau to stage
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
Finally, after twenty
years of writing plays
and theoretical
articles for the
theatre, as well as
experimenting and
lecturing on its
behalf, Kandinsky
brought his creative
imagination to bear in
actual theatrical
production. And he did
so with a conception of
such brilliance and
sophistication that it
boggles the mind to
think of what he might
have accomplished if
his life had not
spanned the two world
wars which uprooted him
in one way or another
for most of his adult
life.
Kandinsky
designed all sets and
lighting for the piece,
along with a complex
array of props which
were suspended above
the stage, and which
also moved. In two of
the sixteen scenes he
devised from the music,
he also used dancers,
and also designed their
costumes. Felix Klee,
the son of Paul Klee
(who was also teaching
at the Bauhaus), was a
stage manager and
production assistant at
the theatre. The
original of the prompt
book that he kept is
now at the Pompidou
Center in Paris: it
includes the musical
score with all lighting
and fly cues for
backdrops and props, as
well as his later
notations for the
choreography.
In
1930 Kandinsky
published a brief
description of his
approach to this
project. The structure
of the music suggested
the shape of each
scene, and he
translated each of his
images from the music
into form, color and
light, taking into
account "of
course," he wrote
knowingly, "the
necessity of
dismantling it."
Pictures of sets,
costumes, props and
prompt book all show
his understanding of
this practical matter
of theatre production.
Kandinsky's wife, Nina, later wrote about this staging of Pictures
at an Exhibition in
her tribute to him,
"The Living Kandinsky":
"The Friedrich Theatre
where Dr. Hartmann was
manager became a kind
of studio for
Kandinsky, an extension
of his own, in which
his forms and colors
came to life in a new
space. Kandinsky the
magician, the creator
of [fairylands],
brought his spell here;
he gave life to these
creatures of an
evening."
More
of Kandinsky's
wonderfully performable
poetry appeared in the
important experimental
journal transition in
1932. That same year,
his longtime
reservations about
Futurism
notwithstanding, he
wrote to the Futurist
Marinetti for a letter
of support for the
Bauhaus, which was, as
usual, under threat of
closure, and which in
fact closed the next
year. In 1933, after
years of precarious
standing, the Bauhaus
was closed by the Nazis
for the last time and
Kandinsky, uprooted
again, moved to Paris,
already in his late
60s. There, he received
visits from Marcel
Duchamp, who had also
come to see him at the
Bauhaus in 1929, and
from Andre Breton. He
owned books that were
personally inscribed by
Breton (Second
Surrealist Manifesto),
Tristan Tzara and
Marinetti. He attended
the Futurist conference
of 1935. Four more of
his poems were
published in transition in
1938, and artist Sophie
Taeuber-Arp included
three of his poems in
her journal, Plastique, in 1939.
Scholars
refer in passing to two
theatre projects in the
last years of
Kandinsky's life. In
1939 he is said to have
discussed a "proposed
multimedia ballet" with
Leonide Massine.
Massine had
choreographed
Diaghilev's
original "Parade"
production of 1917, a
collaboration that had
involved Cocteau, Satie
and Picasso. In March
of 1944, Kandinsky
became ill, but that
same month he worked on
the scenery for a
ballet he planned to
produce with Thomas von
Hartmann, the same
composer with whom he
had collaborated on his
very first theatre
projects in Munich
thirty-five years
earlier. He stopped
working altogether in
June, and died in
December.
Kandinsky
left behind a body of
theatre-related work
that has never received
the serious appraisal
it deserves. As we have
seen, his collaborators
and publishers, as well
as many theatre
innovators of his day
were not so nonchalant
about his achievements.
Even after his death,
in a New York lecture
of 1950, Thomas von
Hartmann reminded his
audience that Kandinsky
was a theatre artist,
calling Yellow Sound "the
greatest venture of
stage art to this
day." Such votes
of confidence from his
contemporaries suggest
that the theatre of
today would benefit
from giving
Kandinsky's
contributions some
consideration.
Nina
Kandinsky, his wife of
twenty-seven years,
confirmed in her 1976
memoir that her
husband's "greatest
ambition was to create
a large-scale,
multi-media ballet."
Although the
opportunity was never
granted him to realize
his monumental,
synthesizing stage art,
he left ample
theoretical writings to
guide us towards his
conception, and
outlined a method of
training for the
theatre artist which is
so fresh that the
contemporary theatre
cannot afford to ignore
it. These writings
themselves must stand
in place of the
performances that
Kandinsky never
achieved, and as his
audience, he asked us
to complete them in our
imaginations.
* * *
Note on images and information
A
reminder that the
Internet is bursting
with materials that can
readily supplement what
you read here. For
example, readers can
easily do a search for
Cabaret Voltaire, Oskar
Schlemmer, Gret Palucca
or Marcel Duchamp and
instantly see what they
look like and learn
more. Also see
<Kandinsky Yellow
Sound> and
<Kandinsky
Mussorgsky>.
Here,
Ana Zugasti has created
an ingenious
presentation of the
work Kandinsky did
for Pictures at an Exhibition,
pairing quite a few of
his designs with
recordings of the music
each design accompanied.
http://rz100arte.com/mussorgsky-kandinsky/
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This
photo is just
one image from
the
reconstruction
of Pictures with
Kandinsky's
designs, staged
for the opening
ceremony
(January 2019)
of the festival
in Berlin in
honor of the
centenary of the
Bauhaus. What a
pleasure to see
Kandinsky's
drawing of this
set built, on
stage, and lit!
Note: An earlier, different version of this article was developed
for Dramaturgias journal, Brazil
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Curator, writer and editor, Kandinsky Anew Series
Lissa Tyler Renaud
MFA Directing, PhD Dramatic Art with Art History (thesis on Kandinsky's theatre), summa cum laude,
UC
Berkeley
(1987).
Lifelong
actress,
director.
Founder,
Oakland-based
Actors'
Training
Project
(1985-
) for
training
inspired
by
Kandinsky's
teachings.
Book
publications: The Politics of American Actor Training (Routledge); an invited chapter in the Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky, and ed. Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U. Michigan Press, 3 vols.). She has taught, lectured and published widely on Kandinsky, acting, dramatic theory and the early European avant-garde, throughout the U.S., and since 2004, at major theatre institutions of Asia, and in England, Mexico, Russia and Sweden.
For her other articles, check the Archives.
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©2025 Lissa Tyler Renaud
©2025 Publication Scene4 Magazine
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