|
2022 Update
Lissa Tyler Renaud
This month, this
"Kandinsky Anew" Series
returns to an earlier piece that places
Kandinsky in the tragic path of just the
type of totalitarian madness we are
witnessing today in Ukraine, where
Kandinsky had close ties of many kinds
throughout his life: the same disrupted
lives, the frightened refugees, the
shocking deaths of dear friends and
children, the property destruction, and
too much more. Again, due to military
invasion, professional artists of all
kinds are losing their jobs and
livelihoods because of their stated
objections to state violence.
Soviet Russia famously liberated Ukraine
in 1944; today's Russia bombs major
portions of Ukraine to smithereens.
Putin even makes a dangerous appearance
in author Zarina Zabrisky's article
below. But as Zabrisky writes,
"… the vocabulary of a
totalitarian state and authoritarian
dictators is the same anywhere on Earth,
regardless of the era." Her article
deepens our understanding of
Kandinsky's life and work, and of
heartbreak repeating today in a place he
loved.
*
Introduction
(to Zabrisky article)
Lissa Tyler Renaud
Editor, "Kandinsky Anew" series
In both
print and online, we too often find
Disneyfied versions of Kandinsky's life,
which was actually one of considerable Sturm und Drang.
It is tempting to be dazzled by his
striking good looks and the fact that
his paintings and writings changed the
history of art, and to stop there.
But
Kandinsky grew up "between
cultures"—a Russian with Asian
heritage, some childhood years in
Odessa, a German grandmother—and
he continued to be an outsider of one
kind or another all his life. He
suffered very real periods of
depression; there was often a fine line
between his famous synesthetic visions
and the hallucinations that had driven
his uncle to suicide. After some
fitful-but-fruitful exploratory years,
at thirty, he chose to live in Germany,
where he wrote as well as painted.
Publishers rolled their eyes and balked
at his extravagant, Russfied German; one
slighted his abstract theoretical works
as "Asiatic." He sheepishly relied on
friends to correct his written German.
He was forcibly ejected from Germany at
gunpoint at the start of WWI—easy
to say, traumatic to live
through—and made a harrowing trip
back to Russia, where the revolutionary
government confiscated his property, and
his revolutionary colleagues treated him
as an old fuddy-duddy and pushed him to
the margins. He'd left a long
relationship and countless,
irretrievable paintings behind in
Germany. At around 50, he married a
(pregnant?) 17-year old; as was common
at the time of the Russian famine, their
child died of starvation, at around
three years old. Indeed, Kandinsky was
hard-pressed to find either food or
materials for painting, and when he and
his wife gave up and left for Germany in
1921—once again leaving his works
behind—he appeared markedly thin
in photos. He accepted a teaching job at
the new Bauhaus in 1922, where his
colleagues never knew of Kandinsky's
long period of privations or that he had
a son buried in Moscow.
Writer
Zarina Zabrisky tells the next, haunting
chapter of Kandinsky's story in the
passionate essay that follows. She has
been devoted to Kandinsky's ideas for a
long time, and her article serves as a
corrective to the
whitewashed—commercialized?—picture
of his life that prevails in the
public's imagination. Zabrisky offers us
the authentic texture of what Kandinsky
lived through during those years, and
gives us context for the final upheaval
that resulted in his move to Paris for
his last ten years. Zabrisky's is also a
cautionary tale, suggesting our own
times.
*
Kandinsky and The Totalitarian State
Degenerate Art
The Nazi German exhibition, Entartete Kunst, widely known as Degenerate
Art, was organized by the Third
Reich in 1937 in Munich. The National
Socialists' attack on modern art, it
showcased 650 out of 16,000 works of art
confiscated from the museums and labeled
"un-German," "insult to German
motherhood," "insanity room" and "Nature
as seen by sick minds." The artists were
fired, banned from work and most went
into exile. Many paintings were burnt
after the show. Hired actors loudly
criticized the art in the galleries.
This show stayed open for four months
and was attended by two million
visitors, including Hitler himself. In
1938, art historian Lucy Wasensteiner,
in defending Kandinsky and other
"degenerate" artists, wrote that for
Hitler, a failed artist whose work did
not receive any recognition or
attention, "art was, and had to be, a
mirror in which the reflection shows the
discernible if idealistically
transformed human material, and such art
must relate to and be governed by the
requirements of the struggle of the
higher race against the lower and not by
any suggestion that the creative process
was the result of 'inner necessity'. "
Kandinsky
The organizers of Degenerate Art mistook
Wassily Kandinsky for a member of the
Dada movement and placed the enlarged
details of his three Compositions,
confiscated during a raid on the Bauhaus
art school, on the "Dada wall" along
with the art of Paul Klee. Considering
that in 1933 Hitler remarked that "sixty
years ago an exhibition of so-called
Dadaistic 'experience' would have seemed
simply impossible, and its organizers
would have ended up in the madhouse,"
this was not just an error. It could be
a life sentence. The three Compositions were destroyed.
Bauhaus
Degenerate Art featured
works by several former professors of
the Bauhaus, an experimental art school
located in Dessau after 1925. Kandinsky
had taught at the Bauhaus since 1922,
after his return to Germany from the
Soviet Union where the Bolsheviks had
labeled modernist and abstract art as
"decadent" and Kandinsky himself as the
"lackey of the bourgeoisie." Ironically,
the Nazis proclaimed the Bauhaus "a
hotbed of Bolshevism in culture"
and closed it in 1933. From a German
culture page entitled "Nazi and Bauhaus
School": "Paul Schultze-Naumburg was the
architect that they sent into the school
to re-establish pure German art instead
of the 'cosmopolitan rubbish' the
Bauhaus artists were doing. He described
Bauhaus furniture as Kisten, or
boxes…"
"The Great German Art Exhibition"
At the same time the Degenerate Art exhibit was running in the city of Munich, the Third Reich opened there The Great German Art Exhibition, featuring
work approved by the Ministry of
Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
From Dr. Lucy Wasensteiner again:
The
Nazi movement attracted many who had a
grudge against modern art. There were
daydreaming racist philosophers,
embittered know-nothings, provincials
who seized the opportunity to direct
their spite against those engaged in
activities they could not understand,
small-town bigshots and big-town
smallshots. Some of the leading party
members took pride in what they
regarded as their artistic inclinations
and were prepared to speak out on the
subject of art and artists. Herman
Goering was a voracious collector of
art; Josef Goebbels was a failed
novelist and playwright (his novel Michael: A German Fate in Diary Form is
a true literary curiosity): and even
the peddler of pornography and
obscenities, the corrupt publisher of
the infamous Der Sturmer (The Stormer),
Julius Streicher, attempted the writing
of poetry and the painting of
watercolors; Alfred Rosenberg, the
self-styled philosopher, whose
well-known if largely unread The Myth of the Twentieth Century was
devoted in great part to a
consideration of art and its
relationship to society, had in the
late nineteen-twenties organized the
Combat League for German Culture, a
collection of wooly-minded activists.
The Nazi
artists turned to Hellenistic and Nordic
visuals for inspiration. They used
symbols and imagery that reinforced the
myth of "Arian superiority," and
promoted youthfulness, health, fertility
and purity, such as Hitler Youth Drummer by Anni Spetzler-Proschwitz, displayed at the show in 1939.
Sculptor Arno Breker, who created works such as Prometheus,
an oversized sculpture of an Arian male,
all sinewy muscles, installed in the
garden of the Reich Ministry of Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda, eventually
joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and became
an official state sculptor.
Nazi-sympathizing organizations, such as
the Military League for German Culture,
established in 1928, promoted the idea
of 'pure' German culture. The ethnic
superiority of Nordic people and fear of
Jewish and foreign influences, including
"Negro" jazz, became the predominant
themes in the art of the Third Reich.
Hitler and Mussolini attended the
exhibit. It became an annual tradition.
London—Twentieth Century German Art
From June to August of 1938, exactly one year after Degenerate Art,
an exhibition Twentieth Century German Art was
organized in central London to challenge
the Degenerate Art exhibit
in Munich. By 1937, the Nazis had
started to confiscate the art from
Jewish art collectors, using the label
"degenerate" art as justification. Many
artists, as well as collectors and
dealers, had escaped Nazi Germany and
Austria. They sent art to the show,
which showcased 300 paintings and
sculptures from 90 private collections.
Sixty-four artists participated,
including Kandinsky, who donated at
least two works for the show. All in
all, thirteen works by Kandinsky were on
display in Twentieth-Century
German Art.
"This
was the largest international response
to the National Socialist campaign
against 'degenerate' art, and it remains
the largest display of twentieth-century
German art ever mounted in Britain,"
according to the curators of the
exhibit London 1938: Defending 'Degenerate' German Art,
which commemorated the
80th anniversary of the London
show. "Much of this art is now in
official disfavour in the country of its
origin," read the flyer that featured
Franz Marc's Blue Horses.
The show
was a great success. The opening
attracted over one thousand people. By
mid-August, an estimated 12,000 people
had visited the exhibit and it was
extended three times. "Women were kept
waiting in the rain, staircases and
galleries were difficult to move in,"
reported the London press. "Because
their work shows the horrors of war,
because it conflicts with Hitler's
'artistic ideas' (he is an amateur
painter), most of the last century they
have been forbidden to exhibit in their
own country," wrote another newspaper.
The Third Reich's Reaction To London Exhibit
As noted in the informational materials of the London
1938: Defending 'Degenerate'
German Art exhibition:
In Nazi Germany, Twentieth Century German Art prompted
a furious reaction. Adolf Hitler spoke
out against the show at the opening of
the second annual Great German Art Exhibition in
Munich in 1939… and various angry
reports followed in the Nazi-controlled
German press. For example, the Voklischer Beobachter characterized
it as 'Judaism and Moscow' presenting
lies to the 'politically clueless
English.'
"The Progress of Bolshevik Art—Degenerate Exhibition in
London—half of them, of course,
Jews and Emigrants," read a headline
from the German press covering the
London exhibit.
"Great German Art" And "Bolshevik Art"
In
another ironic twist, the real
"Bolshevik Art" was practically
identical to the "Great German art." The
Soviet official style was called
"socialist realism," a representational
art style that was class-based, widely
accessible, and comprehensible to the
masses.
Kandinsky, who had to return to his
native Russia in 1914 from Germany after
the beginning of World War I and got
inspired by the experimental nature of
pre-revolutionary and early Bolshevik
Russia, left it for good in 1921, unable
to create under the dictated mandates of
the Communist party leaders.
The
Soviets, like the Nazis, very quickly
knew to allow only the art and culture
that served the state and fit into the
official ideology of the ruling party.
The art,
as the regime's tool, promoted the
stereotypes of loyal citizens united by
the ideals of the utopian future in the
Soviet Union (blood and soil in the
Third Reich); sacrifice of an individual
life for the well-being of the nation
and world proletariat in the USSR (the
Arian race in the Third Reich); the
great destiny of the chosen class (race
in the Third Reich); muscular
masculinity; fertile femininity;
sanctity of motherhood; athletic
vitality; military power.
Art, Propaganda And The Totalitarian State
Fatherland and Motherland, traditional
gender role distribution, racial or
class purity, unity in the name of race
or class—the vocabulary of a
totalitarian state and authoritarian
dictators is the same anywhere on Earth,
regardless of the era.
In the
1930s, both the Nazis and the Soviets
ideologues put culture in the center of
propaganda work. As early as 1933,
Hitler and the Reich Minister for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda, Josef
Goebbels, signed a law on establishing
the Reich Chambers of Literature, Press,
Broadcasting, Theater, Music, and Visual
Art. Thus, the Ministry of Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda started to
control all spheres of culture. In 1932,
the Union of Artists replaced all art
schools, groups, circles and societies
in the USSR. The Soviets also had a
Ministry of Culture that reported
directly to the Kremlin and the
censorship system that erased any voices
outside of the party line. Stalin, like
Hitler, was a failed artist; he started
by writing poetry and "curated" the
poets and writers personally.
In 1933,
just as the Nazis closed the Bauhaus,
the Soviets labeled Kazimir Malevich's
"Black Square" as the product of the
"rotting" bourgeois art, and socialist
realism took a monopoly on the cultural
arena in the USSR.
While
the messages of the Soviets and Nazis
differed— the superiority of the
"Aryan race" vs. the hegemony of the
proletarian class—the essence was
the same. National Socialist and Soviet
socialist realist aesthetics reflected
the ideology of the totalitarian state
intolerant to the liberal democracy
individuation and freedom pioneered by
the founder of modern art, Wassily
Kandinsky.
For the
break through the representational
barrier into pure abstraction presents a
danger to oppressive regimes. The rights
of thought and imagination undermine the
crowd mentality, military discipline and
the blind obedience required of a loyal
citizen of a fascist state. The chaos of
colors is unacceptable. A strict order must rule.
The departure from a utilitarian
approach—the fascists' doctrines
and dogmas—is punished.
Nowadays, in Putin's Russia, the same
playbook is used. In 2015, the secret
police raided an exhibition of a group
called Blue Rider, inspired by the name
of Kandinsky's own group
(1911-1914). The artists dared to
challenge the nationalist fervor of the
Victory Day celebration and depicted the
war in a horrifying way, "insulting
patriotic feeling." The art was
confiscated. In the best tradition of
the Third Reich, the artists were beaten
up and detained.
Conclusion
One
would hope that eighty years after the
London protest exhibition, we would be
examining it only in the light of art
history. As we know, however, the
chimera of fascism has made a full
circle. The neo-Nazi and far-right
forces present a serious threat to
humanity yet again. In the context of
today's political struggle between
the darkness and the light,
Kandinsky's work is as relevant as
ever--and gives us hope.
* * *
Note: This article originally appeared in Kandinsky Beyond Painting: New Perspectives,
ed. Lissa Tyler Renaud, for a special 2018 issue on Kandinsky, Dramaturgias journal, Brazil.
Zarina Zabrisky
is an award-winning American author of five books published
internationally. She holds an M.A. in Literature from St. Petersburg University, Russia. Her
work has been featured worldwide in over fifty magazines, has won a 2013 Acker Award for
Achievement in the Avant-Garde, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times.
Zabrisky is also a journalist, currently reporting from Ukraine for Euromaidan Press, Byline
Times and Bywire News.
 |
|
Curator, writer and editor, Kandinsky Anew Series
Lissa Tyler Renaud
BA Acting, MFA Directing, PhD Dramatic Art with Art History (on
Kandinsky's theatre), summa cum laude, UC Berkeley (1987). Founder, Oakland-based
Actors' Training Project for training based on Kandinsky's teachings (1985- ). Lifelong
actress, director. Book publications: The Politics of American Actor Training (Routledge);
an invited chapter in the Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky. 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. She is a senior writer for Scene4.
For her other commentary and articles, check the Archives.
|
|
* * *
This article will be included in an easily accessible
Index for the entire series. If you are not currently
a subscriber to Scene4 but would like to be notified
whenever a new article is added to the series,
please send us your email address..
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
