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This is the first of my several articles
dedicated to my research on Wassily Kandinsky's production of Pictures at an Exhibition.
This production of Modest Mussorgsky's music was staged at the
Friedrichtheater, Dessau, in 1928.
When I first discovered Kandinsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, I was astonished by the images of living pictures where, in the almost total absence of humans, geometric shapes move and interact with each other, creating one visual composition after another. The stage – the place where this action occurs – becomes an abstract space. Before, as a beginning scenography student, I had rarely felt attracted to abstract paintings. This stage composition opened my mind to the very spirit of this art. No books, exhibitions, talks, etc. help so simply to understand the sense of abstract painting.
Let me briefly describe the creation of Pictures at an Exhibition,
composed by Mussorgsky in 1874. This work was inspired by his walk through
the Memorial Exhibition held in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, dedicated to his good friend, Viktor Hartmann. This was shortly after the latter's death, and the composer was deeply moved. The randomly exhibited drawings were created by the architect Hartmann while traveling through the cities and countrysides of Europe and the Russian Empire: there were architectural drafts and copies, costume and stage designs, depictions of scenes of everyday peasant life, landscapes, and urban sketches. Every musical piece of Mussorgsky's composition narrates these works and expresses his emotions inspired by the death of his friend. The Promenade,
on the other hand, corresponds to visitors moving from one picture to
another in the gallery space. The greater part of these priceless drawings
has been lost. Some correlations of music pieces with pictures are not
certain or are even wrong. For example, the drawing of an old man, which
was supposed to have been the prototype for Mussorgsky's piece Rich and Poor Jew or Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle,
turned out actually to be a drawing of an Italian peasant.
Subsequently, Kandinsky, a great admirer
of Mussorgsky's music, evolved his abstract watercolor sketches in
response to Mussorgsky's musical pieces. He wrote in 1930, "[I] used
forms that swam before my eyes on listening to the music." The
motives from Russian folklore in the composer's music were certainly a
source of great inspiration for Kandinsky, who had himself spent a large
amount of time studying folkloric art in his early Russian period.
Hartmann's image for The Hut of Baba-Yaga
In fact, Mussorgsky and Hartmann belong to a period of deep research into
national style and of a revival in Russian art. In the 1910s, the Russian
Seasons caused a veritable scandal in the theatres of Paris and all around
Europe by presenting stage dances inspired by Slavic pagan rituals, such as
Nijinsky's choreography for The Rite of Spring. An important
reconstruction of this ballet was shown in Paris in 2014 during the
Centenary of Russian Seasons. A reconstructed part of it was also included
in the introduction of the film Coco Chanel. You find related tendencies in Pictures at an Exhibition, in the piece The Hut of Baba-Yaga, for example.
The drawing of Hartmann's that apparently inspired Mussorgsky, and later
Kandinsky, depicts the house of Baba Yaga, a witch in the Slavic folklore
tradition, who flies standing in a mortar, steering herself through the air
with a long pestle; she lives in the woods in a house that stands on chicken
legs instead of a foundation.
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Illustration of the interaction of sound, color and
movement, from Kandinsky's manuscript.
Consider Kandinsky's reflections in his theoretical article On Stage
Composition (1911). In the article, Kandinsky gave a visual scheme that
explains the relationship between the three main elements of the
composition: sound, color and movement. The movement of each of these
elements is shown in a drawing with the help of separate lines. Each of the
three has its own, independent trajectory, different from the others, which
illustrates the independent, inwardly integral dynamics of its development
in time. In some places these lines momentarily cross to structure the
composition. In 1923, Kandinsky wrote in his essay Abstract Synthesis on
the Stage:
Stage:
1. Space and dimension — the resources of architecture — the basis that
enables each art to raise its voice, to formulate joint sentences.
2. Color, inseparable from the object — the resources of painting — in
its spatial and temporal extension, especially in the form of colored
light.
3. Individual spatial extension — the resources of sculpture — with the
possibility of structuring positive and negative space.
4. Organized sound — the resources of music — with temporal and
spatial extension.
5. Organized movement — the resources of dance — temporal, spatial,
abstract movements not of people alone, but of space, of abstract forms,
subject to their own laws.
6. Finally, the last form of art known to us, which has not yet
discovered its own abstract resources — poetry — places the temporal
and spatial extension of human words at our disposal.
Just as sculpture is partially subsumed by architecture, so poetry is
partially subsumed by music. Thus, strictly speaking, the purely
abstract form of the theatre is the total of the abstract sounds:
1. of painting — color
2. of music — sound
3. of dance — movement
within the general sound of architectonic form.
You will notice that Kandinsky uses at each point the words "spatial and
temporal extension" ("zeitliche und räumliche Auswertungen"). This
apparently simple and obvious definition of the essential parts of a theatre
action offers a special vision of space and time; it describes the instruments
by which one can model these two extensions. In the theater, I think there
is no better word for this than the "rhythm" of a performance.
These are some of the observations that guided me in my research. In my
next entry, I wish to investigate the reconstruction of the original
production.
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