Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
From "Realism and abstraction in russian art in the 19th and 20th centuries"
by Milena Cordioli
Between 1876 and 1877 Dostoevsky published two stories in his Writer's Diary, The Meek Girl and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and he specified their nature by referring to them as 'fantastic tales'. However, the author felt the need to explain further the sense even of this definition: for an artist whose reference point was always the reality of Russia with all its contradictions and its profound solitude, this wording might seem like a venture into a new literary realm dominated by fantasy and intuition. This was not so: the reality that continued to nourish his art, the 'fantastic', in other words his poetical invention, continued to feed his dreams though they were always anchored in real life.
The solitary condition of the human soul, captured in intense moments of contemplation, and lowered so deeply into the events of real life as to become almost visionary abstractions, pervades the protagonists of these two tales: the meditations of the first and the revelatory dream of the second become profound dimensions of the soul capable of constructing intense ideas that, like underground tunnels, move the solid foundations of reality and search for its primary and universal meanings. "They say I'm a psychologist; this is not exact: I am only a realist in the highest sense, that is, I show all the depths of the human soul," Dostoevsky said of himself.
The same depths can be found in the works of the most important of his contemporary Russian painters, and these were always arrived at by way of the elaboration of a realistic style, similar to that of the great write in having the constantly present some final sense, trapped in the historical chain of facts and fixed in the work through the strength of form and language.
The symbolic transformation of the peasant, the Russian worker, the concrete figure of the state of civil oppression in 19th century Russia, was the subject chosen by many artists, and is seen in the works of Vassily Perov (1834 - 1882) with all his deep sense of compassion expressed through a psychological and subjective visionary sense, as much as in the works of Il'ya Repin (1844 - 1930), concentrated on a dramatically objective vision of contemporary Russian reality, and in those of the genre painters Vladimir Makovsky (1844 - 1920?) and Nikolay Yaroshenko (1846 - 1898). The work by Illarion Pryanishnikov (1840 - 1894) called Convoy, 1872, shows a moment in Russian life suspended in the endless expanses of its land: a convoy of transport workers in the snow. The figure in the foreground is curved, captured in a thoughtful attitude and closed in on himself, realistically explicable in the physical need to shelter from the freezing air of the snow-covered plain but symbolically transfigured into an image of extreme human solitude, as was Kramskoy's Christ in the Desert, painted in the same year. (…) Kramskoy's Christ and Pryanishnikov's hauler have the same transcendental calibre: even though both are bent earthwards, they are also projected towards the infinity of distant horizons which, at the same time, they keep closed within themselves. The biblical desert and the endless plains of Russia can coincide, just as the figure of Christ and the humblest Russian hauler, peasant, worker or beggar are all coinciding symbols of the universal human condition.
Landscape has an enormous importance in Russian 19th century painting: gloomy and melancholy, cloud-covered, harmonised by the limpid blue of the horizon, prophetic and surreal, dyed red by the setting sun and crossed over by prophetic flights of birds. Black birds, often crows and ravens, at times reduced to black marks wounding the uniform light of the sky or the mantle of snow, are a constant presence in the landscapes of Russian painters, above all in those works in which man and nature are captured and united by the previously mentioned strong reciprocal tensions.
The compositional structure of the work tends towards the essentiality of abstraction: everything we see is concrete and real, but the way in which the artist makes us see it is highly symbolic. This way is the style, in other words the lines, forms, colour, and contrasts of light and shade: the poetical language of art is that spoken by the Russian painters of the great realist period. An intense realism in the best sense of the term, as Dostoevsky affirmed, because it was capable of arriving at the depths beyond visible reality.
The following period, between the 19th and twentieth centuries, saw the growth of a new language in painting arrived at through a process of transforming styles and content: there was a greater linear and chromatic decorativeness (not unrelated to Art Nouveau) and legendary and fabulous themes were favoured, always grounded in the artist's homeland. In this sense the painting of Viktor Vasnecov (1848 - 1926) is significant. Warlords of the Bylina, popular Russian epic poetry, princesses from the underworld, and fabulous subjects populate canvases full of symbolic allusions that echo in the a-historical time of fairy tales.
Is the choice of new themes and languages, the need for autonomy and independence from realistic art, the only soil in which the seeds of the avant-garde were to mature? What new freedom should the artist reveal through his work? The freedom of the spirit, Kandinsky would have answered, which, though, does not coincide with that of the artist's interior subjectivity but with the deeper 'objective' freedom with which an epoch and a people recount their times through images.
Russian painting in the second half of the nineteenth century - revolutionary with respect to academic art, and fully anchored in the reality of the times, of history and, at the same time, raised to the spiritual level of abstraction, in the symbolic and formal sense earlier referred to - was not the antithesis of Kandinsky's work: the dichotomy between realism and abstraction did not exist. The revelation of a spiritual art was, for him, the prophetic task of the contemporary artist: the search for inwardness within the external, the deep correspondence between soul and reality, had been discovered by Russian painters of the preceding generation through the symbolic transfiguration of the humble figures of the Russian people and of their history.
Kandinsky's painting, however, differed from the works of Russian artists of the previous century, and was fully sustained by that 'metaphorical bread' that for him was the essence of artistic vision. But this was a source that had already been drawn on by the Russian realists who constructed their images according to an interior value, and carefully weighed the internal balances of form and colour, light and shade, by suspending the flow of the time of real life in order to imagine eternal time, one that does not pass but waits in anticipation: messianic and prophetic.
Abstract art was meant to direct 'metaphorical freedom' to its extreme consequences though these were already present in the realist compositions of 19th century Russian painters through the visionary potential of reality that animated them: this was his aim. So it would be wise not to conclude too quickly that there was a sharp difference between realist 19th century painting, involved with social and historical issues, and later painting, interpreted as merely subjective and uninvolved: the involvement is of a different character, one that radicalised the need for a profound spiritual freedom and that first passed through anti-academic realism and then through abstraction and was against the dogmatic formalism promoted by the powers that be.
Materialist reasoning denies the sincerity of fantasy, the 'highest realism' of Dostoevsky's narrative art suggests that the dream is the moment of deep truth that dwells in the a-temporal spaces of the subconscious. The mystic content of the dream is the same as that of artistic vision which is eternal because it is outside time and space, even when both seem given to us in their most concrete and solid form, as in the Russian painting of Dostoevsky's epoch.
In the works of these artists something similar occurs to what happens in the dreams narrated by the writer. A final comment might best be left in his words, a few lines in which he describes the nature of dreams and in which is reflected the symbolic union between realism and abstraction, the spiritual basis of those images: