Page 202 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
our present assessment of the Late Byzantine element in Kandinsky’s abstraction shall be limited to a very specific scope. Specifically, it is our aim, in this chapter, to demon- strate that aspects of Late Byzantine painting in Kandinsky’s abstraction do not consti- tute a mere theoretical hypothesis, but are in fact observable visual phenomena. This shall be the common purpose of the three case-studies which comprise the second part of this chapter. In the first part, we shall proceed with a concise outline of Kandinsky’s biography and a discussion of the relevant contemporary perceptions of his lifework respectively.
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It was in 1896 when Kandinsky, despite the fact that his formal studies at the Moscow University were in fields of law, economics and ethnography, decided to become a paint- er. Thus, his life as a painter and his struggle for a new vision in art began in 1896 when, at the age of thirty, he moved to Munich in order to study painting. The influences of Symbolism, Fauvism, Neo-Impressionism, as well as his awareness of the significance of Cubism, have undoubtedly played their role, yet more than anything else he was pro- foundly inspired by his own, personal vision. Thus, he did not become absorbed by any of the artistic movements and trends which were active in his formative years and there- after. Instead, he was guided throughout his entire life by a force of a distinctly esoteric experience. For example, when at the exhibition of French art in Moscow Kandinsky saw Monet’s Haystacks series, in one of the paintings he did not comprehend the subject, and it was this, essentially liberating experience, that he was to recall upon renouncing rep- resentation in his own painting.
We note that in 1896 there was already an atmosphere in Munich imbued with a ten- dency towards radical changes in art. The Munich Secession, founded in 1892, and Jugendstil, are the two prominent art movements which gave platform to new aesthetic directions. During the first two years in Munich, Kandinsky studied under Anton Ažbe and then under Professor Franz von Stuck, a co-founder of the Munich Secession.2 As stated by Becks-Malorny, we have almost no tangible evidence of Kandinsky’s work during the first four years of his stay in Munich.3 That which we do know is that within that period Kandinsky established contact with artists such as Ernst Stern, Waldemar Hecker (the puppeteer) and sculptor Wilhelm Hüsgen, who were members of “Die Elf Scharfrichter” (The Eleven Executioners) – a pro avant-garde literary and artistic cabaret.4
2 Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Kandinsky (Taschen, 2007), 14–15. 3 Ibid., 15.
4 Ibid.
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