Page 207 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter IV
The Musicalisation of Compositions as a Byzantine Parallel
Kandinsky himself was an amateur musician. His experiences with music were of im- mense significance throughout the course of developments in his formation as a painter. In his book On the Spiritual in Art, he refers to Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, and cites him: “Every combination of notes, every advance is possible, but I am begin- ning to feel that there are also definite rules and conditions which incline me to the use of this or that dissonance.”21
One can observe, in the above citation, how the problems encountered in the theory of music correspond to the kind of problems encountered by Kandinsky in his search for a purely abstract visual language. Such theoretical analogies have undoubtedly inspired Kandinsky in his pursuit of the spiritual in art. In his book entitled Kandinsky, Hans K. Roethel has argued that there is a significant analogy between the way in which Kandin- sky, during his Bauhaus years, had intentionally reduced his formal vocabulary to the circle, triangle, and square, and his palette to primary colours, and Schoenberg’s new sound language where he developed a “grammatical style” by limiting his basic musical material to the twelve-tone technique –i.e., a scale of twelve equidistant semitones of the chromatic style.22
It is also important to mention that Arthur Schopenhauer, whose thought constitutes a tremendous influence on Kandinsky, had stated: “to become like music is the aim of art.”23 Kandinsky’s interest in music, specifically the influence it had on his artistic devel- opment, is a phenomenon which has been frequently addressed in relevant scholarly literature. Roethel most insightfully outlines the two main aspects of music that encour- aged Kandinsky’s artistic practice and theoretical enquiry: “first, the conviction that the musician was able to create his art without object and without having to tell a story, and second, the idea that music had its accepted laws of harmony which, even if not ‘objec- tive,’ were at least practicable in their own well-tempered fashion.”24
The question that shall concern us in the following paragraphs is, how does Kandin- sky’s “musicalisation” of painting relate to a Byzantine experience and Kandinsky’s Or- thodox heritage? Ιn all Orthodox cultures, frescoes and icons are experienced as being in an immediate relationship with the Divine Liturgy and thus with the chanting which
21 Ibid., 35.
22 Hans Konrad Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky (Phaidon Press, 1979), 19.
23 This citation is from: John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Roth-
ko and Still (Thames & Hudson, 2000), 87.
24 Hans Konrad Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky (Phaidon Press, 1979), 19.
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