Page 211 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter IV
In the following segments of this chapter we shall gradually elaborate on the specific relationship between the abstraction in Kandinsky’s work and the tendency towards abstraction in Late Byzantine painting. This is by no means a simple task, because in abstract art, not all influences are always unambiguously apparent. Moreover, Kandin- sky’s visual language constitutes a prime example of this phenomenon. It should there- fore be stressed that the influences in his work cannot be decoded and comprehended solely through the assessment of the outer appearance of his paintings – their surface. This occurs due to Kandinsky’s absorbed theoretical, as well as practical commitment to the research of the explicitly inner content which can be expressed through colour and form. As stated by Roethel: “In order to evaluate Kandinsky’s life and art as a whole, it is important to realise that it was not the problem of form as such that was of prime in- terest to him but the question of how to express new content in adequate terms.”32
To the best of our knowledge, the publication entitled The Character and the Rea- son of the Abstraction in Byzantine Painting, written in Greek by Georgios Kordis is the only book which, while using Kandinsky as one of the main references to abstract painting, analytically discusses the possibility of a relationship between the tendency towards abstraction in Byzantine painting and the abstraction in Modern painting of the 20th century. We shall discuss Kordis’ views in the second of our three case-studies in this chapter. The common aim of the following case-studies is to visually demonstrate that the painting of Vasily Kandinsky, besides its other achievements, entails an objecti- fication of a significant and hitherto underappreciated artistic dialogue with the numi- nous in Late Byzantine painting.
The Blue Rider and the Musicalisation of Painting
The aim of this first case study is to demonstrate, primarily by visual means, that in Kan- dinsky’s work the Byzantine experience continues to exist even after he proceeded to pure abstraction. To the best of our knowledge, no study has been written on how in particular the aesthetics of Byzantine painting became transubstantiated within Kandin- sky’s abstract language. Our premise here is that, through the process of the “musicali- sation” of painting, Kandinsky thoughtfully incorporated the inspiration from Byzantine icon and fresco painting into his abstraction – which in turn retained a distinct iconic as well as fresco quality.
32 Hans Konrad Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky (Phaidon Press, 1979), 13. 209