Page 212 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
Kandinsky’s works which are formally most evocative of a Byzantine icon are cer- tainly the depictions of The Blue Rider. The enigmatic theme of The Blue Rider occurs very early in Kandinsky’s work and it escorts him – so to speak – all the way into absolute abstraction. His numerous sketches of this theme and designs for the cover of The Blue Rider Almanac (image 9) were to a great extent undoubtedly inspired by the depictions of Saint George (and other military saints) in Russian icons. We have placed one of such sketches (image 11) amidst two Russian icons in order to demonstrate the particular sim- ilarities: frame-like border around the composition, depiction of a white horse, carefully balanced arrangement of features within the composition, and the warm colour-palette.
In the upper right corner of the image 11 we observe a semi-circular blue area – a place where traditionally either God’s blessing hand or a figure of Christ who blesses is depicted (see image 12). Further, in this sketch of The Blue Rider, it is of outmost impor- tance to note the experimentation with curved black lines – as these have most likely been rendered in or are inspired by the rhythm of a piece of music. We observe the same type of lines in Composition V (image 19) where the “musicalisation” is complete and thus there are no longer readily recognisable forms.
The fact that the sketch of The Blue Rider (shown in images 11 and 13) and Composition V (image 19) date to the same year, leads us to speculate that Kandinsky’s inspiration from Byzantine iconography was not simply succeeded by his process of the “musicali- sation” of painting but continued to develop during that process. In other words, al- though in 1911, through a process of “musicalisation” Kandinsky had reached pure ab- straction, the experience of the Byzantine icon continued to exist in his work. In order to test this speculation we shall implement a visual experiment which aims at gradually turning Kandinsky’s icon-inspired sketch of The Blue Rider shown in image 13 into his work entitled Composition V shown in image 19.
Our first step is shown in image 14, where we have simply turned the sketch of The Blue Rider on its side and excluded its yellow border. Next, as shown in image 15, we have excluded the actual depiction of the blue rider from this composition. In image 16 we have then added with black ink a curved black line similar to the most dominant black line in Kandinsky’s Composition V (image 19). Then, as shown in image 17, we continued adding thinner lines in a rhythmic manner which corresponds to the existing lines of the sketch. Finally, as can be seen in image 18, we have intervened with egg-tempera – while respecting the existing colour-palette of Kandinsky’s original sketch.
When the outcome of this experiment, shown in image 18, is compared to Kandin- sky’s Composition V (image 19) it becomes intelligible how Kandinsky’s inspiration from Russian-Byzantine iconography exemplified in the sketch of The Blue Rider shown in
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