Page 219 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter IV
Division-Unity – A Historical and Artistic Reading
Our premise in this short case-study is that through his last paintings, Kandinsky acts not simply as an artist but also as an art-historian and an enigmatic art-theorist, and that he therein unassumingly alludes to the so far insufficiently observed significance of the influence which the aesthetics of Byzantine painting exercised on his abstract painterly language. We shall examine this premise by discussing firstly Kandinsky’s painting en- titled Division-Unity shown in image 43. Next to this work we have placed a segment from the 16th century Post Byzantine fresco (image 44) painted by Theophanes the Cretan in the church of the Monastery of St Nicholas Anapausas at Meteora: a strict geometrical division of surfaces is the most obvious similarity.
Of course, the overt use of geometrically structured compositions and an inclination towards simplified geometrical rendering of features can be encountered in a number of ancient artistic traditions. Thus, for example, we can conceive of an aesthetic parallel between Kandinsky’s Division-Unity and a detail from an Egyptian mural. A copy of one such mural is shown as a whole in image 45. If we look at the geometrically arranged areas in this mural, we can easily find a number of segments which are strikingly remi- niscent of Kandinsky’s Division-Unity (image 43).
Throughout the history of Byzantine painting, significant aesthetic developments did indeed occur but they mainly occurred at a slow and unassuming pace and they were not inclined towards breaking away from the course of the tradition, but rather, they re- mained an integral part of it. In the case of Egyptian art, we have an even more austere adherence to conventions of the tradition.
Furthermore, neither of the two traditions are concerned with either faithful realism of form or with art for the mere sake of decoration or beauty. In both cases, the predilec- tion for abstraction aspires to conceive of beauty as of something exalted rather than externally beautiful. Of course, between the Egyptian and the Byzantine artistic experi- ence there is the significant mediation of the Ancient Greek and the Greco-Roman expe- rience. The mediation of the Ancient Greek experience in particular is addressed by Wilhelm Worringer in his book Abstraction and Empathy which was deemed by Kandin- sky and a number of his contemporaries as insightful. We include here a relevant cita- tion from this book:
“Compare a Byzantine relief of the good period with an Ancient Egyptian relief, and finally with a Greek vase decoration. Despite the fact that the purely geometric-abstract setting and the markedly abstract tendency bring the Byzantine work quite close to the Egyptian, we nevertheless notice at once, by the elegance and beauty of the linear-orna-
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