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Vasily Kandinsky, a Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich. - book reviews

Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Rose-Carol Washton Long

Vivian Endicott Barnett and Helmut Friedel, eds. Cologne: DuMont BuchveHag; New York: Abrams, 1995. 664 pp.; 618 color ills., 105 b/w. $95.00

Abstraction continues to occupy the minds of museum curators and interest in the pioneers of abstract art is flourishing. The 1996 exhibition Abstraction in the Twentieth Century at the Guggenheim and 1995 Occultismus und Avantgarde at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt are only the most recent examples of this continuing interest. Since the 1986 Los Angeles County Museum exhibition The Spiritual in Art, catalogues and books focusing on the pioneering figures of Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and, to a lesser extent, Kupka have proliferated. In the past three years alone, five books have been added to the voluminous literature on the pioneering abstractionist Wassily Kandinsky. The question is, have these recent studies advanced our understanding of critical issues involving abstraction in general and Kandinsky in particular?

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Annegret Hoberg, a curator at the Stadtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus, Munich (the primary repository of the works and letters of Kandinsky and his pre-World War I companion Gabriele Munter), provides a tantalizing introduction to one issue that has been much debated. To what degree did Munter contribute to the development of abstraction? Until the complete correspondence is published, this edition of carefully selected excerpts from their massive number of letters, supplemented with illustrations of their works as well as documentary photographs, will serve as a good starting point for investigations into the personal dynamics of the two artists as they strove to win recognition for their experimental paintings.

Hoberg supplements the exchanges written during trips to their respective families and friends with excerpts from Munter's chronicle of 1911 and from her reminiscences. Arranged into five chronological sections from the beginning of their friendship in 1902 until their separation in 1914, selections from letters--such as those written during Kandinsky's trip to Russia in the fall of 1910 and Munter's visit to the Rhineland in the summer of 1911--provide a clear map of their contacts with artists and patrons in Russia and Germany and brief glimpses into their methods of working. The last grouping of letters, from Kandinsky's 1913 trip to Russia, presents a stark picture (amid all the accounts of meetings with artists such as Larionov and Gonchorova) of a relationship in decline. One needn't subscribe to a psychoanalytic approach to be aware of the connection between the deterioration of their relationship and Munter's frequent illnesses.

Art historians interested in issues of gender will find much to involve them, even in this abbreviated edition. However, clearer identification of patrons and artists mentioned in the letters and more exact references to the sources of material quoted in the preface and introduction would have made the edition easier to use. Although the excerpted letters do not provide many clues to the intellectual context of abstraction, Hoberg's judicious selection conveys an evenhanded picture of the dynamics of a failed romance and adds to the growing literature on artist couples.

Unfortunately, the largest and most expensive of the books under review provides the least coherent picture of Kandinsky and the issues of abstraction. Although Jelena Hahl-Koch states that she wants her study, Kandinsky, to enable the lay person to better understand his work, her method of "freeing" the artist "from excessively narrow interpretations" (p. 8) has produced a book that is a disservice to the general reader as well as to the field. Undigested material, lengthy quotations primarily from published sources, and attacks on well-known scholars permeate her hagiological discussion of the artist.

Hahl-Koch has organized her book chronologically into seven sections which roughly correspond to the countries and cities where Kandinsky lived during his lengthy career. Because of the major developments that took place in Munich, several sections are devoted to that period. Nonetheless, discussion of the influential Blaue Reiter group, one of the most significant aspects of Kandinsky's years in Munich, is limited to four pages out of a total of 389 pages of text. Although Hahl-Koch was a curator at the Lenbachhaus Collection, her book does not coherently utilize her access to the unpublished material available there and frequently reiterates well-known sources. For example, the first section on Kandinsky's early years in Russia depends heavily on long quotations from his widely known autobiography.

Hahl-Koch's concept of "excessively narrow interpretation" creates one of the most serious problems for her study, as it has led her to dismiss the main body of scholarship on Kandinsky. While Kandinsky specialists might disagree about the extent to which German Jugendstil affected Kandinsky's development of abstraction, no serious scholar would insist as Hahl-Koch does that this artist was "not shaped by Art Nouveau, whether in its German, Russian, or any other form" (p. 53). And few would dismiss the impact of Russian nationalism hy proclaiming: Kandinsky's strong feelings about his native city are of such a profoundly aesthetic nature that the question of whether or not they were colored by Slavophile influences is pretty much irrelevant" (p. 27). In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my interpretations are among those attacked, but more to the point is Hahl-Koch's attacks on so many scholars--including Vivian Barnett, Jean Claude Bouillon, Christian Derouet, Sixten Ringbom, and Peg Weiss--who represent different points of view.(1) An example of her petulant and virulent tone is her critique of Christian Derouet's Centre Pompidou catalogue as "a source of some irritation" because he "mistrust[s] Kandinsky's every statement and artistic objective" (p.386).(2)

Vasily Kandinsky, a Colorful Life: The Collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich. - book reviews

Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Rose-Carol Washton Long

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