Kandinsky and Mondrian
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The immediate forerunners of abstract art, as we know, were Fauvism and Cubism. The influence of the Fauves was decisive in the case of Kandinsky, while Mondrian's formation was completed by that of the Cubists. 1906 and 1912 are two important dates here. The first was not only the year of the death of Cézanne, whose influence on early Cubism has been fully explored; it was also the year when Bergson Creative Evolution appeared, and when Kandinsky spent a long spell in or near Paris. There he sustained the full shock of the Fauves and Gauguin (through the Gauguin retrospective exhibition at the Autumn Salon, showing 227 exhibits). It was after that year's stay in Paris (or rather Sèvres) that Kandinsky emerged from the New Secession style that characterised his previous work, and began to assert an independent personality. As for the year 1912, it found Mondrian in Paris, unreservedly submitting to the influence of Cubism which was to lead him very soon to works that were remarkably mature in their abstraction, and whose originality was at once noticed by Apollinaire.
Both Kandinsky and Mondrian were older in years than the Cubists and Fauves. What the latter discovered -- apparently by accident -- found a ready soil in the Russian and Dutch painters, both arduously prepared by their earlier technical experiments as well as by a certain amount of philosophical speculation. Braque, Picasso, Léger, Delaunay and Matisse were first and foremost painters. Kandinsky and Mondrian were both painters and thinkers, for whom the problems of art could not be approached apart from the other problems facing man. They aimed not only at renewing painting, but thought that man must transform himself and that the whole of mankind is moving towards an age of material and spiritual betterment. The artist appeared to them the person best qualified for preparing and announcing the golden age. That is why the painted work and the painting man must be identical. The evolution of art is unthinkable without a parallel internal development in man himself. Fauves and Cubists are painters and have no intention of being taken for anything else, whereas Kandinsky and Mondrian are prophets.
In Russia, Kandinsky had at first embarked on a career as a scientist. He only turned to painting when he was approaching thirty, impelled by a genuine 'inner necessity' which he had repressed for some years. In his writings on the philosophy of art during his Munich period the term 'inner necessity' constantly recurred, and had an important part to play. It was on this that he based the whole aesthetic justification of his work, after it had already served to justify his career as a painter. After the necessary preliminaries (studies in Munich academies, some instructive travelling) and once he had completed his philosophy of art, Kandinsky flung himself into an orgy of production. A baffling world of forms and colours teemed from his apparently delirious brush. Was it delirium or ecstasy? This dramatic phase in Kandinsky's abstraction still amazes us by its surging overflow, its resonant lyricism, its Wagnerian violence full of clarion-calls. It is the 'Durchbruch', a breaking-through or more precisely a demolition, the battering of the ram on the walls of traditional painting. After a few years this generous strength gradually calmed down. In about 1921 Kandinsky came to accept the geometrical studies of Malevitch and the Russian Constructivists. His painting then progressively changed outwardly but its inventiveness lost nothing of its richness, density and warmth. For a time the presence of Klee could be felt in his work, which began to show touches of humour, and we are not suggesting that this was the least satisfactory part of his output. After 1933 he moved to Neuilly, living in a bright and comfortable flat on the banks of the Seine, where he painted pictures which for the most part are brilliant variations on themes to which he had long been partial. This period has often been called that of the "great synthesis", which is accurate enough so long as it is not taken to include the dramatic period, which finds no echo in it.
Mondrian's period of preparation lasted much longer. Between taking his first art-teaching diploma and his arrival in Paris some twentythree years slipped by, but they were fruitful years. Rather later than Kandinsky he worked out his own philosophy of art, and the Stijl movement was founded on it. At the opposite pole from Kandinsky's, his painting was the pursuit of simplification, of essential measure and economy, at least once Cubism had shown him his way. From Cubism he drew an unexpected lesson, which was that pure rhythm may be reduced to a horizontal-vertical movement. There was only a step from that to the rightangle. He took several years in making that step, painting and meditating, then he laid the first stone of his system, which is that the whole language of painting (and the language of life itself) may be condensed into the dualism of the rectangular tension of two straight lines set in a horizontalvertical relationship. That and that alone makes construction possible. This was the birth of Neo-Plasticism. Till the end of his life, that is to say for another thirty years, Mondrian never diverged from this principle, slowly advancing towards an imaginary perfection which was always within arms'-reach yet always a bit farther on. That was his own expression. " Don't you think, all the same, that it's just a little bit farther on?" he asked a friend as he showed him the latest canvas, which, as ever, must surely be a progress on the one before. Perhaps it was precisely in the last canvas he ever painted, the unfinished Victory boogie-woogie, that he came closest to this imaginary perfection. The very least we can say before his work is that we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a wonderful synthesis, fully alive yet denying nothing of the fundamental neo-plastic principle.
Mondrian and Kandinsky represent two different aspects of human genius, crystallised into two archetypes, infinite patience and saintly impatience. According to our temperament we will be drawn towards one or the other, or perhaps towards each in turn. If genius is something like the toil of a bee, the distillation drop by drop of some unique and all-inclusive essence, then we will favour Mondrian. But if intelligence is restless and multiple, if truth progresses in immense leaps, if creation is a crazy sparkling of treasures, the overflow of some unfathomable primal cause, then we will choose Kandinsky and see in him the Ariel of abstract painters. Externally these two great personalities were not unlike, avoiding eccentric manners or dress and preferring the correct turn-out of the professional man to that of the bohemian. But Mondrian's threadbare smartness hid a bleak, lonely existence, while Kandinsky never wanted for money, comfort or recognition. They were both gentlemanly and distinguishedlooking and had a certain reserve that hinted at a timid childhood. But they had little in common and met rarely, though politely, in Paris during 1930 and after 1933.
Kandinsky's merit lay in showing what marvels can be wrung from genuine freedom, and that the limits of the canvas allow of no excess. Mondrian's lay in his lesson of discipline and humility. Reducing his art to the simplest data ever used, he showed how spiritual stature grows with self-denial and how the poorest means are the purest, often the strongest.
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