Kandinsky V. Composition VI (1913, Hermitage)

The long eighteen months of nurturing the idea of Composition VI are reflected in Kandinsky’s notes devoted to that work, where he defines the main reference points and stages in the history of its creation, thus giving us a key to the understanding of his creative method as a whole and of counterpoint as its important constituent. The work that he names as his starting point, a painting on glass entitled Deluge (1911), has not survived and is only known today thanks to a black-and-white photo. This representation, with the colours, expelled from it – is an example of the pure, if not sterile graphic form that almost literally illustrates the principles of black-and-white counterpoint outlined by Kandinsky in his treatise On the Spiritual in Art. “The flexibility of individual forms,” he wrote, “their inner and organic changes, so to speak, their direction (movement) in a picture, the prevalence of either the material or of the abstract in this individual form, on the one hand, and, on the other, juxtaposition of forms, brought together to create the big forms of groupforms, which, in their turn, create the big form of the entire picture, then the principles of ‘con-or dissonance’ of all the above elements, combinations of the veiled and the exposed, combinations of the rhythmical and the arythmical on one and the same plane, combinations of abstract forms – both purely geometrical ones (simple and complex) and geometrically indefinable ones, combinations of demarcations (sharp vs. blurred ones), etc., etc., – all these are elements creating the possibility of a purely graphic ‘counterpoint’, to which they will eventually lead. And it will be the counterpoint of black-and-white art for as long as colour is excluded from it.”
The large pictorial study for the Composition VI – Deluge. Improvisation. (1912, Lenbachhaus) – is, on the contrary, utterly devoid of the graphic element, of the drawing. It is as if the colour “excluded from black-and-white art” exists here all by itself, living its own independent life as, in Kandinsky’s words,“colour, which itself offers material for counterpoint, and which conceals boundless possibilities within itself.” And then again, in his words, “… in combination with drawing it will lead to that great pictorial counterpoint, by means of which painting will also reach the level of composition, and, as totally pure art, will be able to serve the divine. And it is still the same immutable guide that will lead it to this dizzy height – the principle of inner necessity.”
In his essay Composition VI, Kandinsky expounded his by that time thoroughly revised and illustrated canonical version of his progress towards abstract painting. Linking the origins of his Composition VI with the medieval Bavarian tradition of reverse glass painting (Hinterglasmalerei), Kandinsky pointed out that it was in the crucible of this age-long form of folk art he was able to discover the magical elixir of the future – the non-objectiveness. Indeed, the years 1911 to 1912 saw him experimenting, like a true alchemist, with ‘de-materializing’ objective forms and creating, in various media – watercolours, prints and oils – several series of stylistic variations of artwork on glass.
The restoration work on Kandinsky’s Ladies in Crinolines (1918, Tretyakov Gallery), which afforded a rare opportunity to see the reverse side of the glass plate, has shown that the ‘two-faced’ glass conceals the possibility of transformation of matter. What is seen on the front side of the glass panel, i.e., an instance of Hinterglasmalerei proper, is an elegant ‘bagatelle’ – a purely figurative pen drawing coloured in with bright local colour patches. The reverse, on the other hand, reveals a dynamic composition consisting of coloured forms almost virtually devoid of figural contours.
It was natural to suppose that it was the technique of reverse glass painting itself – from an outlining drawing to the undercolouring, from a detail to the whole, and from the visible to the hidden, that had prompted to Kandinsky the ways of overcoming the tradition of representational painting and inspired his experiments with ‘dissolving material forms’ in the above-mentioned series of stylistic variations.