Constructing the Total Work of Art: Painting and the Public

For a utopian thinker, involving the public to bring about change is critical. For a messianic utopian artist such as Vasily Kandinsky, no issue was more central to his work. This essay argues that Kandinsky’s movement away from conventional easel painting to its construction as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, was intended to provoke the general public to turn away from complacency. A focus on the large 1911 oil Composition V [Fig. 1], which was exhibited in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich, will clarify how early twentieth century anarchist concepts as well as Symbolist and Theosophical crosscurrents prevalent in the years before World War I lent support to this goal. Composition V is one of three oils completed before World War I that are close to 7 x 8 feet,1 a size that is taller and wider than any one person. Its musically derived title and number as well as its contrasting veils of bright and dark color applied with brushstrokes of varying density produce a seemingly abstract and chaotic work. Kandinsky was not averse to referring to these first impressions as having an “anarchistic” or a seemingly random or inconsistent order.2 However, he was quick to point out that this apparent jumble of contrasts opened “the way for further revelations.”3 Just as he explained that the term anarchism could also have “a certain systematic quality and order,” 4 he also explained that the paintings for which he reserved the name Composition (seven major oils completed before 1914) were developed over a “long period of time” so that the careful planning would not seem obvious.5 For an artist committed to reaching an audience in order to communicate his utopian hopes, Kandinsky’s discussion of an audience’s reaction seems quite paradoxical. How did he expect the spectator to become involved in a process that seemed anarchistic or random, especially when he wrote: “The artist must have something to say, for his task is not the mastery of form, but the suitability of that form to its content.”6 Despite this commitment, some art historians have characterized his work as remote and have questioned his ability to involve the public. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially with the 1984 English translation of Peter Bürger’s book Theory of the Avant-Garde reiterating many of the comments of the Marxist historian Georg Lukács from the 1930s, a number of art historians have considered the works of Kandinsky too hermetic and not sufficiently anti-institutional to be clearly effective or even relevant.7 Yet, as we shall see, by allowing a painting to embrace the stimuli offered by other media in order to become a total work of art, Kandinsky transgressively complicated his work so that its message of transforming values would not be ignored. Rose-CaRol Washton long