The Blaue Reiter Almanac.

Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,

eds. by Klaus Lankheit (review)

Glenn B. Hamm

Leonardo, Volume 9, Number 3, Summer 1976, pp. 252-253 (Review)

Published by The MIT Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/598752/summary

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252 Books
pass through as men or women and not merely as names or
references. For all the factual material that Rewald uses,
he nevertheless unfolds his narrative like a novelist and
involves his reader in the real lives of the people whom he
depicts. It is curious that in doing this Rewald is able to
remain scrupulously true to fact and to provide at the same
time an invaluable and reliable source book of the im-
pressionist movement. He uses the words of E. A. Jewel1 in
his introduction to define it: ‘To piece together a full and
in the minutest degree accurate report of developments
that led up to the first impressionist exhibition’. In other
words, it is the group as a whole that interests him.
He has written elsewhere on individual impressionist
artists and in this book he maps out those interactions of
talents and personalities that affected the development of
the group as a whole. The impressionists’ own divisions
of opinion and of aim, as well as their various allegiances
with older men (Courbet, Manet and the Barbizon painters,
in particular), provide a rich historical analysis of the
constituent elements of their own art.
Whenever Rewald makes a critical or theoretical point
about Impressionism he does it through the words of the
painters themselves or those of the theoreticians and critics
with whom they were closely allied. It is from Bazille,
not from Rewald directly, that one learns, for example,
that ‘the subject has little importance’ as long as a work is
‘interesting from the point of view of painting’.
It is a friend of Renoir, G. Rivikre, whom Rewald
invokes to define Impressionism: ‘Treating a subject in
terms of the tone and not of the subject itself, that is what
distinguishes the impressionists from other painters’.
It is in this way that interpretative comments are made.
From certain points of view, for example he has no personal
bias and he has the advantage of an historical perspective,
Rewald’s definition of Impressionism might be more
revealing than that of Renoir’s friend. On the other hand,
his book may be that definition. It remains to be seen
whether the sheer complexity of the period that he has
chosen as the theme for his third book in this sequence,
Post-Impressionism from Gauguin to Matisse, will permit
of the same convincing sympathy for its many protagonists
(Renoir, Monet and Degas, as well as the younger men)
as has this book. The book’s very large annotated biblio-
graphy is an invaluable review of the literature of Im-
pressionism. In at least one sense Rewald’s writing and
impressionist painting have something in common: for
both are brilliantly executed within their own terms and
both are accessible to the expert and non-expert alike.
The Sacred Spring: The Arts in Vienna 1898-1918. Nicolas
Powell. New York Graphic Society, Boston, 1974. 224
pp., illus. $25.00. Reviewed by Alfred Werner*
Like Periclean Athens, the Florence of the Medici and
Rome under Pope Leo X,Vienna under the last Hapsburgs,
Francis Joseph I and Charles I, who held the throne only
in the final two years of the era under review, was a city
of luxury and pleasure but merely for a very small minority.
Of these, so few were really interested that the superb art
magazine, Ver Sacrum (1898-1903), for which the present
charming but somewhat popular book is named, never
boasted a circulation larger than 500. It was a double-
faced city. Adolf Ope1 (who wrote the book’s introduction,
has a Viennese background) and the British art historian
Nicolas Powell describe the big slums with their high
mortality rate, but they keep strangely silent about the
terrible toll taken by World War I, possibly because during
the War’s 50-odd months the Muses were anything but
silent in Vienna,
Powell and Ope1 also do not deny that this defunct
Vienna was hardly a paradise for artists and writers,
actors and musicians, since it had its share of reactionaries
and Neanderthalers who vehemently fought against
anything new. Luckily, there was also the patronage by en-
‘230 West 54th Street, New York, NY 10019, U S A .
lightened aristocrats and members of the upper bourgeoisie,
powerful enough to provide the ambience of Hofmannsthal,
Mahler, Klimt and Schiele. Men of science, and especially
medical men, also often adored the arts. The city harbored
a good and very active doctors’ orchestra. The great
surgeon Theodor Billroth was a brilliant pianist; the
anatomist Emil Zuckerkandle held special lectures for
artists and exerted a definite influence on Klimt.
Most of the personalities with whom the book deals
are known to dedicated art lovers beyond Central Europe.
But the name of one to whom four pages are devoted,
has still to be hammered into their heads: Richard Gerstl.
This gifted and daring painter committed suicide at the
age of 25! He anticipated Soutine, the peinfure de geste
of a Mathieu and even the action painting of an abstract
expressionist like de Kooning.
‘Gerstl’s painting is manly, brutal and unsatisfied.
Its roughness and directness make Gerstl in many ways
the most modern of these Austrian artists’ (‘these’ here
refers to Kokoschka and Schiele).
Ver Sacrum helps to make known Vienna’s remarkable
innovative architects. Otto Wagner, who severely limited
the use of ornamentation, was largely responsible for what
is called here ‘the demystification of architecture’. His
most important building was the stately Post Office
Savings Bank, which was ‘entirely functional with the
merest hint of decoration’. It is a landmark in the history
of modern architecture. Adolf Loos went even further as
he passionately eschewed the use of any sort of ornament.
As a controversial lecturer, he sought to influence his
compatriots in many areas outside his chosen field of
endeavor: ‘He spoke about eating, sitting, walking,
standing, sleeping. He wanted to teach people how to
live . . . ’.
A chapter is included on the Wiener Werkstaette,
founded by Klimt’s colleague, Professor Josef Hoffmann,
in order to improve the aesthetic quality of furniture,
ceramics, works in crystal and silver, fabrics for draperies
and dresses and other useful objects. For years, the most
skilled and dedicated Austrian craftsmen collaborated
with imaginative artists in these workshops to make
things that, to paraphrase the poet, have remained to be
‘joys forever’.
The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Wassily Kandinsky and
Franz Marc, eds. Klaus Lankheit. Trans. by Henning
Falkenstein. Thames & Hudson, London, 1974. 296 pp.,
illus. Paper, €1.95. Reviewed by Glenn B. Hamm**
The author has performed a service in adding his efforts
to what he terms ‘the most important programmatic work
of 20th century art’.
There is, as Lankheit states, ‘an atmosphere that, in
a strange way breathes through the original’ Almanac,
published from 1912 to 1914. He provides additional
documentation, a critical commentary and certain factual
errors are corrected. Essentials about the editors and
collaborators, all of whom were artists, the artistic back-
grounds, the circumstances surrounding the publication
and its subsequent influence are dealt with effectively.
The editors of the Almanac, Marc and Kandinsky,
intended to promulgate current aesthetic insights, to unify
the various arts and to demonstrate how thoroughly the
newer art forms were rooted in Gothic, folk, primitive
and childrens’ art. Pictures and text are mixed together
in benign indifference. Musical scores, stage compositions
and poetry are also included.
The villains in the Almanac are the critics and the art
historians of the time who, in the opinion of the authors,
retarded, via the press, aesthetic awareness of the public.
Intense emotions are thereby injected into texts, which is
actually part of the Almanuc’s charm, if it can be seen as a
form of revolutionary blank verse.
**School of the Arts, 307 Pollak Bldg., Virginia Common-
wealth University, Richmond, VA 23220, U.S.A.
 Book3
Kandinsky eventually found himself in the position of
defending the need for palpable visual meaning divorced
from illusionistic and hieroglyphic extremities-an issue
which has festered ever since. J. J. Gibson’s thoughts on
meanings appropriate to ‘nonsense’ arrays of colors vs.
meaning as adaptive response to familiar imagery exemplify
latter-day continuations of the topic [I].
Kandinsky’s candid admissions (p. 15) of the cultural
dictatorship practiced by Marc and himself in selecting
works for the Blaue Reiter exhibitions point to a subjective
solipsism every bit as paternalistic as the critic’s objective
repression that they had sought to replace.
An ‘official’ Blaue Reiter philosophy might be some-
thing like the following: The form of matter is the outer
expression of a more important inner spiritual content,
a mystery that the senses can partially bridge if the art
form is understood on its own ‘non-objective’ terms.
The‘outer symbolic effect can differ from the ‘inner sound’,
producing extreme expressive profundity. If this inner
voice does not rebel, everything is permitted, though a
‘too ardent desire for synthesis’ produces ‘arbitrary
expositions’ that banish the spirit.
We are progressing toward ideal forms of sense per-
ception. Former cacophony becomes contemporary
harmony, leading to ecstacy and an elevated perception
of nature, resulting in religious exaltation. Yet, too often
a new value, once accepted, becomes a wall against to-
morrow.
Many forms may be equally good. They should be
considered in terms of manifest inner necessity and with
regard to individual, national and contemporary stylistic
elements. When an element is freed from delineating a
thing, it receives its full inner power. Rules do not lead
to art; they only help in the recognition of an inner effect.
Art criticism is the worst enemy of art, drawing its con-
clusions from accepted examples. The ideal art critic
would not try to discover ‘mistakes’ but would feel and
convey insights with the soul of a poet. One important
positive quality outweighs many negative ones. The goals
of art are knowledge, spiritual action and response and
the refinement of the soul.
Kandinsky emerges as the dominant influence in the
Almanac and his On the Question of Form is one of its
more substantial entries. Selz notes that Kandinsky’s
didactic style makes his writings difficult to read and
analyze [2]. Lindsay points to his ‘peculiar literary style’
of associative cross-tracking [3]. Hamilton feels that
although these metaphysical hypotheses are not always
easy to follow, one should accept his statements that in
his own art he was trying to project his mystical appre-
hension of the spiritual values of life [4].
The Almanac defends itself nicely against any unfore-
seen future analysis with the motto: ‘Never trust a
..
theoretician . who asserts that he has discovered some
objective mistake in a work’.
References
1. J. J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World
(Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1950) pp. 200-
203.
2. P. Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1957) p. 223.
3. K. Lindsay, An Examination of the Fundamental
Theories of Wassily Kandinsky (in Ref. 2, p. 223).
4. G. H. Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe
1880-1940(Baltimore: Penguin, 1967)p. 132.
The New Deal for Artists. Richard D. McKinzie. Princeton
Univ. Press, Princeton, N.J., 1973. 203 pp., illus. S17.50.
Reviewed by Gifford Phillips*
There has not been any sustained interest in cultivating
the artistic soil in the U.S.A. Public support of the arts
through the years has been half-hearted and inconsistent.
*I1777San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A.
253
Private support has been largely directed toward helping
a few prestigious museums. Living artists have seldom
been the beneficiaries of either public or private philan-
thropy and university art departments have always put far
more emphasis on art history than on studio art.
The one great exception to this record of indifference
occurred during the great depression of the 1930’s when
the Federal Government mounted a massive program of
subsidy for needy artists. During its lifetime, the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) art project employed
more than 10,OOO artists, who produced over 2500 murals,
17,000sculptures, 108,000easel works and 11,OOO drawings.
Considering its magnitude, why is so little known of this
program today? Possible explanations for the lack of
interest include the association in highbrow art circles of
WPA art with post office murals painted in a stodgy
representational style; and, secondly, the reluctance of
some artists who had been associated with the project
to discuss it, possibly because of the low esteem in which
programs of economic relief have been held during the
predominantly conservative post-World War I1 era.
Whatever the reason, there has been a paucity of
information about the project until recently, when several
good books about it appeared. The first of these was
Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and
Now, by Francis V. O’Connor (Boston: New York Graphic
Soc., 1969) and, more recently, the book under review has
appeared. McKinzie has written a readable and well-doc-
umented account of the New Deal art projects from
1934-43,with emphasis on their inception, their scope, the
manner in which they were administered,the public reaction
to them and the reasons for their demise after a relatively
short term of existence. He attempts no artistic evaluation
of the work produced. He is more interested in the
‘social and political forces’ that attended the program.
McKinzie points out that actually there were two sepa-
rate parts to the program. One was run by the Treasury
Department and it came to be known as the Section of
Fine A r t s . The other and far better-known one was the
WPA’s Federal Art Project (FPA).
The Treasury Department’s ‘Section’ was a more modest
program, entirely restricted to decorating public building
with painting and sculpture. It was run by Edward
Bruce, an energetic man, well connected in upper New Deal
echelons. He, together with George Biddle, a prominent
artist and an old school classmate of President Roosevelt,
persuaded the President that the achievements of the New
Deal should be recorded for posterity in the art of public
buildings (especially in mural art, with the Mexican
murals as the model). Bruce maintained certain artistic
standards. The work had to be executed by well-known
artists and it had to be affirmative in tone and content.
The FPA, under administrator Holger Cahill, gave
artists more latitude, though the majority of works
were done in a conventionally realistic style (exceptions
were those by artists such as Arshile Gorky, Wilem de
Kooning and Stuart Davis). But FPA artists were sub-
jected to more indignities than their colleagues in the
‘Section’. Since FPA was a relief project, they had to
undergo a means test to establish that they were indeed
destitute. Those working in large urban centers (such
as New York City, which accounted for 44% of all FPA
artists) were forced to work in central workshops with
individual cubicles for painters. Here they were required
to check in and out with a timekeeper each day and
supervisors often scrutinized their work. Despite these
humiliations, McKinzie concludes that most of the
artists felt fmally that their careers had benefited from the
FPA experience. At the very least, they were grateful
for the opportunity to keep working.
The program was weakened by growing political
opposition to the New Deal in 1938 and it was unable
to survive the total mobilization of manpower demanded
by World War 11. Had it done so, the course of the
nation’s cultural history might have been considerably
altered. In any event, it was the boldest program of its
kind ever attempted and McKinzie’s book (which is