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Rating: Small Premise: some months ago, in a previous review, I started a discourse on Expressionism which I now resume: the text below can also be read independently from the one just mentioned, but if you are interested in the genesis of the "movement" (which for reasons of space I will not resume) I invite you to reread it.
The story I am about to tell...
...begins at least 20 years before the reviewed work ("Komposition VI", Oil on canvas, now at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg): in the 1890s, between Austria and Germany, various groups of painters, different among themselves under all points of view, considering the way academies viewed art too conservative, gave rise to independent movements that were renamed "Sezessionen". Philologically contrasting with each other, with the only common denominator being a pronounced avant-garde tendency, in ten years of disputes, controversies but also great artistic explosions (Von Stuck, Liebermann, Klimt etc.) they laid the foundations from which, in the early 1900s in Munich, the "Neue Künstlervereinigung" (1909) was born: an association that considered the previous "sezessionen" (and in particular the one founded by Von Stuck in Bavaria in 1892) too little "libertarian" and avant-garde. The association managed to organize three exhibitions, between 1910 and 1911 (hosting names that now evoke shivers: Jawlensky, Picasso, Braque, Marc... besides Kandinsky of course), whose dominant influences were Abstract Expressionism and Fauvism (and an early Cubist germ) but which provoked fierce critiques, including heavy insults and boycotts.
Life is known to be strange, however, and when Kandinsky (for reasons of space you can read his biography in the link I will put in the info) saw the participation of "Komposition V" ("The Last Judgment") at the third exhibition refused by the association (of which he was president and founder) because it was "too abstract", he took "arms and luggage" and, with Marc, Klee, and others, founded the movement "Der Blaue Reiter".
"I love blue and you love horses..."
With "Die Brücke" (which I discussed in the review mentioned in the premise) Kandinsky's movement was the main component of German Expressionism but, unlike the first (realistic, figurative, and aggressive), it was characterized by an abstract approach (pushed to the extreme, after abandoning the influences of the "fauves" and the cubists), a spiritualism that sank its roots in Eastern philosophies (combined with late 19th and early 20th-century European romantic symbolism) and a harmonic exploration that explored parallels with the musical currents of the era.
Overwhelmed by the First World War (after Kandinsky had to retreat to his native Russia and Marc lost his life at Verdun, in '16, the other members could not continue its leadership) "Der Blaue Reiter", despite its brief "life", managed to send the world that message of division of the artist's inner self from nature that influenced art for many years. "Komposition VI" is its perfect synthesis.
"Yellow is a fanfare, Blue is a cello..."
In a chase of inner emotions thrown into colors (magnificent, as if they were music) "Komposition VI" is a constant clash of waves, one into the other, forming unrecognizable figures, broken by lines that, like violent rain (a deluge or an apocalypse?), create explosions that, in turn, give rise to vortices of color: a fearless abstraction that has within it a disturbing chromatic harmony.
Nature, reality, and forms do not influence the artist: only his soul (inner peace or turmoil) must be the protagonist and the only way to make the unfathomable real is to seek its abstract outline to then destroy its boundaries. The emotional and psychic search originates from color and communicates through color, "resonates" in drawn vibrations that must create both a physical and psychological effect: multiple "readings" that few, besides Kandinsky, have managed to provide.
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