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Rating: It is difficult to consider objectively the era in which one lives, risking gross and approximate ruminations.
Are we perhaps living in decadent times? It may be, but what exactly is decaying in these times that has not already collapsed in the past? The putrid human swamp has already swallowed everything swallowable.
Are we perhaps experiencing a "new Middle Ages"? Bah, history never repeats itself pedantically, and besides, I have always seen the word "Middle Ages" as a label; a myth to roughly frame about a thousand (a thousand!) years of human journey.
Then, is it a confused era? I believe that confusion has been the condition of every era; one proceeds by trial and error. The public is peddled, from time to time, an opium suited to contemporary needs in the hope of distracting them from the lack of direction of those sitting in the corridors of power. Today, instead of religion, we have mentalists and gurus selling spirituality and knowledge by the pound, instead of socialism we have attempts at "liquid democracy" (what a horrible and senseless term!).
Could they then be decades of transition? But which decades have not been so? Every era contained the seeds of the next, and, above all, there are no times objectively better than others. The "Belle Epoque," for example, perhaps was not so beautiful; firstly, because it was not exactly spread across the entire globe, and then because, among other things, it contained within it the germs of the future Great War.
Yet, there have been men who not only deciphered the codes of their time but in their works (the famous "acts of the apostles" Henry Miller spoke of) one perceives the distant echo of the generations to come. Kandinsky, one of the fathers and perhaps the true theorist of Abstract Art, was one of these men.
Painter, engraver, daring thinker, in 1910 he managed to publish "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"; an essay between philosophical and metaphysical that considers the artistic results of his era and beyond. A profession of faith from an artist who, with this writing, allows us to enter the "Sancta Sanctorum" of his consciousness.
While in Paris Picasso was launching Cubism and Matisse was becoming the most imposing lion of the "Fauves," Kandinsky, a Russian who lived almost all his life in Germany, ventured further: painting had finally to overcome any connection to the "visible reality" and had to become music. Only in this way, with this leap into "pure sound," could it finally enter a realm of nuanced sensations and delicate emotions; a realm that it was time to conquer.
This search for "musicality" had its precursors, at least in literature. Verlaine was already composing poetry in which meaning was subordinate to sound. Sound not intended as pleasantness to the ear, but as the ability of words to settle directly into the spirit of the reader, "skipping" the intellect (the poem "Art Poetique" is a sort of programmatic manifesto of his way of working and, albeit less consciously, is a distant relative of Kandinsky's writing).
Mallarmé himself, already cryptic in himself, in his later years intensified his attempts at lexical disintegration and in "Un Coup de Dés Jamais n’Abolira le Hasard," the words were arranged on the page in a method reminiscent of notes on a staff.
In the writing, Kandinsky presents his theory of colors; a theory, anything but technical, in which the Russian strives to find in various pigments a precise spiritual value. In which colors (and their combinations) reach the viewer according to a particular force (centrifugal, centripetal), a gradation (warm, cold), and a light (clear, dark).
Even in this case, literature has rummaged abundantly in the figurative art trying to assign a chromatic value to words. Rimbaud in "Voyelles" assigned a color to each vowel, and he did so with an almost esoteric significance. Andrej Belyj (forgotten, but remarkable Russian poet), immersed his compositions in a flaming and noisy light that gave an incendiary aura to his works; his novel "Petersburg" is an unparalleled masterpiece of the 20th century, if only for the incredible "clotting" of events dissolved into true pictorial palettes.
"Concerning the Spiritual in Art" may be the second-best way to approach Kandinsky; the first would be to see in person one of his original pieces, which I have not (yet) had the chance to do. However, my birthday is just around the corner, and if any of you don't know what to get me.
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