From abstract to apocalypse

Contemporary art expert Colin Pink, presented the Horsham Arts Society’s May lecture at the Brighton Road Baptist Church. The subject, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc: Art and Apocalypse, revealed the skilful art of these two innovators, inspired in their paintings by music, theosophy, and abstract symbolism.

Between 1911 and 1914 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (two of the founding members of The Blue Rider artists’ group in Munich) believed that they were working together to create a new art for a new spiritual era that was about to dawn.

Influenced by a mix of ideas derived from German Romanticism and Russian Symbolism, and Theosophy’s blending of Western and Eastern mysticism, Kandinsky and Marc created a symbolic art using colour symbolism to represent spiritual ideals and began to explore the possibilities of abstract art.

Around 1913 this endeavour took an apocalyptic turn with both artists producing visions of devastating events, which they believed were about to unfold and would hasten in a new era of spiritual perfection. Both artists used colour in a symbolic way, with the colour blue representing spirituality.

The lecture traced the development of the two artists and their close working relationship in the Blue Rider group of artists. The lecture demonstrated how figurative motifs are gradually abstracted in Kandinsky’s paintings so that his early abstract paintings contain hidden motifs mostly derived from religious art. Many paintings relate to the themes of the last judgement and the deluge and have an apocalyptic dimension. 

Kandinsky was very friendly with the avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg and drew parallels between art and music. Kandinsky wanted the colours and forms in his abstract paintings to communicate directly to the viewer in the same way that musical notes affect the listener.

Franz Marc’s early work depicted animals with increasingly bold use of colour in rhythmic compositions. Inspired by art emerging from France, such as the work of Robert Delaunay, he begins to integrate his animal figures into the landscape until they become almost absorbed into the environment, which reflects his pantheistic way of looking at the world. 

Franz Marc, like Kandinsky, began to paint apocalyptic images in the years before the First World War showing the destruction of the natural world in cataclysmic visions such as The Fate of the Animals, Tyrol and The Tower of Blue Horses which allude to the Book of Revelations.

Marc and Kandinsky believed they were creating a new art for a new spiritual era but in reality the new era was the brutal world that emerged as a result of the devastation of the First World War. In 1914, Kandinsky (as a Russian national) had to flee to neutral Switzerland because he was an enemy alien and Franz Marc joined the German army and was killed on the western front in 1916.

The next Arts Society lecture is 11 June at Brighton Road Baptist Church: ‘From Claridge’s Hotel to the London Underground: the life and works of textile designer Marion Dorn. She was one of the leading textile designers of the 20th Century, known as the ‘architect of floors’, renowned for her ‘sculpted rugs’. Further details: theartssociety.org/Horsham.