It lasted as a movement and style until the guns of August 1914 announced the beginning of World War I. Braque went off to fight and was wounded, after which the relationship between him and Picasso was never the same again. Unlike Les Demoiselles, which was designed to shock, cubism was a quieter, more reflective art, with a specific goal. ‘Picasso and I,’ Braque said, ‘were engaged in what we felt was a search for the anonymous personality. We were inclined to efface our own personalities in order to find originality.’61 This was why cubist works early on were signed on the back, to preserve anonymity and to keep the images uncontaminated by the personality of the painter. In 1907— 8 it was never easy to distinguish which painter had produced which picture, and that was how they thought it should be. Historically, cubism is central because it is the main pivot in twentieth-century art, the culmination of the process begun with impressionism but also the route to abstraction. We have seen that Cézanne’s great paintings were produced in the very months in which Einstein was preparing his theories. The whole change that was overtaking art mirrored the changes in science. There was a search in both fields for fundamental units, the deeper reality that would yield new forms. Paradoxically, in painting this led to an art in which the absence of form turned out to be just as liberating.
Abstraction has a long history. In antiquity certain shapes and colours like stars and crescents were believed to have magical properties. In Muslim countries it was and is forbidden to show the human form, and so abstract motifs – arabesques – were highly developed in both secular and religious works of art. As abstraction had been available in this way to Western artists for thousands of years, it was curious that several people, in different countries, edged toward abstraction during the first decade of the new century. It paralleled the way various people groped toward the unconscious or began to see the limits of Newton’s physics.
In Paris, both Robert Delaunay and František Kupka, a Czech cartoonist who had dropped out of the Vienna art school, made pictures without objects. Kupka was the more interesting of the two. Although he had been convinced by Darwin’s scientific theory, he also had a mystical side and believed there were hidden meanings in the universe that could be painted.62 Mikalojus-Konstantinas Ciurlionis, a Lithuanian painter living in Saint Petersburg, began his series of ‘transcendent’ pictures, again lacking recognisable objects and named after musical tempos: andante, allegro, and so on. (One of his patrons was a young composer named Igor Stravinsky.)63 America had an early abstractionist, too, in the form of Arthur Dove, who left his safe haven as a commercial illustrator in 1907 and exiled himself to Paris. He was so overwhelmed by the works of Cézanne that he never painted a representational picture again. He was given an exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who established the famous ‘291’ avant-garde gallery in New York at 291 Broadway.64 Each of these artists, in three separate cities, broke new ground and deserve their paragraph in history. Yet it was someone else entirely who is generally regarded as the father of abstract art, mainly because it was his work that had the greatest influence on others.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He had intended to be a lawyer but abandoned that to attend art school in Munich. Munich wasn’t nearly as exciting culturally as Paris or Vienna, but it wasn’t a backwater. Thomas Mann and Stefan George lived there. There was a famous cabaret, the Eleven Executioners, for whom Frank Wedekind wrote and sang.65 The city’s museums were second only to Berlin in Germany, and since 1892 there had been the Munich artists’ Sezession. Expressionism had taken the country by storm, with Franz Marc, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Kandinsky forming ‘the Munich Phalanx.’ Kandinsky was not as precocious as Picasso, who was twenty-six when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In fact, Kandinsky did not paint his first picture until he was thirty and was all of forty-five when, on New Year’s Eve, 1910–11, he went to a party given by two artists. Kandinsky’s marriage was collapsing at that time, and he went alone to the party, where he met Franz Marc. They struck up an accord and went on to a concert by a composer new to them but who also painted expressionist pictures; his name was Arnold Schoenberg. All of these influences proved crucial for Kandinsky, as did the theosophical doctrines of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky predicted a new age, more spiritual, less material, and Kandinsky (like many artists, who banded into quasi-religious groups) was impressed enough to feel that a new art was needed for this new age.66 Another influence had been his visit to an exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow in the 1890s, where he had stood for several minutes in front of one of Claude Monet’s haystack paintings, although Kandinsky wasn’t sure what the subject was. Gripped by what he called the ‘unsuspected power of the palette,’ he began to realise that objects no longer need be an ‘essential element’ within a picture.67 Other painters, in whose circle he moved, were groping in the same direction.68
Then there were the influences of science. Outwardly, Kandinsky was an austere man, who wore thick glasses. His manner was authoritative, but his mystical side made him sometimes prone to overinterpret events, as happened with the discovery of the electron. ‘The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly, the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial.’69 Everything?
With so many influences acting on Kandinsky, it is perhaps not surprising he was the one to ‘discover’ abstraction. There was one final precipitating factor, one precise moment when, it could be said, abstract art was born. In 1908 Kandinsky was in Murnau, a country town south of Munich, near the small lake of Staffelsee and the Bavarian Alps, on the way to Garmisch, where Strauss was building his villa on the strength of his success with Salomé. One afternoon, after sketching in the foothills of the Alps, Kandinsky returned home, lost in thought. ‘On opening the studio door, I was suddenly confronted by a picture of indescribable and incandescent loveliness. Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches. Finally I approached closer and only then saw it for what it really was – my own painting, standing on its side … One thing became clear to me: that objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings, and was indeed harmful to them.’70
Following this incident, Kandinsky produced a series of landscapes, each slightly different from the one before. Shapes became less and less distinct, colours more vivid and more prominent. Trees are just about recognisable as trees, the smoke issuing from a train’s smokestack is just identifiable as smoke. But nothing is certain. His progress to abstraction was unhurried, deliberate. This process continued until, in 1911, Kandinsky painted three series of pictures, called Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, each one numbered, each one totally abstract. By the time he had completed the series, his divorce had come through.71 Thus there is a curious personal parallel with Schoenberg and his creation of atonality.
At the turn of the century there were six great philosophers then living, although Nietzsche died before 1900 was out. The other five were Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, William James and Bertrand Russell. At this end of the century, Russell is by far the best remembered, in Europe, James in the United States, but Bergson was probably the most accessible thinker of the first decade and, after 1907, certainly the most famous.