My Kid Could Paint That

A space is any continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied. So any viewer who sees this and thinks of the outer space would not be wrong to think so. This painting does represent space, just not the space the viewer was probably thinking of.

During his illustrious career where he garnered attention for being an impeccable painter as well as philosopher, Kandinsky heavily believed in an art style defined as "theosophy." Theosophy is the idea that creation is a geometrical progression from a single point, and every creative element of the work is generated from the original central point. Kandinsky wrote two books on theosophy during his career. With the second book, Point and Line to Plane, he released this painting to help amplify his point.

This painting helps define the theory of theosophy. Kandinsky starts the work from the direct center of the painting. From there, he sketches two circles. From the larger black circle, he follows it to the bottom and defines a new point of origin, and generates more circles from that point. While this sounds maddening, in the end, the work looks as it does now. A mess? Absolutely not. A calculated, geometrical masterpiece.

Kandinsky's works means nothing when its explained in such crude terms. To me, Kandinsky is a painter of feelings. Upon first inspection it looks like outer space and a bunch of colorful planets. However, if I look deeper, the other space I talked about earlier emerges. Eternal nothingness. The beauty of just general emotion, emerging from the center point, with hues of more nothing, but surrounded by a calming blue. Follow the blue and you see even warmer colors: light olive greens, violet, orange, and light pinks. I will not define each color because these should mean something else, to every different individual. 

Starting on Monday, the students of the Modern Art History class will post writings that link painting and film. What makes me happy about this - they are the ones that came up with the idea. 

As I thought back to film that actually made me think about art, I came back to the adaptation of John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation. In the 1993 film (and play) a young confidence man, Paul, intrudes upon the rarefied world of Flan and Ouisa Kittredge. Flan looks to sell a mid-period Cezanne to a Japanese syndicate, but his plans are temporarily interrupted by the arrival of Paul, who claims to be friends with the Kittredge's kids. The film and play each explore questions of identity, self-absorption and empathy. They are also each littered with literary and artistic references ranging from a theory on Holden Caulfield's cap to a non-existent Kandinsky. 

The rotating Kandinsky, which would be quite cool, doesn't actually exist. Guare invented it to help deepen the themes of chaos and control that define the lives of Ouisa and Flan. The paintings now live  at the Guggenheim, but they were painted 13 years apart. I have always loved each side of the Kandinsky - the vibrant, often violent abstractionist and geometrically-obsessed Apollonian. Here, though, it's Flan's quotation of Kandinsky that brings me a smile. 

Kandinsky said, "It is clear, therefore, that the choice of object that is one of the elements in the harmony of form must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul." In other words, the work must speak to us on a level that can't necessarily be expressed. Learning to see will always be a part of any Art History class; however, what I hope you can see in all the posts here is the rather joyous process of students learning how to hear and feel the vibrations of art.