KANDINSKY AND STAGE COMPOSITION

While some Russian Futurists were creating a physicalised, political epic theatre focused on the future, others were more interested in seeking a transrational, or abstract, dramatic form.

A forerunner to these, who was perhaps no more than on the fringes of Futurism, was Vasily Kandinsky. He was a member of the Jack of Diamonds group and exhibited with Larionov, Goncharova and the Burlyuk brothers. But he was born in 1866, and was therefore a good generation older than the Futurists. He studied law and became an academic before throwing this career over in 1896 in order to be an artist. He went to Munich to study, and for the next eighteen years he split his time between Germany and Russia. In Munich in 1909 he and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider group which promulgated the idea that great art was rooted in spirituality. In 1914 he returned to Russia and, though positively apolitical, after the Revolution he joined the Fine Art Department of Lunacharsky's Narkompros, becoming director of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) in 1920. Two years later he left Russia to join the Bauhaus, and he never returned to his native country. But from 1918 to 1922 in Russia Kandinsky wrote and lectured on his ideas, especially the relationship he found between form and colour. It should be added, however, that most of the Russian Futurists rejected his theories, not least because he seemed out of step with contemporary social and political developments.

Nevertheless, many of Kandinsky's ideas chimed with those of the Futurists, and his plays form an intriguing prelude to Futurist transrational drama. As Peter Jelavich has pointed out, as early as 1904 Kandinsky was arguing that painting (‘malerai’ in German) should properly be called copying (‘abmalerai’), since most earlier painting imitated nature, just as most earlier, and indeed contemporary, theatre tried to ‘imitate’ real life. Painting – and theatre – needed to move beyond mere imitation, he argued, towards a new kind of Gesamtkunstwerk in which sound, colour and movement could each exist in their own right. In a further pre-echo of Futurism, he looked forward to the replacement of contemporary materialism by an ‘epoch of great spirituality’, though unlike the Futurists’ idea of the coming Utopia, Kandinsky believed this would be a time when the artist would uncover the spiritual essence of humanity.