The German Genius

Brücke.
    In 1908, on a cycling tour, Kandinsky and Gabriele discovered (or in his case rediscovered, because he had been there in 1904), the village of Murnau. Kandinsky explained its attractions in a postcard: “It is very, very beautiful…The low-lying and slow-moving clouds, the dusky, dark-violet woods, the gleaming white buildings, velvety deep roofs of the churches, the saturated green of the foliage, remain with me; I even dreamt of these things.” The landscape around Murnau gradually became a decisive motif in Kandinsky’s output, the colors growing more lively, ever more vivid as the forms began to dissolve. 35
    In 1909 Kandinsky and Gabriele, together with Alexei Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and the art historians Oskar Wittenstein and Heinrich Schnabel, founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association), the NKVM, with Kandinsky as chairman. The aim of the association read: “Our assumption is that artists, apart from impressions observed in the outside world, progressively collect experiences of the inner world,” adding that the artist’s task was to “free the line for the inner sound.” That same year Kandinsky produced Painting with Skiff , a work he later described, for the first time, as an “improvisation,” subsequently defined as “mainly sub-conscious…impressions of an ‘inner nature.’” 36 In that year too Gabriele Münter bought a house in Murnau, which they called The Russian House and where she and Kandinsky spent several months a year from then on. The following year he began to refer to his works as “C,” for composition, followed by a number.
    Beginning in 1910 Kandinsky embarked on a series of ten compositions, seven completed before 1914, which are now regarded as his most important paintings. His most significant relationship at this crucial time, after Gabriele, was with Franz Marc, who Kandinsky felt understood him instinctively, though he also came under the influence of Nietzsche. 37 In the exhibition organized that year by the NKVM his Composition II and Improvisation 10 created a storm of protest, but Marc wrote a review about the “spiritualisation of the material world” and “an immaterial inner sensation which expresses itself through pictures.” Kandinsky confirmed that this was his aim.
    In 1911, in response to a Schoenberg concert, he painted Impression III (Concert) . Kandinsky later defined “Composition” as “planned and rationally structured ‘Improvisations.’” But by now he was at variance with other members of the NKVM and, that year, when the association refused to show his Composition IV he resigned, together with Marc, Münter, and a few others and mounted a rival exhibition. 38
    The following year Kandinsky showed several works at the famous Cologne Sonderbund Exhibition and published extracts of Concerning the Spiritual in Art in Camera Work , a journal produced by Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer whose “291” gallery in New York specialized in contemporary art. 39 In February 1913 he took part in the New York Armory Show. It was in that year that he did further work on Composition IV and on Bright Picture and Black Lines , which he later described as “purely abstract pictures.” It had been some time coming, but now abstraction had fully arrived.
    Kandsinky was not German. The German role in the birth of abstraction was threefold—the intellectual freedom (relatively speaking) of Munich, the landscape around the city, which so inspired Kandinsky and Münter, and the whole Germanic concern with the inner life, the new world of the sub- or unconscious, which so fascinated Kandinsky and many other artists, writers, and musicians of the time. 40 The unconscious sparked three artistic movements (at least) in the twentieth century—abstraction, Dada/Surrealism, and Expressionism. Each began in the German-speaking lands.

Berlin Busybody
     
    I n 1871 when Germany was at last unified, following the victory over France by a Prussian-led coalition of German states, Berlin became the capital of the new nation. 1 It was not yet the city it would become. It did, however, celebrate the great victory with the largest military parade ever seen there. On Sunday June 16, 1871, in butter-bright sunshine, 40,000 soldiers wearing iron crosses paraded from the Tempelhof Field through the Brandenburg Gate to the royal palace on Unter den Linden. Eighty-one captured French flags, many in tatters, were