Kandinsky

     Kandinsky grew to perfection as naturally as a fruit develops
and ripens.  Anyone not resisting nature will become beauty and spirit.
In time and space, those divine mirrors, his work is aglow with spiritual
reality.  Kandinsky loved life, he was intoxicated with the riches of the
earth and the sky.  Light and darkness vigorously crossed his beautiful
life.  His work grew unhesitatingly to become powerful and testify to
the "well-being of genius."*
     Things blossom, sparkle, ripple, shine in his paintings and poems.
They speak of old blood and young stones.  They speak with peerless
purity to anyone with sharp eyes and sharp ears.  His paintings and
his poems obviously have to be heard with the eyes and seen with the
ears, like fairy tales.  I hear the blue of violets.  I see the sound
of the lyre.  Let anyone with ears look, and anyone with eyes hear!
Ice energies face fire energies in spirited dialogues and dumb shows.
Things rise and fall in luminous rounds across the brightness and
darkness of heavenly spheres.  Milky ways whisper like frail grass in
the infinite depths.  Planets burst into tiny specks and fragments,
and the noise is perceptible to the ear alone.
     Kandinsky is a great master of colors and words, and his smallest
touch of color, his least little word is alive.  He evokes the powers
of heights and depths, the forces of pure creations.  He has conjured
up imperishable primordial energies and forced them to flow through his
paintings and his poems.  These forces dissolved the unreal basis of
reality.  Only a quiver of the palpable world remains in his works.  
For example, in his poem "In the Forest," Kandinsky speaks about a man.
The man is nothing but a fading shadow.  The imperishable has burned
up and devoured the man.  The descriptive image is transformed into pure
reality. Kandinsky's image and poetry have become concrete.  Here is
the road that leads from the sinner to the saint.  Here is the road
that reshapes the body and the soul.
     I did not personally witness the "break through" in the development
of Kandinsky's œuvre.  I met him a bit later, in Munich, in 1912.
But I can judge Kandinsky's experience by my own, for the same yearning
for liberty blazed in me.  "Break through" is the appropriate word.
Spiritual reality-- sparkling, roaring, jubilant-- broke through the
morbid darkness of traditional ideas on art.
     Kandinsky was an explorer.  He devoted himself body and soul
to the discovery of spiritual reality.  He discovered "the spiritual
in art."  An explorer like Kandinsky particularly stresses the invisible,
impalpable life that our defective eyes cannot distinguish and that
sometimes leads the explorer along the angel's road.
     Kandinsky paid homage to the little and the big, and life never
petrified for him.  He was rooted in life like a sovereign.  He was
independent and free.  No creature, no object ever escaped his notice,
and he sometimes greeted them with an odd burst of laughter.  His
laughter always reminded me of a passage in Heraclitus: "It is always
the same substance that is in all things: life and death, waking and
sleeping, youth and old age.  For, in changing, this becomes that, 
and that, by changing, becomes this again."

* Eudemonism, the personal and fateful predisposition to happiness.
     

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