Visiting Munich Garageland reviewer Liza Weber takes in Gabriele Münter's staggering expressionist donation to Lenbachhaus and wonders where exactly Kandinsky's pianist has got to.
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| Franz Marc, Blaues Pferd I (Blue Horse I), 1911 |
On turning eighty years old Gabriele Münter
gave, rather than received, an inestimable gift. In 1957 to Munich’s Lenbachhaus
or, more accurately, to the world, she donated 90 oil paintings, 24 glass
paintings, 116 watercolours and coloured drawings, 160 drawings, 28 sketchbooks
and an entire collection of prints. Their corners confessed not the signature
of her modest umlauted ‘M’ however, but rather nine upper case letters spelling
that reddened name ‘KANDINSKY’.
Münter’s “basement of millions” has, after
a quarter of a century, been unearthed. Its wings, no longer clipped by the Nazi
regime, are – as in Franz Marc’s testimony to Futurism, Birds (1914) – unfurling.
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| Franz Marc, Vögel (Birds), 1914 |
Boasting the names of Jawlensky, Klee,
Macke, Marc and more Der Blaue Reiter,
a now permanent Lenbachhaus exhibition, left me short not of an expressionist, nor
of a word or two to say about them. And so I briefly write, however indefensibly,
chiefly on Kandinsky. For what I can extricate from the assembly of German
artists exhibited in Munich, is Münter’s memorialization of a lifetime lived
with Kandinsky, the painter and the paintings.
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| Gabriele Munter, Kandinsky und Erma Bossi am Tisch (Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table in the Murnau House), 1912 |
Münter’s Kandinsky and Erma Bossi at the Table in the Murnau House (1912) certainly seems a painful preservation of her more
private memories. Yet in its bilateral dining room, where Kandinsky and Bossi sit
at a table set with china cups and saucers, it is Münter’s empty chair, on the
peripheries of their conversation, that is the artwork’s axis. Her dumb chair,
together with her tilting teapots lonely on a lace tablecloth, are the
viewer’s psychological pivots, for they point to the purposelessness of their shared
mundane reality. To our routine madness. It is not that she, or someone, is
necessarily missing from the picture. Rather, meaningfulness is missing in
Münter’s familiar.
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| Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation Deluge, 1913 |
The Blue Riders thus soon sought and found
unfamiliar and unchartered territory for their playing field; they moved, if
not galloped, inward. Indeed the legendary
almanac Der Blaue Reiter published in
1912 supposedly explores the art movement’s “pluralism of its inner necessity”.
Oxymoronic no? Granted, where Kandinsky’s blue stippled brush strokes in Improvisation Deluge (1913) physically amount
to, at most, one-quarter of his composition, they optically surge from unknown
springs, reverberating and altogether flooding his canvas. Kandinsky’s Improvisations are inner soundscapes. For
where The Blue Riders were concerned, what we subconsciously listen to is
greater than the sum of what we consciously see. To drown impromptu is only to
resurface elsewhere. In the Black Square
(1923) of Kandinsky’s rhombus perhaps? Or on that signature diagonal plane of
the Riders’ reality.
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| Wassily Kandinsky, In The Black Square, 1923 |
Granted, The Blue Riders were hardly conventional,
conservative, or conformist. They were, and are still today, challenging. While
Kandinsky posited that Impressions are
direct sensations from the outward nature of reality, I soon find myself puzzled
as to why the artist’s canvas capturing his first experience of a recital of Arnold Schoenberg’s
musical scores is labeled as such. For Kandinsky’s legless Klavier (piano) in Impression
III (Konzert) (1911) gives
more the impression of a vacant stage, whereby his audience tend towards its
blackness, its silence. His impression of the Schoenberg concert seems not a
literal translation from his real experience, but rather translates our literal
experiencing of reality.
My grandfather, whispering in my ear “I am missing the pianist”, at once articulates
our spectatorial self-conciousness. Kandinsky challenges his spectators as the
ultimate performers of his composition. For it is our impression of the music that,
after all, keeps count.
Liza Weber
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| Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III (Konzert), 1911 |
Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)
Lenbachhaus, Munich
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