Der Blaue Reiter Almanac :Obituary for Eugen Kahler

Obituary for Eugen Kahler

by Wassily Kandinsky

Eugen Kahler, "Rider" or "At the Circus", 1910-1911

On December 13, 1911, Eugen Kahier, just thirty years old, died in Prague. Death took him tenderly into its arms, without suffering, without anything horrible or ugly. We might say that Kahier died biblically. And thus Kahler’s death corresponded to his life.

He was born into a wealthy Prague family on January 6, 1882. He attended a Gymnasium for five years and after that a business college, a fact that seems incredible to us today: Kahler’s soul was so removed from anything practical; he lived so entirely in the land of his dreams. As early as 1902 he was to go to an art academy in Munich, but he contracted nephritis and was operated on iii Berlin. Despite this first sign of his disease he devoted himself entirely to the study of art. Two years in the Knirr School, one year with Franz Stuck at the Academy in Munich, one year with Habermann, and then Kahler felt strong enough to seek his way alone. His inner voice was so clear, distinct, and precise that he could rely on it utterly. Travel to various cities and countries (Paris, Brussels.Berlin, London, Egypt, Tunis, Italy, Spain) was actually always the same journey in the same country. It was always in the same world which must be called Kahlerland. Now and then the nephritis affected him, and sometimes Kahler had to stay in bed for weeks. But he remained entirely the same: lying in bed, he drew and painted his dreams, he read a great deal and continued to lead his strangely intense inner life.  In London, for example, many typical Kahler water colors were painted, rewarding enough as the life’s work of any artist. It was the same in the winter of 1911 in Munich, where, lying feverish in a sanatorium, he painted another long series of marvelous water colors. This continued: traveling from one sanatorium to another, Kahler remained true to himself to his last breath.

Der_Liebesgarten, 1910-1911

Kahler’s delicate, dreaming, serene soul, with its pure Hebrew cast of unappeasable mystical sadness, was afraid of one thing only: the ignoble. And his entirely noble soul did not seem to belong to our time.
Kalier left numerous oil paintings, water colors, drawings, etchings. About a year and a half ago he had a small exhibition in Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich; in the usual manner the critics received it haughtily and with didactic admonitions.

A great number of profoundly felt poems, of which he had never spoken, were found after his death. .


Art history has not been as enthusiastic about Kahler as Kandinsky was - so it's hard to find good reproductions online.


His "Liebesgarten" reminds me a lot of the Chicago artist, Seymour Rosofsky.

"At the Circus" may have been his best drawing, but regretfully it has been lost.

I also like this sketch on the back of a landscape drawing. It appears to be Don Quixote and Dulcinea.

One might note that the principle quality which Kandinsky finds in this work is a nobility of soul. He does not discuss the kind of technical issues that Von Busse did in his discussion of Delaunay, nor  mention any kind of innovation. His main accomplishment, if you would call it that, was living entirely in the land of his dreams, despite his extensive travel.

Der Blaue Reiter Almanac - Erwin Von Busse

Delaunay, "St. Severin No. 3",1909-1910
(not in Almanac)

ROBERT DELAUNAY'S METHODS OF COMPOSITION

Delaunay’s paintings may appear bizarre, or, at the very least, enigmatic to those who look at them unprepared. This reaction, as we shall try to prove, is not the fault of the paintings but is the result of the viewer’s prejudice or his different attitude toward art. Therefore, we want not to “criticize” the paintings but to analyze the artist’s intentions, the ideas he expresses in his paintings. We shall try to explain in colloquial language the process of forming ideas that the artist, by his own means of expression, achieved in the paintings. We want to give the kind of “interpretation” that is more familiar to the public. Delaunay himself does not give us this interpretation. He is a painter and concentrates solely on painting. Painting absorbs all his means of expression and does not leave him any other possibility. What at first glance appears to be a limitation is really with him a  strength, and consequently his ideas find their most natural and at the same time their most perfect realization in painting.






Delaunay has not always been an abstract artist. His first works were confined to simple reproductions of external nature. He acquired skills that ensured him against subsequent technical difficulties. His essential artistic development began only when he was able to discipline his natural talent and devote it to his desired expression. In his first paintings the arrangement of colors did not correspond to the treatment of lines; despite their color effects these pictures were flat and dull. This led him to the problems of perspective and space. At the same time his sensitive faculties deepened, and he recognized his artistic mission in portraying what nature yielded to his feelings. This he wanted to make visible in a form that other people could understand. His aim was no longer a reproduction and imitation of objective nature but the embodiment of the idea that had come to him when he contemplated nature.


This kind of creation is original and demands a new form of expression, an idea characterizing the means, to realize it. The search for a means of expressing one’s ideas faithfully and down to the smallest detail of technique is the leitmotiv in the development of an artist. At first, form is most important. The subject plays an absolutely subordinate role, but it has a close connection to the idea that it expresses. The artist always chooses a subject that can easily render the idea.


The first stage of this development is represented by the painting St. Séverin. The artist intends to focus the viewer’s attention on the center. He achieves this not by content or objects (objects moving to a particular point) but by an adequate dynamics of space. This is created by a proportionate distribution and correspondence of colors, as well as by curving lines corresponding to the motion. 

Delacroix, "Entrance of Crusanders into Constantiniple" (study and finished piece), 1840

(not in the Almanac)

Delaunay goes back to Delacroix’s painting The Entrance of the Crusaders into Constantinople or, to be more exact, to a much freer sketch for this painting. The dynamics of space are created here by a latent movement of masses, not by objects frozen in postures of movement. All the lines—even the streets of the town in the background—correspond to this movement. Although stressing subject matter in his painting, Delacroix was forced to make concessions to historical  and decorative demands, that is to say, extra-artistic demands. Delauay remains consistent in his radical execution of the motif. There is just one inconsistency in his painting: not all the means express his idea; some of them reproduce nature in simple imitation. Besides his idea,  he paints the physical aspect of the cathedral, the exterior of the natural object. The viewer easily recognizes it as a nonabstract “subject,” which does not serve the idea but disturbs it. It confuses him and keeps him from understanding clearly the representation of the idea. To the majority of viewers this painting will, therefore, appear only as a distorted reproduction of nature.

St. Severin No. 1, 1906

(this is the one reproduced in the Almanac)

St.Severin No. 2, 1909

Delaunay painted three versions of St. Severin from 1906 to 1910 --- so I'm wondering why Busse only mentions the first in his discussion of the artist's development.

I'm also wondering why Busse, or perhaps Delaunay, singled out that piece by Delacroix as exemplary for this kind of painting.


In Busse's discussion of the Delacroix, I'm wondering why "decorative" is "extra-artistic", and in his discussion of St.Severin, I'm wondering how the recognizability of  this scene as a church does not serve the "idea" of the painting.   Isn't this painting about how it feels to be in a particular place ?  That's the main idea that I'm getting -- though I'll have to check out Severin 2 the next time I'm in Minneapolis, or Severin 1 at the Guggenheim.

Delaunay, "Champs de Mars: La Tour Rouge", 1911-1923

(not in the Almanac)

Eiffel Tower, 1911

(not in the Almanac)

Delaunay painted 11 versions of the Eiffel Tower between 1909 and 1911, and I have no idea which one Busse is writing about.





In order to eliminate this disturbing distraction from the main idea, the initial method of composition must be continued logically: the imitative reproduction of exterior nature must be avoided, and for it factors must be substituted that render only the latent law of nature. The articulation of this law should arouse in the viewer a feeling corresponding to the impression of nature analogous in a way to the colloquial term “borrowed concept.” In his Effel Tower Delaunay tries to solve this problem. For this purpose he shatters the optical image of nature and dissects it into small pieces. Size, color, and arrangement of the pieces are again controlled by the aforementioned dynamics of space. Even at this stage of development the artist is inconsistent in that the small parts of the dissected image are still fragments of the optical image of nature, each of which represents in itself an imitation of nature. He does not yet dare to draw the final consequences. The point is to form these pieces in such a way that they are represented by different technical methods.






Again, Busse doesn't want Delaunay to be depicting  particular places -- but that's exactly what he did again and again and again -- with no apparently reduction in recognizability..

La Ville, 1910-1912

In the picture that represents his next stage of development, La Ville, this new method appears in the form of a geometric cube. All exterior objects are dissolved, i.e., transposed into this form. The problem of space dynamics is not solved here. The rhythm of the latent movement does not yet include all directions of movement. Also, the dominating vertical movement impairs the balance of the movements as a whole. A complete equilibrium of all factors is still missing.




I'm not sure that the above version of La Ville is the one Busse is talking about -- but it does seem to a cluttered mess - at least in this reproduction.  Busse doesn't mention them, but the Three Graces seem incompatible with Delaunay's cubism.

  "La Ville 2", 1910-11

"LaVille 2" detail

"LaVille 2" detail

The problem is solved in a second painting of La Ville.. Retaining the technical expedient of the cube, a further development is achieved through the balance of movement in all directions. The movements downward and upward are juxtaposed with a corresponding horizontal movement, a circling one, and, finally, a concentric movement. This concentric movement gives the painting the quality of a complete self-contained whole. Without it, there would be only a fragmentary space section that could be extended at will over the frame of the picture. The concentric movement is achieved by an increasing refraction of all lines toward the center of the painting, i.e., through a reduction of the cubes. The treatment of color supports the space dynamics created by the construction of lines in that the arrangement of color tones also suggests the movements to the viewer.


I also find this "La Ville" more satisfying than the other. Busse's explanation for it's success makes sense as explanations go, though it also might be said that the design seems to come in from corners just as forcefully as it expands from the center.

This time around, he's not bothered by recognizability -- though it's still there - as all these geometric shapes also serve to create views of  a city

Lorenzetti, "Effects of Good Government", 1338, detail

(not in the Almanac)

With the second Ville Delaunay’s formal development reached a stage at which he could stop for a while. He began to make use of his experiences in other aspects of painting. First he used the “landscape,” or only a certain part of it, to demonstrate his ideas; then he decided to extend the ideas to everything that the eye and mind can conceive: the inherent laws of everything that exists and its subjective understanding and representation.

Yikes! "The inherent laws of everything that exists"?

Delaunay does not appear to  share Busse's interest in such a broad topic - which is the problem with this entire essay.

Der Blaue Reiter Almanac : Roger Allard

Raoul  Dufy, "Portrait  of Roger Allard" 

(not in the Almanac)

Roger Allard : Signs of Renewal in Painting

I couldn't find much biographical information about Allard (1885-1961), other than that he wrote poetry and criticism of art and literature.

Cezanne, "The Seasons: Fall", 1861

The best training for a study of the pattern of artistic evolutions is to experience the development of a style in painting up to its fossilization and death, preferably a style that is survived by the pseudostyle of its imitators. 

Because impressionism now belongs to the past, we can detect its historical relationship not only to the period directly preceding it—--- which frequently has been done before—but also to the period following it, the art of our time.

The undeniable analogy of impressionism to naturalism, especially in its late period, is perhaps the main reason that impressionism could not lead to a more important style. In all other periods great epochs of art founded schools and the forms of great renovators created definite styles. The narrow limits of the impressionist principle allowed only three or four great artists to develop their personalities.

Surprising reactions followed, such as neo-impressionism, which basically was nothing but a concealed restoration and which finally developed into an art for gourmets. Even the great heritage of Cezanne was dissected and the labor of his discoveries became a cheap commodity. But Cezanne’s art is the arsenal out of which contemporary painting takes its swords for the first parry and thrust in the struggle to defeat naturalism, false literature, and pseudo-classicism. Today different things are being fought for.

It seems important to us to outline this short prehistory of “cubism” up to its final definition in art, because we intend to combat the trivialities and false reports that are disseminated today in all magazines and newspapers on infamoijs cubism.

What is cubism ?


First of all, it is the deliberate intention to restore again to painting the knowledge of measure, volume, and weight.

Instead of the impressionist illusion of space based on perspective in atmosphere and a naturalism of colors, cubism renders sinple, abstract forms in defined relationships and proportions to one another. The first postulate of cubism is, therefore, the order of objects—not however, the order of naturalistic objects, but of abstract forms. It perceives space as a compound of lines, units of space, quadratic and cubic equations and relationships. 

Henri Le Falconnier, 1911

It's not difficult for a 25 year old  to severely  reduce art history to a  "pattern of artistic evolutions". --  yet his requiem for  impressionism remains canonical in academic art history, despite the variety of its prolific, ongoing practice.

His disparagement of "art for gourmets" -- and presumably for the gourmets as well -- also lives on in academia.

One might also note that Le Falconnier, whose above piece was chosen to accompany this essay, was included among "the ambitious young painters out to hijack Cubism" in "The Other Cubists: Jackdaws in Peacocks' Feathers", the title of chapter 14 in Richardson's "Life of Picasso, Vol. 2" -- as shown in the 1911 Salon


 The two of them (Picasso and Kahnweiller) were decidedly unimpressed by the centerpiece of Room 41 ,Le Fauconniers monumental (over ten foot by six foot) Abondance—his Russian giantess of a wife (a painter called Maroussia) carrying a basket of huge fruit accompanied by an oafish putto—which no amount of faceting could redeem from academicism. On the strength of Abondance, this now forgotten painter was perceived as the leader of the new school—and not just in France, either. Le Fauconnier had exhibited an earlier version of his allegory in Munich at the second Neue Kunstlervereinigung, of which was a member (Picasso and Braque exhibited as guests), and it had made such an impression that he was invited to join the Blaue Reiter the following year. After a succession of one-man shows in Munich, Berlin, Prag Budapest, Zurich, Le Fauconnier would soon be better known in Mitteleuropa than Picasso. With his red, fan-shaped beard, imposing height, myopic air of earnestness, which drugs did much to heighten, Le Fauconnier personified the charismatic chef d’école. As such he was hailed Russia (at the Golden Fleece and Knave of Diamonds group shows). also  in Holland, where, after abandoning cubism, he spent World War I. wallowing in mysticism and back-to-nature expressionism. When he returned to Paris after the war, the artist whom Gleizes had once celebrated as master of a new generation” found that he was unremembered.

Even allowing for Richardson's snarky partisanship - Cubism clearly had a much shorter shelf-life than Impressionism.

William McGregor Paxton, 1909

(not in the Almanac)

Doesn't the above non-cubist painting also exemplify "a knowledge of measure, volume, and weight" ?
Aren't the forms just as tightly ordered as the triangles, circles, and squares found in the Falconnier landscape posted above it ?

Ben Aronson, Reflections, 2008

(not in the Almanac)

While here's a painting done a hundred years later. It's more about light than volume and weight -- but you wouldn't call it tired or moribund, would you ?

Matisse, "Le  Danse", 1910

The task of the artist is to create an artistic order out of this mathematical chaos. He wants to awaken the latent rhythm of this chaos.


Not that mathematical  expressions cannot be applied to the lines in a cubist painting (or any other) - but it's not likely that they were conceived this way.  The mention of "quadratic and cubic equations" is only to suggest an intellectual rigor that otherwise might seem to be lacking.

Any view of life in which the most dissimilar forces struggle in opposition is a center for this idea. The external subject of this view of life is only a pretext for, or, rather, the argument of the equation. This has never been different in art-—only this final meaning has been hidden for centuries; modern art is trying to rediscover it.

Isn’t it strange how difficult it is for our contemporary critics and aesthetes to admit the necessity for a re-evaluation of nature in terms of an exact and abstract world of forms in the visual arts? In other fields, in  music and poetry, a similar abstraction is a self-evident postulate for them. Camille Mauclair, for example, regards cubism as a scholastic sophistry leading to the sterilization of the creative urge. He forgets that two creative people are necessary to enjoy a work of art: the first is the artist who creates it, the great stimulator and inventor, and the second is the viewer whose mind has to return to nature. The further the two of them advance to reach the same goal, the more creative they both are.

Everyone who is fully aware of his own aesthetic feelings will sense the truth of this statement.

If the possibility of a legitimate explanation of aesthetic actions is denied right at the beginning, then one can well ask whether order equals disorder

Louis Anquetin, "Portrait of Camille Mauclair", 1896

(not in the Almanac)

I

Braque, "Candle Stick and Playing Cards on a Table", 1910

(not in the Almanac)

I would have to agree with Mauclair that  Analytic Cubist paintings suggest a "scholastic sophistry leading to the sterilization of the creative urge".

Because I find paintings like the above to be boring.

I would  agree with Allard that "two creative people are necessary to enjoy a work of art: the first is the artist who creates it..  the second is the viewer ...".    Though I have no idea what would be involved in having one's "mind return to nature." .... and  whether it's important for   "the two of them advance to reach the same goal" depends upon the value of that goal. .Doesn't it ?







Cannot or must not the human mind enter here with theories and differentiations? This is not at all to deny that all values in this world, especially aesthetic values, are relative and changing.

It is hardly necessary to mention the forms and means of expression that have been applied so far in the wide system of cubism; the development of these ideas is still at its beginning.

Some dematerialized their conception of the world in the attempt to separate its various parts from one another. Others searched for a system to transform objects until they became abstract cubist forms and formulas, weights, and measures.

There was the idea of the futurists (“Le cinématisme”) who wanted to replace the old European rules of perspective by a new, to some extent centrifugal, perspective that would no longer show the viewer one fixed plane, but would, so to speak, lead him around the object. Others tried a reciprocal interpenetration of objects to increase the expression of motion.

None of these ideas, however, alone or combined, produces an artistic canon for creating. The terrifying fertility of these ideas is rather the evil sign of decadence. No sound artistic structure can be erected on such a basis. In contemporary literature we have the same movement: the ardent urge for synthesis drives the spirit to arbitrary expositions that push poetry to the picturesque, which is, at the same time, on the brink of the carefully avoided anecdote; a dangerous vicious circle  that banishes the spirit. Therefore futurism appears to us as a malignant growth on the healthy tree of art.

Boccioni,Visioni simultanee, 1912
(not in the Almanac)

I'm not sure why Allard gave Futurism such a hard slap. Nowhere else does he give any importance to an "artistic canon for creating" or a "sound artistic structure"

Perhaps he felt that he needed to throw some avant garde movement under the tires, just to show that he was not indiscriminate in advocating the new.



We are proclaiming the right of the new constructive movement in art. We defend its good purpose against all romantic points of view which deny the sleeper the opportunity to think and to speculate and in which he is regarded as an inspired dreamer whose left hand does not know what his right hand is doing.
The first and most noble right of the artist is to be a conscious builder of his ideas.

Whenever someone gets around to writing a comprehensive history of conceptual art - this paragraph would have to be considered.

I guess I'm what Allard calls a "Romantic". Not that I "deny the sleeper the opportunity to think", but that I want composition to be the discovery, rather than the demonstration, of ideas.

Many highly talented artists of our time bleed to death disregarding their right to work consciously. The most honest among them realizes the imperative necessity of new aesthetic laws and the knowledge of these laws.





I doubt I'd be interested in the work of those who "realize the imperative necessity" of any aesthetic laws, new or old --- though such "laws" are so liable to be fuzzy and open to wide interpretation, it may not make any difference.




Cubism is no new fantasy of “savages,” no scalp dance around the altars of the “officials,” but an honest search for a new discipline.

From this point of view the old quarrel about the priority of its discovery is completely irrelevant. Unquestionably Derain, Braque, and Picasso made the first formal attempts in cubism; these were followed by more systematic works by others. We are indebted to the spirit and temperament of these artists; therefore we place their names on the top of this objective essay, which is not meant to evaluate talents but only to show the line of development. Since the exhibition in the Salon d’Automne in 1910, this line took a very clearly defined direction. The exhibition of the Indépendants and of the Salon d’Automne in 1911 finally made it clear that one could speak of a “renewal” in painting. 


This is the very same 1911 Salon which Richardson, above, condemned as academic and derivative




The critics’ attitude was remarkable; they were no longer reserved but very angry and offensive. They would have put up with the works of some amateurs, but they could not bear to be confronted with a serious movement that threatened to cause the final downfall of their own senile art. They clearly expressed their indignation that these new painters did not even think of wiping the sand out of their tired eyes so that they could see the athletic qualities of these new paintings. The critics were upset about the vast, pulsating life of this rich movement; they would rather have tried to classify it as a hoax upon the masses.This was a waste of time, for among the new painters were celebrities such as Metzinger, and Le Fauconnier, who asserted the noble reserve of his northern character in the delicate architecture of his space creations. Then Albert Gleizes, who forced his rich imagination into logical constructions. Then Fernand Léger, indefatigably searching for new relationships of proportions; finally the painterly Robert Delaunay, who conquered the arabesques of the plane and who shows the rhythm of great, infinite depths. 






This group pursues its high aims apart from the dreamlike art of Rouault and without connection to the talented and delicate Matisse. To this group belongs also the stylish Marie Laurencin and R. de La Fresnaye, full of tradition and schooling and full of new forms. Is it not an infallible proof of the power of the movement that from an inner congeniality it attracts the most heterogeneous elements? Dunoyer de Segonzac, L.-Albert Moreau, Marchand, Dufy, Lhote, Marcel Duchamp, Boussingault, and many other names whom I soon hope to have the opportunity to speak about.
With the sculptors, like Duchamp-Villon and Alexander Archipenko, we also experience the trend toward new ideas.
The new spiritual movement is also no longer solely French. The same search for renewal in art resounds abroad.
Is it possible to see in this valiant movement anything else but the rebellion against worn-out aesthetics and at the same time the creation of a new canon, which shall give our life style and inner beauty?
,

Dufy, 1910

Marchand, 1910

Duchamps, 1911

Delaunay, 1911

Fresnaye, 1911

Gleizes, 1911

Laurencin, 1911

Leger, 1911

Metzinger, 1911

Lhote, 1911

Segonzac, 1911

Above is a collection of images I found of paintings  by the artists Allard has listed. They were all done around the time the Almanac was published - though none of them were included in it.

Andre Derain, 1910

And here's one by Derain. Allard credits him as one of three pioneers of Cubism, along with Picasso and Braque

*********

It's interesting that Allard ended his essay  by proposing that these painters "give our life style and inner beauty" - definitely not what you would expect from an advocate of avant garde art a hundred years later..

Der Blaue Reiter Almanac : August Macke

Magdeburg Cathedral, 13th Century

Masks - by August Macke

A sunny day, a cloudy day, a Persian spear, a holy vessel, a pagan idol and a wreath of everlasting flowers, a Gothic cathedral and a Chinese junk, the bow of a pirate ship, the word “pirate” and the word “holy,” darkness, night, spring, the cymbals and their sound and the firing of armored vessels, the Egyptian Sphinx and the beauty spot stuck on the pretty cheek of a Parisian cocotte.


The lamplight in Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the paintings of village streets and ruins, the mystery plays in the Middle Ages and children frightening each other, a landscape by Van Gogh and a still life by Cezanne, the whirring of propellers and the neighing of horses, the cheers of a cavalry attack and the war paint of Indians, the cello and the bell, the shrill whistle of the steam engine, and the cathedral-like quality of a beech forest, masks and stages of the Japanese and the Greeks, and the mysterious, hollow drumming of the Indian fakir.

Is life not more precious than food and the body not more precious than clothing?

August Macke was 24 when he wrote this youthful celebration of life as he knew it. . Sadly, he would die three years later on a battlefield in France.

I share his relative disinterest in food --- he's obviously not a gourmet --- but  did he really feel that clothing was  more precious than the body that it covers ?

August Macke, (not in the Almanac)

He did paint nudes - apparently from life or from life drawings - though this one seems more contemplative than sensual.

Incomprehensible ideas express themselves in comprehensible forms. Comprehensible through our senses as star, thunder, flower, as form.

Form is a mystery to us for it is the expression of mysterious powers. Only through it do we sense the secret powers, the “invisible God.”

The senses are our bridge between the incomprehensible and the comprehensible. 

To behold plants and animals is: to perceive their secret.

To hear the thunder is: to perceive its secret. To understand the language of forms means: to be closer to the secret, to live.

To create forms means: to live. Are not children more creative in drawing directly from the secret of their sensations than the imitator of Greek forms? Are not savages artists who have forms of their own powerful as the form of thunder?

Thunder, flower, any force expresses itself as form. So does man. He, too, is driven by something to find words for conceptions, to find clearness in obscurity, consciousness in the unconscious. This is his life, his creation.

As man changes, so do his forms change.

The relations that numerous forms bear to one another enable us to recognize the individual form. Blue first becomes visible against red, the greatness of the tree against the smallness of the butterfly, the youth of the child against the age of the old man. One and two make three. The formless, the infinite, the zero remain incomprehensible. God remains incomprehensible.

Man expresses his life in forms. Each form of art is an expression of his inner life. The exterior of the form of art is its interior.

Each genuine form of art emerges from a living correlation of man to the real substance of the forms of nature, the forms of art. The scent of a flower, the joyful leaping of a dog, a dancer, the donning of jewelry, a temple, a painting, a style, the life of a nation, of an era.

The flower opens at sunrise. Seeing his prey, the panther crouches, and as a result of seeing it, his strength grows. And the tension of his strength shows in the length of his leap. The form of art, its style, is a result of tension. 

Styles, also, may perish from inbreeding. The crossbreeding of two styles results in a third, a new style. The renaissance of antiquity and of Durer, the disciple of Schongauer and Mantegna. Europe and the Orient.

In a world full of forms, he doesn't talk much about what kind of forms he prefers to others -- other than the notion of "power" - the form of a panther is more powerful when he is crouching to attack than when he is sleeping.

Cameroons

Easter Island

This essay is accompanied by the above images, taken from pieces in the Munich Museum of Folk Art.

Invariably, the pieces are mediocre - but that might reflect the limitations of what was available. Presumably they qualify for inclusion only because they are not naturalistic. .



In our time the impressionists found a direct connection with natural phenomena. Their rallying cry was to depict nature’s organic form bathed in light, enveloped in atmosphere. It changed under their hands.

Peasant, Italian primitive, Dutch, Japanese, and Tahitian art forms became as stimulating as nature’s own forms. Renoir, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin. They are all no more naturalists than El Greco or Giotto. Their works are the expressions of their inner lives; they are the forms of these artists’ interior world in the medium of painting. This does not necessarily indicate that there is a culture, a culture that would mean to us what the Gothic style meant to the Middle Ages, a culture in which everything has form, form born from our lives—only from our lives. Self-evident and strong as the scent of a flower. 


Perhaps it's the fault of the translation - but the above seems  so confusing.  What did the Gothic Style mean to the Middle Ages ?  What forms have not been  born from the lives of those who made them? But isn't it possible for artifacts to  express  social conventions more than someone's inner life?  Isn't it possible for some artifacts to be like street signs -- and be intended to communicate like a written text ?



In our complicated and confused era we have forms that absolutely enthrall everyone in exactly the same way as the fire dance enthralls the African or the mysterious drumming of the fakirs enthralls the Indian. As a soldier, the independent scholar stands beside the farmer’s son. They both march in review similarly through the ranks, whether they like it or not. At the movies the professor marvels alongside the servant girl. In the vaudeville theater the butterfly-colored dancer enchants the most amorous couples as intensely as the solemn sound of the organ in a Gothic cathedral seizes both believer and unbeliever.

"Enthralls exactly the same way" ?   I would doubt it -- though the  professor and the servant girl might be  enthralled just as intensely by the same performance  up on stage. I would be surprised if  even two servant girls would be enthralled exactly the same way.



Forms are powerful expressions of powerful life. Differences in expression come from the material, word, color, sound, stone, wood, metal. One need not understand each form. One also need not read each language.


What about forms - and lives - that are not so very powerful ? Macke does not allow for many kinds of differences.

Van Gogh, "Portrait of Dr. Gachet"

The contemptuous gesture with which connoisseurs and artists have to this day banished all artistic forms of primitive cultures to the fields of ethnology or applied art is amazing at the very least.
What we hang on the wall as a painting is basically similar to the carved and painted pillars in an African hut. The African considers his idol the comprehensible form for an incomprehensible idea, the personification of an abstract concept. For us the painting is the comprehensible form for the obscure, incomprehensible conception of a deceased person, of an animal, of a plant, of the whole magic of nature, of the rhythmical.
Does Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet not originate from a spiritual life similar to the amazed grimace of a Japanese juggler cut in a wood block

Yashima Gakutei , "Monkey Juggler", c. 1812

I have no idea which grimacing Japanese juggler Macke had in mind -- above is the first one I found. Neither it, nor the Van Gogh, were reproduced in the Almanac.

If these two pieces exemplify a similar spiritual life -- I wonder where Macke would have  recognized spiritual lives that were dis-similar.

Ceylon, disease-demon mask

(not in Almanac)

 The mask of the disease demon from Ceylon is the gesture of horror of a primitive race  by which their priests conjure sickness. The grotesque embellishments found on a mask have their analogies in Gothic monuments and in the almost unknown buildings and inscriptions in the primeval forests of Mexico. What the withered flowers are for the portrait of the European doctor, so are the withered corpses for the mask of the conjurer of disease. The cast bronzes of the Negroes from Benin in West Africa , the idols from the Easter Islands in the remotest Pacific, the cape of a chieftain from Alaska, and the wooden masks from New Caledonia speak the same powerful language as the chimeras of Notre-Dame and the tombstones in Frankfurt Cathedral.

Everywhere, forms speak in a sublime language right in the face of European aesthetics. Even in the games of children, in the hat of a cocotte, in the joy of a sunny day, invisible ideas materialize quietly.
The joys, the sorrows of man, of nations, lie behind the inscriptions, paintings, temples, cathedrals, and masks, behind the musical compositions, stage spectacles, and dances. If they are not there, if form becomes empty and groundless, then there is no art. 

With this listing of things from around the world that have something very powerful in common, this concluding paragraph sounds a lot like Malraux in the La Psychologie de l'Art from 1947.  And like Malraux, he's not going to tell us much about that mysterious something that apparently defies European aesthetics - even if it can be found in celebrated European art as well. Nor does  Macke  offer any examples of form that is empty and groundless.

This writing is so empty-headed, one wonders why Kandinsky, or anyone, would wish to include it in a collection of essays.

But fortunately, the power and clarity that are absent from his writing can easily be found in his painting.

1909

1913

1914

In these three paintings, Macke seemed to be moving away from whatever naturalism he had.

I wonder how he would painted had he survived the war.