Kandinsky

In fact, Kandinsky generously credited his spiritual reeducation to the foremost occultist leader of the fin de siecle, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. As Kandinsky earnestly explained. 

Like most contemporary Theosophists, Kandinsky believed that... 

As a painter, speaking to other painters (like Duchamp), Kandinsky was naturally quite explicit in suggesting the preferred compositional means of pictorially attaining the non-material strivings of the soul. Often Kandinsky s artistic-spiritual prescriptions are specific ... 

Kandinsky s Color-Language ) a lone exception is the 1910 Portrait of Dr. Dumouchel (fig. 2), but the specific inspiration for that is revealed in the next chapter. Worse than the persistent problems of physically mediocre and mentally flaccid technical execution, glaringly apparent even in his early Cubist efforts, Duchamp s juvenilia reveals no original ideas. 

Further on, one realizes that Kandinsky s approach is actually synesthesia, a simultaneous blending of all the sense perceptions. According to the painter-theorist, the expression scented colors is frequently encountered. And finally the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes, or dark lake in the treble. Red lights stimulate and excite the heart while blue... 

Once Nature has been transcended, then, says Steiner (just as did Kandinsky ), for the first time, large numbers of people will feel spiritual life to be a vital necessity, when [through Art] spiritual life and practical life are finally brought into direct connection with each other. Because [only] Spiritual-Occult Science [die geheime Wissensdwft, or Secret Science ] is able to throw light on the nature of matter, so will Art, which is bom of Spiritual-Occult Science, attain to the power of giving direct form to every chair, every table, to every man-created object. 

For the most likely purchase date of Kandinsky s book, see Ephemerides, 7 August 1912. For more details about Duchamp s copy, and what little else is known about other books actually possessed by him at this time, see chapter 1, n. 4. 

Kandinsky, Spiritual in Art, 13-14. For an exhaustive account of Kandinsky s involvement with Occultism (specifically Theosophy), see Ringbom, Sounding Cosmos for a biography of this high priestess of modem occultism, see Meade for a discussion of the dubious movement she founded, see Campbell Washington. 

Nonetheless, Kandinsky was certainly not the first artist (even in Germany) to employ concepts potentially indicative of radical pictorial abstraction see Lankheit. Besides noting der Primat der Musik in the subjective process of dematerialization, Lankheit usefully discusses important philosophical precedents coming from Wackenroder, Tieck, and Novalis. 

According to the OED, the first reference in English to the word synesthe-sia appeared in The Century Dictionary, 1889-1891. Nonetheless, the practice, how-ever self-described, is truly ancient see Schrader for the strictly modern kind, as known to Kandinsky, see Lockspeiser. 

Kandinsky, W. Uber das Geistige in der Kunst. Munich Piper, 1911 trans. Concerning... 

The Sounding Cosmos A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis... 

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