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Lot Essay
Kandinsky painted this large and dramatic composition in his sixtieth year, while teaching at the new Bauhaus, which opened in Dessau in 1925. The artist moved from rented rooms in mid-June 1926 into one of three newly built "Master's" double-houses, designed by Walter Gropius, which he shared with his Bauhaus colleague and close friend Paul Klee. The Bauhaus curriculum and faculty was then at the height of its form; the influence of the school was being felt throughout Europe and in America. The roster of teachers included Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Lionel Feininger, Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, under the directorship of Gropius.
The lively exchange of ideas in the Dessau Bauhaus, running across the lines of various disciplines in the fine and applied arts, stimulated teachers and students alike, and the classroom experience greatly enriched Kandinsky's painting. While the emphasis on architecture and technological design in the later Bauhaus encouraged Kandinsky to experiment more broadly with geometric imagery and the structuring of space, as seen in the present painting, his pursuit of the spiritual dimension in art transcended the utilitarian origins of the means he employed. The work of Paul Klee was especially important to Kandinsky during the mid-1920s. Kandinsky admired Klee's improvisational approach to form and materials, the great variety of his subjects, and his ability to connect with the spiritual dimension in art through his astonishing flights of imagination and fantasy.
Kandinsky was still fighting the battle to justify the value of abstract art, and protecting his hard-won gains of the past decade and a half, which had met with increasing criticism, especially in France, where a new classicism had endorsed a return to the object and figure as the proper subjects of the artist. In his 1925 text Abstrakte Kunst, he declared, "the transvaluation that very gradually abandons the external and very gradually turns toward the internal is the natural herald of one of the greatest spiritual epochs. Art has set foot on this pioneering path, and it may be assumed that the great dawning of abstract art, this fundamental turning point in the history of art, represents one of the most important beginnings of the spiritual overthrow that, in its day, I dubbed the 'Epoch of the Great Spiritual'" (quoted in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, pp. 512 and 518).
Kandinsky systematically laid out this exploratory process in his book Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), which the Bauhaus published in 1926. To replace the missing object, to overcome the reliance on external nature, Kandinsky sought to create a science of art that would reveal the compositional laws inherent in abstract forms. The creation of line from points, and planes from lines, suggested energy, rhythm and movement. Kandinsky noted that these aspects of pictorial composition were rooted in perceptual psychology, and he demonstrated, in turn, how they revealed the way to the spiritual dimension in art.
Kandinsky put his findings to use in his paintings of the late 1920s, among which Pfeile is an especially satisfying example. In it he plays off the contrast between the triangle and circle, which in Point and Line to Plane he set down as "the original pair of contrasting plane figures" (in ibid., p. 600, fig. 38). Kandinsky's repeated use of the arrow form recalls Klee's statement in the Pedagogical Sketchbook: "The father of the arrow is the thought: how can I extend my range in that direction?" Kandinsky's arrows are likewise thoughts, in the shape of missiles fired outward into the world from the artist's familiar tower, which stands as a representation of his role as solitary thinker and visionary. Pfeile appears to describe a tower under a medieval-style siege, surrounded by a catapult, a smaller siege tower, and phalanxes of enemy troops. This was indeed Kandinsky's situation as he fought off the critics of abstraction, and fired off his own prophetic ideas in the cause of a synthetic and spiritual art of the future. Seen in this way, the composition becomes more than just the sum of its geometric components, as Kandinsky wished it should be.
The lively exchange of ideas in the Dessau Bauhaus, running across the lines of various disciplines in the fine and applied arts, stimulated teachers and students alike, and the classroom experience greatly enriched Kandinsky's painting. While the emphasis on architecture and technological design in the later Bauhaus encouraged Kandinsky to experiment more broadly with geometric imagery and the structuring of space, as seen in the present painting, his pursuit of the spiritual dimension in art transcended the utilitarian origins of the means he employed. The work of Paul Klee was especially important to Kandinsky during the mid-1920s. Kandinsky admired Klee's improvisational approach to form and materials, the great variety of his subjects, and his ability to connect with the spiritual dimension in art through his astonishing flights of imagination and fantasy.
Kandinsky was still fighting the battle to justify the value of abstract art, and protecting his hard-won gains of the past decade and a half, which had met with increasing criticism, especially in France, where a new classicism had endorsed a return to the object and figure as the proper subjects of the artist. In his 1925 text Abstrakte Kunst, he declared, "the transvaluation that very gradually abandons the external and very gradually turns toward the internal is the natural herald of one of the greatest spiritual epochs. Art has set foot on this pioneering path, and it may be assumed that the great dawning of abstract art, this fundamental turning point in the history of art, represents one of the most important beginnings of the spiritual overthrow that, in its day, I dubbed the 'Epoch of the Great Spiritual'" (quoted in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, New York, 1994, pp. 512 and 518).
Kandinsky systematically laid out this exploratory process in his book Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), which the Bauhaus published in 1926. To replace the missing object, to overcome the reliance on external nature, Kandinsky sought to create a science of art that would reveal the compositional laws inherent in abstract forms. The creation of line from points, and planes from lines, suggested energy, rhythm and movement. Kandinsky noted that these aspects of pictorial composition were rooted in perceptual psychology, and he demonstrated, in turn, how they revealed the way to the spiritual dimension in art.
Kandinsky put his findings to use in his paintings of the late 1920s, among which Pfeile is an especially satisfying example. In it he plays off the contrast between the triangle and circle, which in Point and Line to Plane he set down as "the original pair of contrasting plane figures" (in ibid., p. 600, fig. 38). Kandinsky's repeated use of the arrow form recalls Klee's statement in the Pedagogical Sketchbook: "The father of the arrow is the thought: how can I extend my range in that direction?" Kandinsky's arrows are likewise thoughts, in the shape of missiles fired outward into the world from the artist's familiar tower, which stands as a representation of his role as solitary thinker and visionary. Pfeile appears to describe a tower under a medieval-style siege, surrounded by a catapult, a smaller siege tower, and phalanxes of enemy troops. This was indeed Kandinsky's situation as he fought off the critics of abstraction, and fired off his own prophetic ideas in the cause of a synthetic and spiritual art of the future. Seen in this way, the composition becomes more than just the sum of its geometric components, as Kandinsky wished it should be.