Kandinsky’s Composition VI : Heideggerian Poetry in

Noah’s Ark

Joshua M. Hall

The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2012,

pp. 74-88 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/475979

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Kandinsky’s Composition VI:
Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark

JOSHUA M. HALL

Introduction

I will begin my investigation of Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Composition

VI with Kandinsky’s own commentary on the painting. I will then turn to
the analysis of Kandinsky and the Compositions in John Sallis’s book Shades.
Using this analysis as my point of departure, I will consider how Composition
VI resonates with Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” particularly
with regard to the role of language in art. Principally through the “theme”
of Composition VI, namely the Deluge, I will examine the ­interconnections

Figure 1. Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition VI. Oil on canvas. 195x300 cm. Inv. no.
GE-9662. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg and Photograph © The
State ­Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin, Leonard Kheifets, Yuri
­Molodkovets.

Joshua M. Hall recently successfully defended his PhD dissertation in philosophy, on

the philosophy of dance, at Vanderbilt University. He has journal articles forthcom-
ing in Philosophy Today and the Journal of Blacks Studies, poetry published in journals
internationally (recently including Crucible, Lilliput Review, and Chiron Review), and
eighteen years of experience as a professionally trained dancer and choreographer.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 46, No. 2, Summer 2012

©2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   75

among the painting, its theme, and their poetic dimensions. I will then
­conclude with a brief look, in this light, at Kandinsky’s own poetry.
The most important implication of understanding Composition VI as a
kind of poetry develops out of its suggestion that more than one artwork
from more than one genre can open up new worlds (in Heidegger’s sense)
that are even richer and more interesting than the world opened up by any
one individual artwork. This opportunity could, in turn, motivate artists in
any one genre to seek inspiration not only from other artworks in their own
genre (in which genre their own community might currently possess a par-
ticularly rich tradition) but also from artworks in other genres, which might
widen the search to include artworks born from other communities (whose
cultural traditions at some point in time are richer in some other genre).
For example, perhaps an Italian librettist, in seeking inspiration for an op-
era, might seek inspiration from dance or architecture, and might thereby
turn to nineteenth-century Russian or medieval Islamic culture for the in-
spiration. A tendency in this direction, finally, could inspire cross-cultural
communication, and thereby tolerance and appreciation, in our increasingly
global world. In this respect, the theme of the Deluge seems particularly
­appropriate, given that the deluge myth, though most well-known in its
Jewish form, is one that is shared by cultures from around the world.

Kandinsky on the Painting

In his commentary on Composition VI, Kandinsky first describes the glass

painting that served as the impetus and study for the Composition. In
beginning this glass painting, Kandinsky writes, “My starting point was
the Deluge.”1 Kandinsky took various “objective forms, which are in part
amusing,” and “enjoyed mingling serious forms with amusing external ex-
pressions: nudes, the Ark, animals, palm trees, lightning, rain, etc.” But in
attempting to turn this glass painting into one of his Compositions, Kand-
insky experienced multiple failures. He explains these failures as follows: “I
was still obedient to the expression of the Deluge, instead of heeding the ex-
pression of the word ‘Deluge.’” In other words, Kandinsky’s focus on paint-
ing (in which German culture possessed a particular prowess at that time)
as opposed to poetry (in which the Jewish tradition possesses a particular
prowess) initially obscured his painting’s potential. Instead of depicting an
actual event, Kandinsky was attempting to capture what he calls “the in-
ner sound” of the event. But even a year and a half later, he tells us, “that
element that was foreign to my inner picture of that catastrophe called the
Deluge still stuck to me.” Then, after taking some time away from the glass
painting, and then returning to it, as it were, afresh, Kandinsky remarks
that he “was struck, first by the colors, then by the compositional element,
and then by the linear form itself, without reference to the objects.”2 By at-
tending to what painting and poetry share, he was able to transcend certain
76   Hall

restrictive dimensions of conventional painting; and doing so in this case

involved moving from his Germanic base of inspiration to the Hebraic tra-
dition, thereby potentially facilitating further rapport and communication
between the two, as for example in this very essay.
Kandinsky begins the actual description of the finished Composition
with an identification of “three centers” in the painting:

1. on the left the delicate, rosy, somewhat blurred center, with weak,
indefinite lines in the middle;

2. on the right (somewhat higher than the left) the crude, red-blue,
rather discordant area, with sharp, rather evil, strong, very precise
lines.

Between these two centers is a third (nearer the left), which one
recognizes only subsequently as being a center, but is, in the end, the
principal center. Here the pink and white seethe in such a way that
they seem to lie neither upon the surface of the canvas nor upon any
ideal surface. Rather, they appear as if hovering in the air, as if sur-
rounded by steam . . . This feeling of “somewhere” about the princi-
pal center determines the inner sound of the whole picture.3

Note that the third and “principal” center of the painting only emerges
“subsequently” (that is, temporally) in the process of experiencing the paint-
ing, which might remind the reader of both the interplay of concealment
and unconcealment and also the centrality of temporality in Heidegger’s
thought. Note also that temporality is a dimension traditionally understood
to be foreign to painting and central for poetry; again Kandinsky’s painting
reaches out to its other and finds new possibilities for itself in that other.
One might also suggest here a connection to the arguably stronger emphasis
on temporality and historicity in Jewish culture compared to the greater em-
phasis in Greek and Germanic culture on spatiality.
Kandinsky then goes on to catalog various effects produced by colors,
lines, and forms in the painting, such as “long solemn lines,” “a whole fugue
out of flecks of different shades of pink,” “various patches of blue, which
produce an internally warm effect,” “very deep brown forms . . . introduce a
blunted extremely abstract-sounding tone, which brings to mind an element
of hopelessness,” and “Green and yellow [that] animate . . . [a] state of mind,
giving it the missing activity.”4 These passages betray a sort of synesthesia
in Kandinsky, an intermixing of different sensory modalities—the ability to
hear colors, taste sounds, etc. This synesthetic capability will be important
to keep in mind in considering Kandinsky’s own poetry and his under-
standing of poetry. Synesthesia might also serve as a useful metaphor for
the process of learning to see content in forms one had previously assumed
were incapable of possessing it, and seeing potential forms for content that
one had previously assumed could never take such a form. Similarly, one
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   77

community might express a given idea or theme in sculpture and believe

itself to have expressed it uniquely, unless and until it discovers the same
idea or theme in the music of another community.
Kandinsky notes that “all these elements” in the painting, “even those
that contradict one another, inwardly attain total equilibrium.”5 The end re-
sult of these effects is that “the original motif out of which the picture came
into being (the Deluge) is dissolved and transformed into an internal, pure-
ly pictorial, independent, and objective existence. Nothing could be more
misleading than to dub this picture the representation of an event.”6 From
these lines, one is inclined to disregard the “theme” of the Deluge entirely,
except as a more or less irrelevant starting point from which the forms and
colors independently emerged. Yet consider the lines immediately follow-
ing, which are the final lines of the essay: “What thus appears a mighty
collapse in objective terms is, when one isolates its sound, a living paean of
praise, the hymn of that new creation that follows upon the destruction of
the world.”7 Here the Deluge returns, not as an event that has been repre-
sented, but as something like what Heidegger terms “the naming power of
the word.”8 One might also see in this moment a reaching out from the heart
of Germanic abstract expressionism to the messianic dimension of Jewish
culture.
Something is revealed in the proper noun “Deluge,” in what ­Kandinsky
describes as “the expression of the word ‘Deluge.’” One is tempted to agree
with Derrida’s observation (about painting in general) that “what’s at stake
here is a decision about the frame, about what separates the internal from
the external, with a border that is itself double in its trait, and joins together
what it splits.”9 It might also be helpful to note here another, more specifi-
cally linguistic, issue raised by Derrida along these lines. “Is there any ob-
solete language?” one of his fictive interlocutors asks. “Like old outworn
shoes, out of use or out of date, in a word—painted language?”10 Whether
there is such a thing as painted language, and whether it even makes sense
to formulate such a question, are questions that are part of the larger issue
of the relationships among the various art forms. I will first address Kand-
insky’s understanding of the relationship between painting and music, for
which I turn to Sallis’s text.

Sallis on Kandinsky on Painting

Kandinsky felt, according to Sallis, that “painting could develop just

such powers as music possesses.”11 Music was the ideal toward which
­Kandinsky’s art stretched. “The exemplary role of music remains ­decisive
for Kandinsky.” Sallis notes that Hegel also suggests this blending of
­painting into music. He also, Sallis writes, speaks of a kind of object-less
painting—a painting constituted solely by shining and counter-shinings
78   Hall

that “become so fine, so fleeting, that they begin to pass over into the sphere
of music.”12 This “passage into pure art”—Kandinsky’s attempt to render
in painting the pure nonrepresentational quality of music—is a recurring
theme in ­Sallis’s analysis. And might this concept of “pure art” find a place,
at the community level, in a global culture of enhanced sensitivity and sym-
pathetic interrelation?
Given Kandinsky’s understanding of painting as potentially intimately
linked with music, one might also ask the question of the relation of this
musical painting to poetry in poetry’s spoken (and thereby potentially mu-
sical) form.13 If painting can become (almost) music, and music is the art
whose medium is sound, and the voice produces sound, then painting can
be thought of as a kind of poetry. What the word “poetry” might mean here
is of course far from clear, and is a question to which I will return below.
Kandinsky, however, according to Sallis, rejects any attempt to bring the
literary into communion with painting. Here, Kandinsky would likely agree
with Nietzsche that “compared with music [and presumably also paint-
ing that is crossing the threshold into music] all communication by words
is shameless.”14 And yet, Nietzsche also writes that it is the “poeticizing
power” that is “the forging of the chain of affirmations of beauty.”15 Like-
wise, Kandinsky writes in a brief statement in the Journal des Poètes in 1935
that “each true painting is poetry. For poetry is not made solely by the use
of words, but also by colors, organized and composed.” Consider, for an
example of such poetry, the following lines from Kandinsky’s prose poem
“The Tower”:

Man in green tights with his moustache turned upward lay almost
full-length upon the green meadow. I never like him. Red toadstools
were all around. Woman came from out of green forest. She was blue,
and I found her unpleasant.16

There is a startling reduction here of beings to colors—the “green tights,”

“red toadstools,” and even the blue woman emerge as principally chromat-
ic, while their other defining features melt away into the musical rhetoric of
the poem.
As the result of this multiplicity of media in which poetry can take
place—including in color—Kandinsky argues that “painting is a pictorial
poetic creation. It possesses its own means of being ‘pure poetry.’” Kand-
insky further claims that the source of both the painting’s language and the
poem’s language “is the same; they share the same root: intuition—soul.
Seen in this light,” he writes, “there is no difference at all between Painting—
Poetry—Music—Dance—Architecture. All art.”17 The reader will need
to keep these descriptions in mind when considering below the similarly
­holistic ­description of art in Heidegger’s understanding of poetry.
Sallis further remarks that “in order to write a discourse on painting, af-
ter Kandinsky’s work after ‘Composition VI,’. . . a new language, a new
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   79

kind of language, a kind that would hardly even still be language, needs to
be discovered.”18 Earlier in the text, Sallis also mentions Kandinsky’s own
poetry, part of his “texts that, within the domain of the literary, carry out—
as in a kind of mimesis—what Kandinsky would execute in his painting.”19
Could Sallis be gesturing here to a type of language at the threshold of po-
etry, or even poetry itself, with this rhetoric of a “new kind of language”?
Perhaps some of Kandinsky’s own poetry could be part of this “discovery.”
In referring to one of the prose poems in Kandinsky’s album Sounds, Sallis
describes it as “evocative” and claims that it functions as a sort of “pro-
topainting.” This protopainting, however, according to Sallis, is only “sec-
ondary” to “the evocativeness of the poem.”20
Sallis observes a doubling in Kandinsky’s work, a double move in which
one move is a pushing of the metaphysics of art to its limit, and the other “is
driven by the work of concealment, by the obscuring of objects, as, for in-
stance, in the running-over of color beyond the outlines.”21 Such obscuring
and blurring as concealment Sallis implicitly links to the thought of Heide-
gger; and it is to the latter’s Origin of the Work of Art that I now turn.

Heidegger on Painting

The English title of Hofstadter’s translation of this text—“The Origin of the

Work of Art”—while technically faithful, seems to miss an important aspect
in the original German—a certain springing forth. As an alternative, more
poetically liberal title, I would like to suggest “The Upspring of the Art-
work.” This draws on the etymological connection of Ursprung to springing,
leaping up, and presents, it seems to me, a sense of the dynamism of the
original German title, a dynamism pervasive in Heidegger’s work.
One of the most significant passages in “Upspring of the Artwork” is the
one in which Heidegger deals with the artwork of Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s art
is mentioned in the context of Heidegger’s attempt to grasp the “equipmen-
tality of equipment” as differentiated from things qua things and artworks
qua works. Specifically, Heidegger mentions Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes
in order, Heidegger says, “to facilitate the visual apprehension of” peasant
shoes.22
Thus facilitated, Heidegger describes “the world of the peasant woman”
as made manifest in her leather shoes and determines that it is the reliabil-
ity [Verlässlichkeit] of these shoes that makes her world possible in the first
place. Because the peasant woman can count on her shoes being there and
clothing and protecting her feet, without having to think about it, she is able
to carry on her normal activities. Heidegger concludes that it is exactly this
reliability in which the equipmentality of the equipment consists. And fur-
thermore, he concludes that it is the work of the artwork that made possible
this understanding of the reliability of the shoes. The “workly character of
the work” opened up the “equipmentality of the equipment.”23
80   Hall

It does not require a second glance at Composition VI to realize that it

could not have served just as readily the purposes for which Heidegger uti-
lized Van Gogh’s shoe paintings. The reason for this is simple: Composition
VI, as an example of what is now termed “abstract art,” is largely nonrep-
resentational. The minute details Heidegger mentions with regard to the
shoes, such as “the dark openings of the worn insides of the shoes” and “the
dampness and richness of the soil” on the leather, would not be possible
with the pseudo-figures of Composition VI such as the “palm trees” or the
“dolphin” that Kandinsky identifies in the painting.
This is not to say, however, that the painting does not “open a world” in
Heidegger’s sense, or that the truth is not “setting itself to work” or “setting
itself into the work” (Sich-ins-Werk-setzen) in Composition VI.24 On the con-
trary, Heidegger insists that his understanding of art is not based on any rep-
resentational model of art. One piece of evidence for this claim is Heidegger’s
analysis in the essay of C. F. Meyer’s poem “Roman Fountain.” The poem
presents a typical three-tiered fountain in which the water springs from the
inside and out of the top and then fills and overflows each of three successive
basins. “The second [basin] in such plenty lives, / Its bubbling flood a third
invests” (emphasis added). Despite its visually descriptive quality, and the
pulsing image of the fountain, however, Heidegger remarks that the poem is
not “a poetic painting.”25 Given Heidegger’s view on the relation of poetry to
art in general, which I will explore below, one is tempted to read this denial of
“poetic painting” as a repetition of Heidegger’s rejection of the representation
model of art, of labeling the poem as a “copy” of a real fountain.
My next question is the following: what does Heidegger’s analysis of
strife (Streit, polemos) in the sense of intimacy (Innigkeit) illuminate in Com-
position VI, and vice versa? First, as with all artworks, according to Heideg-
ger, this painting brings what one might call an “open space of significant
possibility.” To put it in Heidegger’s terms, the painting stands there, and in
standing there (Dastehen) gives a there (da).26 It does so by both setting itself
into and setting up a world and by setting itself back into and setting forth
the earth. In and as the strife of world and earth, the painting is the locus of
truth as unconcealment, as ale-theia.27 Or, one could say just as appropriately,
that the painting is the happening of that truth, that it is the truth itself.28
Composition VI rests against the earth, in Heidegger’s sense, insofar as
the work of this artwork happens in color. As Heidegger writes, a paint-
ing “causes it [the color] to come forth for the very first time and to come
into the open region [Offene] of the work’s world.” The painting, instead
of using up the colors, causes them “to glow,” and “sets itself back into
. . . the brightening and darkening of color.”29 The splendid array of color in
Composition VI is undoubtedly what the observer will be first struck by on
viewing the painting. Kandinsky himself notes that each time he observed
the glass painting that served as the inspiration for Composition VI, he “was
struck, first by the colors.”30
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   81

In considering the place of the earth in Composition VI, one might go a step
farther and note that the earth is present in and as the oil paint itself, some of
which is absorbed into the canvas, and some of which rises up from the sur-
face of the canvas, giving the paint its own independent texture in addition to
its color. Kandinsky mentions this effect in his commentary on the painting:
“The alteration of rough and smooth, and other tricks in the treatment itself,
have here been exploited to a high degree. Thus, the spectator will experi-
ence a different response again on approaching the canvas more closely.”31
Heidegger does not speak of the color in its brute materiality as paint, though
he does refer to the color of a painting as its “material.”32 Perhaps he avoided
this reference in order to resist the reductive interpretation of world and earth
as merely form and matter. Nevertheless, the earthiness suggested by the
paint is helpful in light of the abstractness of Composition VI’s world.
Both of these aspects of earth, the color and its paint (qua earth), still
resist complete disclosure. They are “self-secluding” and still “shrink from
every disclosure and constantly keep [themselves] closed up.”33 What ap-
pears through this withdrawing of color and paint as earth is the world (or
perhaps worlds) put into play by Composition VI.
As Composition VI is only marginally representational, with vague forms
and figures that can only be recognized with time and concentration, there
seem to be two possible worlds that it might be said to “set up.” The first
world would be the world of “inner” experience and feeling of the art-
ist. Kandinsky’s focus on expressivism, exemplified by his approval of
­Schumann’s quote that the “vocation of the artist” is “to shine light into the
depths of the human heart,”34 would lend support to this conception of the
world offered by the painting. The other world would be that suggested by
the “theme” attributed by Kandinsky to Composition VI—“the Deluge.” This
theme, as I noted above, was the initial inspiration for the work, and those
beings that can be identified in the painting are all thematically linked to
the Deluge. Kandinsky’s comments on this theme, as quoted above, lend
credence to this view as well.

The Painting’s Theme

The story of the worldwide flood as it occurs in the Torah is found in

­chapters six through nine of the book of Genesis.35 In Genesis 6:3, one reads
that “the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that
he is also flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” Here
one observes again an image of strife, in its activity of striving. The spirit
of Yahweh in an intimate strife with the fleshly nature of his creations, in
which strife Yahweh becomes most fully a god (in terms of creation, power,
worship-worthiness, etc.) and human beings become their most spiritual in
contending with their god. Similarly, Heidegger notes that, “In strife, each
opponent carries the other beyond itself.”36
82   Hall

Verse 5 describes Yahweh’s reason for the worldwide deluge: the

“­wickedness of man,” whose every thought “was only evil continually,”
leads the creator to “regret” having ever created any life on earth.37 Be-
cause, Yahweh says, “the earth is filled with violence through them [fleshly
­beings]  . . . behold, I will destroy them with the earth.”38 In other words,
the world of each human being (aside from the privileged eight) is to be
destroyed by the earth—one half of the intimately striving pair will almost
completely dominate and destroy the other. One sees this struggle in Com-
position VI in the dominance of motion and chaos in the poem over against
stability and objective order. And the many strong, dark lines in the painting
are ­suggestive of conflict and violence.
The only reason Yahweh does not follow through with the complete
­destruction of all life on earth is because of his intimacy with one human
being: Noah, who “found grace in the eyes of the Lord” and “walked with
God.” Their intimacy is one of companionship, a companionship between
the two often opposing forces of deity and mortal.39 Yahweh commands
Noah to build an ark within which Noah, his family, and the selected ani-
mals can survive the impending flood.
In the ark, the bow of which can be identified in Composition VI, one can
find a certain parallel to the Greek Temple in Heidegger’s essay. In both
cases, the architectural or marine structure makes present the concealed
­deity as concealed. The temple does so by housing a statue of the god, and the
ark by symbolizing the divine intervention in the midst of the catastrophic
flood. Yahweh is nowhere explicitly depicted in Composition VI, yet the fig-
ure of the ark makes him present as the concealed author of both the Deluge
and the means of surviving it.
The rains of the flood, which are to last for forty days, in the
six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, began, according to the text, as “all the
fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven
were opened.”40 Eventually, “the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and
it was lift up above the earth.”41 In effect, the whole world, in Heidegger’s
sense of the word, has been concentrated into the contents of a single struc-
ture, a wooden vessel that is lifted up and tossed above the earth. This can
certainly be described as a sort of groundlessness or Abgrund for a world
(in Heidegger’s sense), in which that world is in fact not merely sheltered
or protected in the self-secluding earth but almost entirely consumed by it.
One is reminded here of the aforementioned Kandinsky quote, describing
how in the third and principal “center” of the painting, “the pink and white
seethe in such a way that they seem to lie neither upon the surface of the
canvas nor upon any ideal surface. Rather, they appear as if hovering in the
air.” The earth is present in Composition VI as discussed above, in terms of
the color and the paint, but the earth seems almost completely washed away
in terms of the earth as represented thematically.
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   83

The passage continues as follows: “And the waters prevailed, and

were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of
the waters . . . and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven,
were covered . . . and the mountains were covered” in a state of flood-
ing that lasted for “an hundred and fifty days.”42 Here one sees even
the earth consumed by the flood, until the force of the water is all that
remains. In Heideggerian terms, one could think of these floodwaters
as a metaphor for the self-showing power of physis, shining so brightly
that it temporarily eclipses most of the beings (in this case, the ark, the
animals, and the earth) that it makes visible in the first place. It should
be noted, however, that physis for Heidegger is always “sheltered” in
some being or other, and in this case the sheltering being would be the
floodwaters themselves. In this case, for example, the elementals—such
as the “raging of the sea”—are clearly allowed “to shine forth” in this
artwork, this narrative of the Deluge. In Composition VI as well, the ele-
ments are powerfully present, such as in the windswept rain, the trees,
and what might be ominous dark clouds.

The Painting’s Theme in the Painter’s Poetry

One could find similar reminders of Heidegger’s conception of physis in the

following brief poem by Kandinsky himself:

Hymn
There the blue wave rocks.
The torn red cloth
Red rags. Blue waves
The old book closed up.
Gaze in silence at the distance.
Wander blindly in the wood.
The blue waves deeper grow.
The red cloth soon sinks below43

Given that Kandinsky chose to base one of his Compositions on the theme
of the Deluge, one wonders if this same theme is operative here in the
poem, with the “blue waves” and the tattered and torn “red rags.” Could
the “old book” be a reference to the Torah, and could “the distance” and
“wood,” which appear after the “blue waves,” describe the post-flood
earth? But what then would one make of the return of the waves, as
they “deeper grow”? Note also the concealment of the last half of the
letter “w” of the word “below” in the final line of the poem. Finally,
and perhaps most suggestive, the title of the poem, “Hymn,” is the final
metaphor Kandinsky uses to describe Composition VI in his commentary
on the painting: “the hymn of that new creation that follows upon the
­destruction of the world.”
84   Hall

Ultimately, as Genesis 8 recounts, the floodwaters recede and the ark

comes to rest on top of a mountain. The world again “rests on the rocky
ground.” The ark “holds its ground, against the storm raging above it and
so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence.”44 Thus, although it
appeared to have been almost entirely consumed in the flood, the ark, exactly
as that which was tossed about, made it possible for the flood to appear as a
mighty storm at all. In other words, one gets a sense of the power of the
flood by virtue of its capacity to uproot and toss about such a massive ves-
sel as the ark.
After the ground is once more dry and capable of supporting life, after the
clearing (lichtung) of the waters, in which the ground is again unconcealed,
Noah is commanded to exit the ark. It is interesting that the general area of
Composition VI that is designated by Kandinsky as constituting two of the
three centers of the painting is the area of most pronounced simplicity, of a
relative clearing away of the chaos that dominates most of the painting.
After exiting the ark, the living beings are encouraged to “be fruitful,
and multiply upon the earth,” and Yahweh announces a new era of strife,
both between humans and other animals, and among humans themselves.45
“And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of
the earth . . . Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you . . . And
surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast
will I require it, and at the hand of man.”46 Thus, even after the destruc-
tion of the flood and the subsequent renewal of life, the intimate strife does
not cease, suggesting that, as with Heidegger’s text, one should not “con-
found strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and
destruction.”47
Finally, Yahweh formally establishes a covenant with Noah, which
­guarantees that there will never again be a worldwide flood “to destroy the
earth.”48 The “token” of this covenant is a “bow in the clouds”—a rainbow.
“And I will look upon it [the rainbow],” says Yahweh, “that I may remember
the everlasting covenant.”49 One can also find the rainbow, at least its colors,
in the group of diagonal lines in Composition VI suggestive of torrential rain-
fall. There is thus a fusion in the work of both the source of the destruction
(that is, the rain, indicated by the form of the lines) and the sign that there
will be no similar future destruction (that is, the rainbow, ­indicated by the
color of the lines.) The rainbow as a symbol of renewal and peace reminds
one again of Kandinsky’s final comment in his essay on C ­ omposition VI, that
it is “a living paean of praise, the hymn of that new creation that follows
upon the destruction of the world.”50

The Poetry in/as the Painting

These issues arise from the mythological source of the theme of the ­Deluge.
There are other issues, however, that stem, as Kandinsky noted, not from
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   85

“the expression of the Deluge, but from the expression of the word ‘­Deluge.’”
According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, the word “deluge”
derives from the Latin dı-luere, “to wash away;” from dis-, “apart”; and lu-
ere, “to wash.” The word can mean a great flood, “a heavy downpour,” or,
“something that overwhelms as if by a great flood.” On the surface, Com-
position VI certainly presents itself as a flood of color, a surging wave of
spectral light that overwhelms the viewer. One is washed away, even at a
distance, by the paint on the canvas.
Waves, attendant phenomena of any great flood, are manifested in
several ways in Composition VI. First, in a geometric sense, there are vari-
ous “wavy” lines in the painting. Second, in physical terms, one’s vision
is drawn across and into the painting in both transverse and longitudinal
waves, waves of motion and of intensity. (Waves in water operate as a
combination of these two basic types of mechanical waves.)51 Third, in
an auditory sense, one is struck by the waves of “inner sound” reverber-
ating off the surface of the canvas. Finally, in a pictorial sense, one can
observe various frothy-textured areas of blue and white, which suggest
oceanic waves.
It seems that the linguistic resonance of the word “deluge” fits well
with the word’s mythological world, and that what the word says, what
the painting says, and even what some of Kandinsky’s poetry says have
a common trajectory. But in what might this commonality consist? Is
there a fundamental linkage of language and art, and/or a fundamental
connection between two forms of art as apparently distinct as painting
and poetry? In pursuing this question, I return again to Heidegger’s
essay.
In his understanding of truth as unconcealment, Heidegger asserts the
following: “all art, as the letting happen of the advent of truth of beings, is
as such, in essence, poetry.” The ability of the artwork to “break open an open
place,” to offer the intimacy of a world set in the earth, to disclose, “is due to
art’s poetic essence.” Poetry is here defined “as clearing projection” in and
as the Riss (rift, design) that is the strife of world and earth.52 “If all art is
in essence poetry,” Heidegger argues, then the other arts, such as painting,
“must be traced back to poesy,” although he is using the term “poesy,” not
in the narrow sense of poetry as a literary genre but in a very broad sense of
the “projected clearing” of truth.53 And yet he remarks later in the essay that
“poetry is thought of here” both very broadly, and in “intimate ­essential
unity with language and word.”54 To what extent this clearing of truth and
the genre of writing overlap, or “say the same,” is, however, worthy of fur-
ther questioning.
The privileged place Heidegger accords to poetry as a literary genre is
derived from his understanding of language as that which “alone brings
beings as beings into the open for the first time.” “Projective saying,”
Heidegger writes, “is poetry . . . Poetry is the saying of the u ­ nconcealment
86   Hall

of beings.”55 And “language itself is poetry in the essential sense.”56

Painting, then, operates as a certain sort of language, as a “pictorial”
­language, to use Kandinsky’s term. One is also reminded of Kandinsky’s
description of painting as being its own form of “pure poetry.” Is it pos-
sible that Kandinsky’s thinking is stretching here toward Heideggerian
unconcealment?57
Consider, on this note, Kandinsky’s prose poem “See,” from the ­album
Sounds, listening in the poem to the blue floodwaters rising and falling;
the browns, blues, and reds of Composition VI; the concealment (of the
“red cloth”) that is essential to truth qua unconcealment; and the “white
cracks” that form the rift-design (Riss) of the projective clearing—pro-
jective clearing both as Kandinsky’s poetry and as the painting entitled
Composition VI:

See
Blue, blue, rose up, rose up, and fell.
Sharp, thin whistled and pressed in, but could not prick through.
There was a droning in every corner.
Far brown hung seemingly for all eternity.
Seemingly. Seemingly.
You must stretch your arms out wider.
Wider. Wider.
And you must cover your face with a red cloth.
And perhaps it has not yet been moved: only you have been moved.
White crack after white crack.
And after this white crack another white crack.
And in this white crack a white crack. In every white crack a white crack.
It just won’t do that you can’t see the opaque: the opaque is just where it is.
And that’s how it all starts...........................................................................
.................................................There was a crash.........................................

In this essay I have attempted an interpretation of Kandinsky’s

­Composition VI that draws essentially on poetry, including Kandinsky’s
own poetry, the poetry of Genesis, and the conceptions of poetry of-
fered by ­Sallis and Heidegger. By doing so, I have tried to suggest that
this artwork has the potential to open up a fuller, richer, more exciting
and interesting world when understood as being in collaboration with
other artworks in other genres, such as poetry. I have also suggested
that this artistic collaboration further constitutes a cultural collabora-
tion between a culture with a particular prowess in one genre of art (in
this case, early twentieth-century German culture and painting) and a
culture with a particular prowess in another genre of art (in this case,
ancient Jewish culture and poetry). And this kind of cultural collabora-
tion, for my final suggestion, might thereby facilitate increased toler-
ance and appreciation among various communities in our ­increasingly
global world.
 Heideggerian Poetry in Noah’s Ark   87

NOTES

  1. Wassily Kandinsky, “Composition 6,” in “Reminiscences/Three Pictures,”

trans. Robert L. Herbert, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, De Capo Press
edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994),
385.
  2. Ibid., 386.
  3. Ibid., 387.
  4. Ibid., 387–88.
  5. Ibid., 388. This reminds one of Nietzsche’s claim in the notes collected under
the title Will to Power that “in beauty, opposites are tamed.” Friedrich Nietz-
sche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter
­Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 422.
  6. Kandinsky, “Composition 6,” 388.
  7. Ibid.
  8. Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in ­Basic
Writings: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harp-
erCollins, 1993), 171.
  9. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure],” in The Truth
in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 331.
10. Ibid., 342.
11. Wassily Kandinksy, quoted in John Sallis, Shades—of Painting at the Limit (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 69.
12. Ibid., 71, quoting Hegel.
13. Some contemporary poets such as Robert Pinsky hold that poetry is fundamen-
tally a spoken art and that its true medium is the column of air suspended in the
human body. See Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998): “Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art.
The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest,
shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry
is as physical or bodily an art as dancing.”
14. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 428.
15. Ibid., 424.
16. Wassily Kandinsky, “The Tower,” in “Sounds,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings
on Art, Da Capo Press edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1994), 291.
17. Wassily Kandinsky, “Statement in Journal des Poètes,” in Kandinsky: Complete
Writings on Art, Da Capo Press edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo,
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 833.
18. Sallis, Shades—of Painting, 114.
19. Ibid., 78.
20. Ibid., 78–79.
21. Ibid., 115.
22. Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in
­Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. David Farrell
Krell, (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 158 [translation modified].
23. There has been much scholarly debate regarding this section of the essay.
­Because of limitations of space, I merely refer the reader to Derrida’s The Truth
in Painting for a thorough investigation of Heidegger’s appropriation of Van
Gogh’s work.
24. Heidegger, “Origin,” 162.
25. Ibid., 163.
26. Ibid., 168.
27. The preceding analysis is greatly informed by lecture notes from John Sallis’s
aesthetics class (on painting and philosophy) in the spring of 2004 at the Penn-
sylvania State University.
88   Hall

28. One finds a similar echo of strife/intimacy in Kandinsky’s poem “Always

­Together,” in “Four Poems” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Da Capo Press
edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994), 812:
Mr. Rise and Mr. Fall said to one another:
“I’ll soon be coming to you. Yes indeed!”
And Mr. Rise: “You to me?”
And Mr. Fall: “You to me?”
Who to whom?
When?
29. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 171.
30. Kandinsky “Composition,” 386.
31. Ibid., 388.
32. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 171.
33. Ibid., 174, 172.
34. Robert Schumann, qtd. in John Sallis, Shades—of Painting at the Limit (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1998), 69.
35. All references to the book of Genesis are taken from the King James Version,
which was chosen primarily for its poetic value.
36. Heidegger, “Origin,” 174.
37. Genesis 6:5–6.
38. Genesis 6:13, emphasis added.
39. Genesis 6:8–9.
40. Genesis 7:11.
41. Genesis 7:17b.
42. Genesis 7:18, 20–24.
43. Wassily Kandinsky, “Hymn,” in “Sounds,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on
Art, Da Capo Press edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1994), 291.
44. Heidegger, “Origin,” 167.
45. Genesis 8:17.
46. Genesis 9:2–3, 5.
47. Heidegger, “Origin,” 174.
48. Genesis 9:11.
49. Genesis 9:12,16.
50. Oddly enough, at least from a contemporary Western perspective, chapter nine
ends, not with the establishment of the covenant, but with the accidental expo-
sure of Noah’s naked body to his son Canaan, who then summons his brothers
to share in this disclosure. The other two brothers, Shem and Japheth, however,
walk backwards into Noah’s tent and use a “garment” to “cover the nakedness
of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s
nakedness” (Genesis 9:22–23). For these actions, Canaan receives a severe curse
from Noah. In this brief and surprising story, one encounters again the issue of
unconcealment, concealment, and truth.
51. Cf. the following website, “Acoustic Animations,” by Dr. Dan Russell, Ketter-
ing University Applied Physics, at http://www.gmi.edu/~drussell/Demos/
waves/wavemotion.html.
52. Heidegger, “Origin,” 197.
53. Ibid., 198.
54. Ibid., 199.
55. Ibid., 198.
56. Ibid., 199.
57. One can ask this question, not only of Kandinsky’s conceptual thought, but also
of his poetry. Consider the prose poem “Gaze,” in which the speaker of the poem
contests with someone hiding behind a white curtain. “Why does it [the curtain]
conceal your face from me . . . I shall pull the white curtain aside and see your
face.” Wassily Kandinsky, “Gaze,” in “Sounds,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings
on Art, Da Capo Press edition, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston:
G. K. Hall, 1994), 291.