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Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art
Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art
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Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's
Early Abstract Art
Margaret Olin
1. Stylistic Unity
"'What is a work?'" Michel Foucault has asked. "'Is it not what an au-
thor has written?'"" One could add, "is it not what an artist has
made?" For an important strain of modern criticism, the artist is the
principle that validates the work of art. Some critics identify the work
solely with its creator. Harold Rosenberg, an extreme example of this
tendency, thought the work of the "action painters" was "of the same
metaphysical substance as the artist's existence."2
According to Foucault, the principle of the author validates the
work by endowing it with "a certain unity." The author, however,
The research for this essay was funded in part by the American Council of
Learned Societies. Part of the argument was presented at the College Art Association
Annual Meeting in Boston, 1987. I am indebted to Robert von Hallberg, Joan Hart,
and Richard Shiff for perceptive readings and criticisms of various drafts of this essay.
I also wish to thank the students in my seminar on Kandinsky at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago in the Autumn of 1984 for discussions of topics relevant to this
paper.
1. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" trans. Josue V. Harari, in Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), p.
143.
144
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 145
6. Both these ways of identifying stylistic unity with the concept of an origin
were applied to impressionism and abstract expressionism.
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146 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
7. Period styles follow one another with the logic of a historical development
that mimics the microcosmic development of the individual. In the most orthodox ver-
sions, this development follows a logical course. A unifying thread can be followed that
leads in the direction of the solution of a great underlying problem.
8. On the levels of the concept of style, see SauerlBnder, "From Stilus to Style."
9. Schoenberg explained seeming changes in his style by arguing that his public
reception merely changed as his style matured. He did not draw the potential conclu-
sion that the public creates an artist's style. See Schoenberg, "How One Becomes
Lonely," in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (New York, 1975), pp. 30-53.
10. Robert Zaller, "Philip Guston and the Crisis of the Image," Critical Inquiry 14
(Autumn 1987): 75. Similar examples may be found in any of a large number of studies
of individual artists.
11. The terms "modern" and "postmodern" are used in a variety of ways in con-
temporary criticism. Here, "modern" refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists
who embrace the notion of originality, and "postmodern" to those who would attack
the notion by exposing the conventionality at its center. Although some critics who pro-
fess "modernism" do not mention "originality" by name, most subscribe to it in some
form, often with the originality and self-sufficiency of the artist transposed to that of
the work. This is especially true of the criticism of Clement Greenberg and Michael
Fried.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 147
FIG. 1.--Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 19, 1911. Sttdtische Galerie Len-
bachhaus, Munich.
12. Rosalind Krauss rightly uses the semiotic complications of Picasso's art to ob-
ject to autobiographical interpretations of his work. In the course of the argument, she
refers to Picasso's semiotics as part of the "proto-history" of postmodernist art. See
Krauss, "In the Name of Picasso," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 38-39. Arguments for Duchamp's protopostmod-
ernism are much more common. For one example, see Krauss, "Notes on the Index:
Part 1," The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 196-209.
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148 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 149
to the source of style, at least by the mid-1890s, when the notion had filtered down to
the classroom. For example, the Viennese professor Alois Riegl was able to refer in his
classes to "was man Stil nennt: naimlich die innere kiinstlerische Notwendigkeit welche
den Griffel und den Pinsel fiihrt" (Kolleg on Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters nordlich der
Alpen [1895-96], Riegl Nachlafi, Institut fiir Kunstgeschichte, University of Vienna, car-
ton 3, p. 84). For Kandinsky's use of the term, see his iber das Geistige in der Kunst
(1912; Bern, 1952), p. 64 and passim; trans. and ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter
Vergo, under the title On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 2 vols.
(Boston, 1982), 1:114-219; hereafter abbreviated UG and OS.
16. See Kandinsky, "Uber die Formfrage," Essays ifber Kunst und Kiinstler, ed.
Max Bill, 3d ed. (1955; Bern, 1973), p. 23; trans. and ed. Lindsay and Vergo, under the
title "On the Question of Form," Complete Writings, 1:239; hereafter abbreviated "UF"
and "OF." In some quotations from this and other German texts I have slightly altered
the translation.
17. Hilton Kramer, "Kandinsky," Artforum 1 (May 1963): 24. Another critic to re-
ject Kandinsky along similar lines was Greenberg; see his "Kandinsky," Art and Culture
(Boston, 1961), pp. 111-14.
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FIG. 2.-Kandinsky, Sancta Francisca, 1911. Painting on glass. The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald.
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FIG. 3.-Kandinsky, Landscape with Two Poplars, 1912. Oil on canvas. Arthur Je
? 1988 The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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152 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
On the denaturalization of morality. To separate the action from the man; ... to
believe there are actions that are good or bad in themselves.
Restoration of "nature": an action in itself is perfectly devoid of value: it all
depends on who performs it.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Kauf-
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 153
In the case of this person, this deed is not a crime, even if in gen-
eral it would be considered a crime in the case of other people.
Therefore: in this case a crime is not a crime. And further: abso-
lute crime does not exist .... And finally: every act is indifferent.
It balances on the edge. The will gives it the push. ["Rii," p. 48n
"Re," 1:379n]
mann [New York, 1967], sect. 292). Elsewhere, Nietzsche discusses the relationship
tween the criminal type and the "great" and artistic human types. See ibid., sects. 7
864.
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154 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 155
abstract root, his painting the real crime. But in an essay that records
the path to abstraction another interpretation is more likely. If a crim-
inal act has both an abstract root and a real existence, an artistic act
probably contains an abstract and real component as well. Neither one
need be a person. Kandinsky suggested as much in another essay, writ-
ing that "form is the material expression of abstract content.'"23 If this is so,
then the problem of authenticity resolves itself into the excavation of
the abstract root, or content, of art. The artists' answer ("conscious or
unconscious") to Socrates's dictum "know thyself" is to "turn to their
material ... to weigh spiritually the inner value of the elements out of
which their art is suited to create" (UG, p. 54; OS, 1:153). The respon-
sibility for art lies not with the artist but with the material. "Inner ne-
cessity" is within art itself.
3. Grasping Reality
23. Kandinsky, "Malerei als reine Kunst," Essays iiber Kunst und Kiinstler, p. 64;
trans. and ed. Lindsay and Vergo, under the title "Painting as Pure Art," Complete Writ-
ings, 1:350.
24. The passage is not included in the edition of Kandinsky's essays edited by Bill.
Weiss argues persuasively that the illustrations in the Almanac, as diverse as they are, all
contribute, through an iconography of healing, to the same task set for the Almanac, the
identification of art as a "universal medicine for the human soul" (Weiss, "Kandinsky in
Munich: Encounters and Transformations," in Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914
[exhibition catalog, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1982], p. 76).
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156 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
25. From the German manuscript of Kandinsky's essay, "Om Konstniren" (Stock-
holm, 1916), cited in Gabriele Miinter, 1877-1962 (exhibition catalog, Stidtische Galerie
im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1962).
26. Daniel Wildenstein identifies the Zurich Meule au soleil (1891) as the painting
Kandinsky saw in Moscow in 1896. See Wildenstein, Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue
raissonne, 4 vols. (Lausanne and Paris, 1974-1985), 3:144.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 157
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158 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
FIG. 5.-Gabriele Miinter, Village Street in Winter, 1911. StUdtische Galerie Len-
bachhaus, Munich.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 159
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160 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
28. George Berkeley, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709), para-
graphs 67-71.
29. Ibid., paragraphs 59, 74.
30. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr
(1754; Los Angeles, 1930), p. 73; see also pp. 144-85.
31. Speculation about the identity of the objects of perception of touch and vision
dates to at least John Locke, who speculated on whether a congenitally blind person
would, on recovering his sight, be able to distinguish a cube from a sphere on the basis
of vision alone. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nid-
ditch (1690; Oxford, 1975), pp. 143-49. In the eighteenth century, such speculations
were often fueled by observations of the congenitally blind after successful operations
to remove cataracts. The most well known among early analyses is Denis Diderot, Letter
on the Blind, Diderot's Early Philosophical Works, trans. and ed. Margaret Jourdain (1749;
Chicago and London, 1916), pp. 68-141. For an account of the later history of these
speculations, see Nicholas Pastore, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-
1950 (New York, 1971), and Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux's Question: Vision, Touch, and
the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, 1977).
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 161
lows vision the scope to "rival the boldest flights of fancy in penetrat-
ing to illimitable distances."32
At the end of the eighteenth century, the opposition between vi-
sion and touch had already begun to infiltrate artistic discourse. Usu-
ally, vision was the preferred sense, since it was traditionally more
intellectual than touch. Goethe, one of the eye's most eloquent de-
fenders in the modern period, pronounced vision the "noblest sense,"
as distinguished from the baser, coarser sense of touch, and Schiller
projected this contrast onto history: The intellectual and imaginative
senses, vision and hearing, developed later than the primitive "animal
senses" that depend on contact with materials."3 The early nineteenth-
century theorist Carl Gustav Carus used the distinction to promote
landscape painting in the early 1800s. He labeled painting optical, and
proclaimed that it constituted progress over sculpture: "The more
subtle senses of hearing and seeing emerge only when the organism
perfects itself.'""34
Although vision's flights of fancy captured the imagination of
most art theorists, touch had champions as well. Johann Gottfried
Herder was the first to defend the physicality of touch as an artistic
advantage over the "most philosophical" but also "coldest" sense of
vision. For him, beauty of form was "not a visual, but a palpable
[fihlbarer] concept.""35 Sculpture was more real and subject to fewer
limitations than painting. A few late nineteenth-century theorists also
centered artistic theories on the stable sense of touch. Drawing on the
child's tactile experience, Bernhard Berenson lauded the sense of
touch for a "higher coefficient of reality" that allowed the beholder
to "realise form" and thereby acquire a "heightened sense of capac-
ity."36
32. Hermann Helmholtz, "The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision," Helm-
holtz on Perception: Its Physiology and Development, ed. R. M. Warren and Roslyn P. War-
ren (New York, 1968), p. 108.
33. See Herbert von Einem, Goethe-Studien (Munich, 1972), pp. 11-24. According
to Schiller, nature provided man with two senses (vision and hearing) that distance man
from the object that the animal senses "contact immediately [unmittelbar beriihren]"
(Schiller, Uber die fsthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Sa*mtliche
Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. G6pfert, 5 vols. [1795; Munich, 1958-60],
5:657). The prejudice that places the eye above the other senses dates at least to antiq-
uity; it was revived in the Renaissance, as von Einem points out.
34. Carl Gustav Carus, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the
Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, N.J., 1960), p. 20.
35. Johann Gottfried Herder, Herders Saimtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33
vols. (Berlin, 1877-1913), 4:45, 52.
36. Bernhard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York,
1896), pp. 10-11. Also: "This intimate realisation of an object comes to us only when
we unconsciously translate our retinal impressions of it into ideated sensations of touch,
pressure, and grasp-hence the phrase 'tactile values"' (Berenson, The Central Italian
Painters of the Renaissance [New York, 1897], p. 33).
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162 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
37. For a detailed discussion of Riegl's use of this theory in Spdtrdmische Kunstin-
dustrie, see Margaret Olin, "Alois Riegl and the Crisis of Representation in Art Theory,
1880-1905," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1982, pp. 438-55.
38. For further discussion of this theory of representation in the work of architec-
tural theorists of the nineteenth century, see Olin, "Self-Representation: Resemblance
and Convention in Two Nineteenth-Century Theories of Architecture and the Decora-
tive Arts," Zeitschriftflir Kunstgeschichte 49, no. 3 (1986): 376-97.
39. Riegl, Spitroimische Kunstindustrie, 2d ed. (Vienna, 1929), pp. 33, 317.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 163
Like most theorists, Riegl regarded the visual sense as more intel-
lectual than the naive and immediate sense of touch.40 The signs of
visibility to which it responds are the well-known signs of impression-
ism. The German interpretation of impressionism emphasized ephem-
eral qualities of light and color.41 Broad brushstrokes were thought to
evoke atmosphere. To interpret them requires intellectual effort; yet
these subjective, optical devices are matters of "sensory deception." If
not pinned down by tactile references, they threatened to dwindle
into arbitrariness and subjectivity. While Riegl welcomed the increas-
ing use of such optical signs in art, his concern for objectivity caused
him to worry about the modern preponderance of opticality in art and
to look for signs of the reemergence of palpable elements.42
The relation between the senses of touch and sight had far-
reaching implications, for, in a strategy later repeated by Worringer,
Riegl projected it into history and extended it beyond the artistic
realm. According to his view, primitive man learned to handle objects
one by one. Only gradually did man learn the (optical) connections be-
tween things, first mechanical, then chemical. By the end of the nine-
teenth century, these connections exceeded the objects themselves as
the focus of intellectual attention. Yet the basis in primitive tactile fact
secured the validity of the vast generalizations of more sophisticated
thinkers. Riegl's historical narrative is in effect a statement about
learning. It naturalized his own "synthetic" method by projecting it
into history and anchoring it to the facts of sensory perception.43
Other scholars assumed a similar historical progression, although
not always sharing Riegl's evaluations of the respective sensory facul-
ties. Analyses of perceptual epistemology were far from the purpose
of Heinrich W61fflin's Principles of Art History, for example, yet even
he introduced the concept of a tangible design that isolates objects,
40. For a discussion of Riegl's associations with the sense of touch, see Olin,
"Spditrdmische Kunstindustrie: The Crisis of Knowledge in fin de siecle Vienna," in Wien
und die Entwicklung der kunsthistorischen Methode, vol. 1 of Akten des XXV. Internationalen
Kongresses fir Kunstgeschichte, ed. Hermann Fillitz and Martina Pippal (Vienna, 1984),
pp. 29-36.
41. See, for example, Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, 3 vols. (Lon-
don, 1895-96), 2:718-96. Muther emphasizes the light effects of impressionism.
42. For example, he told a popular audience in 1902 that "palpable physicality
and firmly adhering color" would rescue art from the arbitrary will of the individual
(Riegl, "Uber antike und moderne Kunstfreunde," Gesammelte AufsAtze, ed. Karl M.
Swoboda [Vienna, 1929], p. 205).
43. For Riegl's defense of the "synthetic" method over the groundless generaliza-
tions of the "analytic" method, see "Eine neue Kunstgeschichte," Gesammelte Aufsdtze,
pp. 46-48; for the historical argument, see "Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen
Kunst," Gesammelte Aufsaitze, pp. 28-39; "Der moderne Denkmalkultus, seine Wesen
und seine Entstehung," Gesammelte AufsAitze, pp. 144-93; and Spdtrdmische Kunstindustrie,
pp. 400-405.
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164 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
44. Heinrich Wblfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of
Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (1915; New York, 1950), p. 14; hereafter ab-
breviated PAH. Kandinsky may have met W*lfflin in Munich. See Weiss, Kandinsky in
Munich: The Formative Jugenstil Years, p. 82.
45. No indication of a hierarchy of touch and sight, for example, can be found in
the writings of the great German psychologist of the time, Wilhelm Wundt.
46. Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella
(exhibition catalog, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass., 21 Apr.-30 May 1965),
p. 17.
47. Although Kandinsky identified van Gogh with impressionism, he also saw him
as constituting a bridge to what would later be known as "expression" (UG, p. 96 n.1;
OS, 1:185n). The term "index" was used by the nineteenth-century philosopher C. S.
Peirce to differentiate types of signs. An index is a sign "which refers to its object not
so much because of any similarity or analogy with it ... as because it is in dynamical (in-
cluding spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with
the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand"
(Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed.
Justus Buchler [New York, 1955], p. 107). Examples of such signs are a footprint, for a
foot, or the brushstroke of the impressionist painter, for the self-expression of that
painter.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 165
4. Validation by Touch
When Kandinsky affirmed the validity of both the real and the
abstract provided they emanated from inner necessity, he did not in-
tend thereby to confine the individual artist to one or the other style.
He himself practiced representational and nonrepresentational art at
the same time for years. Moreover, even his nonrepresentational art
was not the optical art of Monet. Rather, Kandinsky worked with asso-
ciations offered by both the "abstract" and the "real" styles, whatever
the dominant mode of a given work. The story of the Lady in Moscow
(1912), for example, is narrated both on the "real" and "abstract"
levels (fig. 7). The contrast between the two abstract splotches is usu-
ally interpreted as signifying the conflict between good and evil
"thought forms." According to theosophy, thoughts create forms in a
nonmaterial sphere, visible only to clairvoyants. Annie Besant and
C. W. Leadbeater published many of these in 1905 in their book
Thought Forms, where Kandinsky may have become acquainted with
them.48 Even if Kandinsky did intend his splotches as thought forms,
however, the interpretation does not explain the style in which he rep-
resented the "real." It is not a straightforward narration, but a "great
reality." The hard outlines of the lady, the reverse perspective of the
table, the exaggerated perspective of the street, and even the peculiar
juxtaposition of lady and street suggest "naive" art. Each object in the
picture exists for itself, a sign of direct perception as pure in its own
way as are the splotches that represent thought forms. The pink
flower in the lady's hand tells the same message in "reality" as the
pink splotch tells in abstraction. The two forms equate the two styles.
Many of Kandinsky's abstract paintings of 1911-13 using the
landscape format suggest the topos of realistic illusionism rather than
the decorative surface effects of the tactile. Nevertheless, they often
contain a curious arrangement of childlike line drawings that floats,
48. See Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos, pp. 94-102. Ringbom interprets Lady in
Moscow as a representational testing ground for Painting with Black Spot, in a process ac-
cording to which representational forms were gradually abstracted using forms based
on theosophical models. Felix Thiirlemann disputes the relation between the two paint-
ings, and with it iconography as a determining factor in the development of Kandinsky's
abstraction. See Thiirlemann, "Kandinskys Analyse-Zeichnungen," Zeitschrift fir Kunst-
geschichte 48, no. 3 (1985): 370-77. The relation between Kandinsky and theosophy is a
much disputed issue into which it is unnecessary to delve in the present context.
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166 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
49. Jonathan Fineberg has recently confirmed the reference to children's art by
tracing a number of motifs in Kandinsky's paintings, similar to the ones in Improvisation
No. 30, to samples of children's art that were collected by Miinter and Kandinsky. See
Fineberg, "'Making a Horse out of a Stick': Children's Art in Kandinsky's Prewar Ab-
straction," lecture delivered at the College Art Association Annual Meeting, Boston,
1987. A version of this paper comprises part of a forthcoming book and exhibition cata-
logue.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 167
FIG. 8.-Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30, 1913. Oil on canvas. Arthur Jerome
Eddy Memorial Collection. ? 1988 The Art Institute of Chicago. All rights reserved.
ceptual theory of his time, he does not try to argue that colors are
things. To make reference to touch through line is to make reference
to the real without necessarily making reference to any specific "real"
object.
Kandinsky was not the only painter to manipulate tactile and opti-
cal modes. The Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was another. As a
member of the Austrian Secession, he took part in the organization's
fifth exhibition (December 1899). The catalogue for the exhibit dis-
tinguished between ornament and representation, preserving for each
its own sphere. It stated that ornament must confirm, while represen-
tational art [das Bild] must suspend, the surface.50 Many of Klimt's
50. Die Principien der Fl~chendecoration und jene des Bildes sind die ausge-
sprochensten Gegensatze. Wihrend die Flkichendecoration uns keinen Au-
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168 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
works of the late 1890s sought to fulfill this demand of painting, in-
cluding his Philosophy, painted on commission for the Aula of the Uni-
versity of Vienna and exhibited in the Secession's seventh exhibition,
early in 1900 (fig. 9). The unsuitability of its ambiguous, optical style
genblick im Zweifel lassen darf, dass wir eben eine Flache vor uns haben,
ist es dagegen wesentlich flir den Charakter des Bildes, dass der Eindruck
der Flaiche aufgehoben und wir an eine Raumwirken glauben miissen.
(Josef Engelhart et al., Katalog der V. Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Kiinstler Oster-
reichs [Vienna, 1899], pp. 5-6). For further discussion of this and related issues, see
Olin, "Self-Representation."
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 169
51. Alice Strobl, "Zu den Fakultfitsbildern von Gustav Klimt," Albertina Studien 2
(1964): 153. For a political analysis of the controversy, see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle
Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980), pp. 225-44.
52. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 36 (Mar. 1900): 18-19.
53. See Ringbom, "Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pi-
oneers," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, ed. Edward Weisberger
(New York, 1986), p. 134.
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170 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
54. It is clear from the context of Kandinsky's references to Worringer that the
two men were in contact. For example, Kandinsky mentioned writing to Worringer,
and referred to Worringer's enthusiastic response to Uber das Geistige in der Kunst. Marc
read Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy during this period and commented on it en-
thusiastically to Kandinsky. See Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Briefivechsel: mit Briefen
von und an Gabriele Miinter und Maria Marc, ed. Klaus Langheit (Munich, 1983), pp. 30
173, 136.
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1989 171
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172 Margaret Olin Kandinsky's Early Art
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