Output details

Kandinsky’s Animated Page: The Almanac The Blue Rider as a Work of Art'

A number of authors have suggested that the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (R. Piper, 2012) be considered a work of art on the model of the Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the diverse arts were to be united in what Kandinsky called a single, ‘monumental’ artwork. However, this paper is the first to offer a sustained reading of the almanac on these terms.In the essay ‘On the Question of Form,’ published in the almanac, Kandinsky begins an account, developed in later writings, of the emancipation of text from its purely conventional significance and its transformation into an abstract, purely visual form. He writes that in this, the reader is ‘transformed into a spectator.’ The paper shows how text in the almanac performs what the essay describes and, as the corollary of this, the paper also shows how the many sequences of visual images in the almanac take on a more narrative, discursive, even ‘textual’ function. As the conventional relationship between text and image is thus challenged, both elements are shown to combine to create a weave of continuity and discontinuity that compares to the structure of musical counterpoint – a structure that Kandinsky considered the basis of the monumental art and, the paper argues, the basis for conceiving of the diverse content of the book as a unified work of art.The volume in which the essay appears contains essays by leading researchers in the field, and is edited by Dr Kathryn Brown (Rhodes Scholar and Assistant Professor of Art History, Tilburg University, Netherlands). Short’s contribution was invited by Dr Brown, based on his reputation in the field. It develops in a new way the principle of ‘synthesis’, explored in Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909 – 1928: The Quest for Synthesis.