Painted on the eve of World War I, Wassily Kandinsky’s wildly colored Skizze 160A (Sketch 160A) reflects the turbulence of an era unhinged by modernity and suggests an impending apocalypse. Carefully nuanced colors and seemingly erratic marks dominate this work of art. An accomplished musician, theorist, and artist, Kandinsky was intensely inspired by music. Just as the word in the title, Skizze, refers to a composer’s notes about a work in progress, the hint of musical elements and symbols infuse this work with a sense of lyricism.
Delicate, ethereal pastel shades illuminate the canvas, while deep blues, reds and purples stabilize the work and provide a sense of depth. The seemingly contrasting elements and the jumbled placement of figures suggest cacophony, but Kandinsky manages to achieve equilibrium and harmony in this work. Although slightly abstracted, symbols of the Apocalypse such as the horse and rider, a mountain, birds, and fish are discernible. These recognizable images bring the viewer into the painting and help interpret its mystery. The apparently haphazard structure belies the care with which Kandinsky placed each character of the composition, using different pictorial elements and moods to create an intricate balance.
Kandinsky believed that the artist should reveal realities of the spiritual rather than of the material world. Taking the words of composer Robert Schumann to heart—“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts, such is the duty of the artist,”—Kandinsky believed that true artists were prophets of their age. He presented this belief of the artist as prophet in his 1912 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, wherein the painter also developed an elaborate system of colors and shapes that included correlations between specific colors, emotions, and musical sounds. Just as music produces a cadence that affects the emotions and soul of its listeners, Kandinsky too believed that abstract forms and colors in the proper configuration revealed spiritual truth by enacting a vibration in the viewer’s soul. “Color is the keyboard, the eyes the hammer, the soul is the piano with many strings,” he wrote. “The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
Many of Kandinsky’s pre-WWI abstract canvases were inspired by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. The rider, a common motif in his repertoire, came to signify the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who bring epic destruction, after which the world will be redeemed. The mounted horseman became Kandinsky’s symbol of transcendence from the material to the spiritual realm. Just as apocalypse (a Greek word meaning “un-covering”) is brought by the horsemen, here it symbolizes Kandinsky’s crusade against conventional aesthetics, as a means of unveiling spiritual truths for a better future through the transformative powers of art.
