Odd how this stuff happens. Last week in response to seeing a sketch of my current work (as yet unveiled to the public) a new friend said it reminded her of Kandinsky. This led me to think about two artists: Kandinsky and Henri Rousseau. I never really got Kandinsky's connection to Rousseau until now. So in organizing the shed for winter I came across a bag of old books and there was Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Here's what has been inspiring me since:
"Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive art-principles of the past will at best produce art that is still-born."
". . . a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age. An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the Primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form."
Which explains to me why Picasso admired Rousseau, even if only in a sort of mocking way. Anyway he goes on to say:
"This all-important spark of inner life today is at present only a spark. Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after years of materialism, are infected with despair of unbelief, of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul in its grip. Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. This feeble light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality"
That was written in 1914 just prior to WWI. I imagine the world looked pretty bleak to Wassily. Yet he understood that art could serve to mirror what was present or point to that tiny star, the inner spark. Today I look around the globe and see what feels like our collective soul awakening, finally. And in this awakening a renewed nobility of spirit with a compassion of understood interconnectedness. We really are in this together.
The work has shifted. Art, can imitate, as we have seen with the post-modernists mocking culture with an effort to awaken. The work of the post-post modernists is to fine tune what has awakened.
"Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they "key it up," so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument."
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