COMPOSITION VI

1913

Oil on canvas 195 x 300 cm.

Signed and dated lower right: KANDINSKY 1913

The Hermitage, Leningrad

Kandinsky published the following commentary to Composition V in the Journal «Der Sturm», Berlin 1913, p. XXXV:

"I have carried this painting within me for one and a half years, and I often thought that I would be unable to make it. The initial inspiration came from The Deluge. It was a glass painting that I had made for my own pleasure. In it there are several figurative patterns, some of them amusing. I enjoyed mixing serious forms with funny ones: nudes, an ark, animals, palm trees, lightning, rain, etc. After I finished the glass painting, I felt the desire to use the same subject for a composition and, at the time, I was pretty sure how to do it. But very soon that feeling vanished and I got lost in figurative patterns which, after all, I had only made in order to clarify my idea of the painting. But I reaped vagueness instead of clarity. In some of the sketches I dissolved the figurative patterns, in others I tried to achieve the result by purely abstract forms. Neither way worked. And the reason was that I had succumbed to the fact of the Deluge instead of listening to its message: I was dominated by the exterior meaning and not by the inner sound.

Weeks went by and I tried again but always without success. I also tried the familiar recipe of turning away temporarily from my task in order to enable me to look with new eyes at the better sketches. Then I might have been able to see something that looked all right, but I was unable to separate the core from the shell. I was reminded of a snake that couldn’t quite succeed in creeping out of its old skin. The skin already definitely looked dead— but it still stuck!

Meanwhile my glass painting traveled in exhibitions. When it came back, and after I looked at it again I sensed at once the same inner shock that I experienced after fin- ishing it. But I had become doubtful and didn’t believe that I should be able to produce the big painting now. All the same, from time to time I glanced at the glass painting hanging in my studio. And every time I was again moved—first by the colors, then by the composition, and also by the design as such, regardless of the objects represented. I felt cut off from it. It seemed strange to me that I should have painted it. And it impressed me like other objects or ideas which by virtue of their psychic vibrations have the power to create within me purely pictorial images and which eventually make me produce a painting.

Finally, the day came and a familiar calm tension made me feel perfectly secure. At once I made a final sketch almost without any corrections and to a large ex- tent I was very satisfied with the result. Now I knew that under normal conditions I would be able to paint the picture itself. The canvas had hardly arrived when I immediately started to make the drawing. It went quickly and nearly everything was good. Within two or three days the general idea of the painting was there. The big battle, the great conquest of the canvas had taken place. If for one reason or another I would not be able to work on it any further it would still be there: the main thing was done.

And then came the infinitely delicate task of balancing the divers parts against each other, a task that is as agreeable as it is trying. . . . The third beautiful as well as agonizing moment in the process of finishing the painting is the search and strain for the right pair of scales and for the exact weight that is still missing; the tremor of the left scale when touching the right one; the vibration of the whole painting caused by the most minute changes in color or design; and all the infinite vitality and the immeasurable sensitivity of a correctly painted picture. ...

Thus all the elements, including the contradictory ones, have been brought into perfect balance so that not one gets the upper hand; and the initial motif of the painting (Deluge) has been dissolved and transformed into an independent, purely artistic inner being with its own objectivity. Nothing could be more wrong than to consider this painting to be the representation of an event.

A great objective disaster in its independent meaning is as much of a eulogy as a hymn about the new birth that arises from it."