Abstraction and Atonality

On the second day of 1911, Wassily Kandinsky and other artists working in Munich were dazzled by a concert of Arnold Schönberg's music. Kandinsky was so affected by the performance, which included String Quartets No. 1 and 2 and Three Piano Pieces - the composer's first forays into free atonality - that he immediately initiated a correspondence with Schönberg. By the end of that year, Schönberg, who was also an accomplished painter, had joined Kandinsky in the seminal art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

The centenary of this electrifying encounter was the impetus for the exhibition "Abstraction and Atonality," in which Museum Kampa brings together works by Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Schönberg (1874-1951) with those by pioneering Czech artist František Kupka (1871-1957). Pieces from the museum's extensive Kupka collection - which contains more than 200 works of art - make up the core of the exhibition, while the show's proportionally fewer works by Schönberg were provided by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, and the Kandinsky pieces come from the Centre Georges Pompidou and private collections.

This is not the first time the museum has presented its Kupkas in the broader context of early European abstract art. In the summer of 2007, it traced the parallel paths to nonobjective art by Kupka and Piet Mondrian. Similarly, this exhibition aims to chart the simultaneous efforts by Kupka and Kandinsky to liberate visual expression from figuration and by Schönberg to cut music loose from the tonal system.

Despite this premise, Schönberg is presented here primarily as a painter. While the exhibition ably makes the case that he, too, moved toward abstraction around the same time as Kupka and Kandinsky (he had begun painting in 1907), he was neither as good an artist as them nor did his mark on the visual arts equal his importance as a composer. Schönberg surely influenced 20th-century visual art more through his ideas of atonality and the 12-tone method than as a painter.

In the compositions performed at that 1911 concert attended by Kandinsky, Schönberg was seeking to dissolve the traditional bonds between harmony and melody, thereby permanently unfettering the relationship between them. It was for this reason that his music was so exciting for visual artists of that time. Perhaps what is missing most from this exhibition is the accompaniment of Schönberg's compositions - the ones that so affected Kandinsky - in the exhibition rooms.

Kupka and Kandinsky produced some of the world's first entirely abstract works, but while they both matured to abstraction around the same time, their paths were quite different. However, both artists were part of a bigger trend in Europe investigating color theory and taking inspiration from other art forms. For example, Der Blaue Reiter stressed the spiritual and symbolic associations of color as well as the connection between visual art and music.

The year 1911 was key for Kandinsky, marking his full transition from figurative to nonfigurative painting. It was also the year he published his most important theoretical work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and the exhibition literature suggests that the Munich concert and his intensive correspondence with Schönberg may have significantly influenced the book's final form.

Kupka's work also became increasingly abstract around 1910-11, embodying his theories about color and movement and the relationship between color and music. Kandinsky and Kupka both saw music as a means to fundamentally transform art. But while Kupka was interested in freeing colors from their descriptive associations, Kandinsky emphasized the spiritual associations of color.

Kandinsky and Kupka followed an artistic trajectory from organic to geometric to a synthesis of both in which color had major importance. The exhibition demonstrates Kupka's development through all of these phases, with many superb examples of each. It presents Kandinsky mainly in his mature style, though some earlier Russian motifs are included. There are no major works by Kandinsky here, but the paintings, watercolors and lithographs display the key attributes of his signature style: spontaneous, organic composition with its own inner logic, energetic line and pulsating color. The show is not chronologically linear, but sometimes circles back to earlier works, especially in the case of Kupka.

Schönberg's output is mostly from a narrow time period. The self-portraits, portraits and streetscapes show him venturing into semi-abstraction and abstraction around the same time as Kandinsky and Kupka, though his visual expression is murkier and his break with representation less absolute than theirs.

The show comes to a crescendo in the final room, where the finest works by Kandinsky - the lithographs Picture With a White Form (1913) and Composition IV (Battle) from 1911 plus a small, untitled watercolor and India ink from 1915-16 - are juxtaposed with Kupka's, among them Amorpha, Warm Chromatics (1911-12), awash in royal purple, dark amber and other autumnal colors. It is one of the museum's treasures.

No works by Schönberg are in this final room, but he is present in the form of a historical footnote with a local connection: A display case contains his Czechoslovak passport from 1933, after which he fled Europe for the United States following Hitler's rise to power. Schönberg, who reclaimed his Jewish faith in a Paris synagogue before departing overseas, was the son of a father born in Bratislava and a mother originally from Prague.

All three of these cosmopolitan figures were part of the vibrant exchange of ideas in early 20th-century European cities such as Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Paris, and they were all also affected by the tumultuous events of the first half of the century. More than any other connecting factor, however, all three aimed for and achieved purity and freedom in their art, whether cutting loose from objective representation or melodic tone.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com