The Dance of the Future: Wassily Kandinsky's Vision, 1908–1928

ABSTRACT

One can best glean painter Wassily Kandinsky's contribution to ideas about dance by looking at the totality of his writings. Kandinsky conceptualized dance as part of his theories for a new abstract art in his major book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I consider his 1912 statement on the dance of the future as a modernist statement in its time. Kandinsky's idea for a new form of theater, Bühnenkomposition, incorporated dance, as his script for The Yellow Sound demonstrates. His later writings in Moscow and at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau reveal his concern for what the modern dance might achieve. In 1928, Kandinsky finally realized his ambition to stage a new form of synthetic theater in a production of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

KEYWORDS:

• Kandinsky
• abstract art
• modern dance
• modernist
• spirituality
• synthetic theater

Notes

* Bühnenkomposition translates as “stage composition.” Kandinsky used the term to describe his writings and experiments for the stage at a time when he was painting a series of pictures that he termed komposition.

* The publication date of Über das Geistige in der Kunst reads 1912, but the book appeared in December 1911. M. T. H. Sadler's English translation, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, appeared simultaneously in London and Boston in 1914. Later editions adopted the more accurate translation, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In this article, I refer to pagination in the Boston 1914 edition because the English-speaking world read this translation for three decades following its publication. Where necessary for the sake of clarity, I refer to the Rebay 1946 translation and the Lindsay and Vergo 1982 translation. Wassily Kandinsky, Über Das Geistige in Der Kunst: Insbesondere in Der Malerei (Munich: Piper, 1912); Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914); The Art of Spiritual Harmony, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (London: Constable, 1914); On the Spiritual in Art, trans. and ed. Hila Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946); Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (1982; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1994), 114–220.

* Magdalena Dabrowski, in her definitive account of all the compositions that Kandinsky painted between 1909 and 1939, refers to their purpose as “the creation of a new spiritual realm.” Magdalena Dabrowski, Kandinsky Compositions (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 11.

^† Isadora Duncan, Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future): Eine Vorlesung (A Lecture), ed. Karl Federn (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903); republished as The Dance (New York: Forest Press, 1909). Federn published the lecture, along with an introduction, in book form, but it would not be accurate to say that Duncan wrote The Dance of the Future as a book.

^‡ In her definitive documentation of Kandinsky's period in Munich, Peg Weiss makes such a claim. Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 203, fn. 90.

* See Adrian Glew, “‘Blue Spiritual Sounds': Kandinsky and the Sadlers 1911–1916,” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 139, no. 1134 (1997): 600–615. Ramsay Burt and I also discuss this in “Concerning the Spiritual in Early Modern Dance: Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Wassily Kandinsky Advancing Side by Side,” Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualities, vol. 1, no. 2 (2014): 251–69.

^† Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, as translators and compilers, suggest that the anonymous dancer was “almost certainly Aleksandr Sakharov [Alexander Sacharoff].” Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 473.

* See, for instance, the range of contemporary interpretations of spirituality in the Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualities, first published in 2014.

* Lindsay and Vergo's translation and notes, with Kandinsky's own footnotes, are very helpful here: Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 355–82.

^† Ramsay Burt and I have explored some aspects of Kandinsky's ideas of the spiritual in an article that compares his writings to those of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Our starting point here is the meetings of both artists separately with M. T. H. Sadleir (Sadler) and his father Michael Sadler in 1912. Michael Huxley and Ramsay Burt, “Concerning the Spiritual in Early Modern Dance: Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Wassily Kandinsky Advancing Side by Side,” Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualities, vol. 1, no. 2 (2014): 251–69.

^‡ Magdalena Dabrowski gives an excellent account of these paintings, placing them in the context of Kandinsky's Munich period, and relating them to his work with Arnold Schoenberg, but failing to mention his involvement with dance and, particularly, Sacharoff. Dabrowski, Kandinsky Compositions.

* In his January 1910 letter from Munich for the journal Apollon, Kandinsky describes the aspirations of the NKVM, quoting from their publicity statement. He emphasizes the need for artistic synthesis. Kandinsky (1910) in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 62.

* In a 1952 essay, “Space, Time and Dance,” Cunningham begins by saying, “The dance is an art in space and time.” And he concludes, “For me, it seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen, is what is.” Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time and Dance,” Transformation, vol. 1, no. 3 (1952), reprinted in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, eds. David Vaughan and Melissa Harris (New York: Aperture, 1997), 66–67. In a 1955 essay, “The Impermanent Art,” Cunningham speaks of dance, art, and music as follows: “If the dancer dances, everything is there. The meaning is there, if that is what you want. . . . When I dance, it means: this is what I am doing. A thing is just that thing. In painting now we are beginning to see the painting, and not the painter nor the painted. We are beginning to see how a painted space is. In music, we are beginning to hear free of our well-tempered ears.” Merce Cunningham, “The Impermanent Art,” Arts, vol. 7, no. 3 (1955), reprinted in Harris, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years, 86–87.

^† Reconstructions and re-imaginings from the 1970s onward are of a different nature. While many have attempted to stage The Yellow Sound, the earliest performances, including those in New York (1972), Paris (1976), Saint Baume (1975), and University of Leeds (1977), omitted the de Hartmann score. The first complete production, which reconstructed the music score, was Strasfogel's version for the Guggenheim Museum at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre on February 9, 1982. More recently, The Yellow Sound has been realized at Tate Modern in London (2011), at the Nationaltheater in Munich by the Bayerischen Staatsballett (2014), and at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford (2015).

* Wadsworth made his own translation, but the journal also noted the recent Sadler publication. Edward Wadsworth, “Inner Necessity,” Blast, vol. 1 no. 1 (1914): 119–25.

^† From a dance point of view, Evelyn Doerr, John Hodgson, Carol-Lynne Moore, and Valerie Preston-Dunlop have variously discussed the Munich milieu and speculated on the relationship of Laban's ideas to those of Kandinsky's. See Evelyn Doerr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer and the Crystal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); John Hodgson, Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban (London: Methuen, 2001); Carol-Lynne Moore, The Harmonic Structure of Movement, Music and Dance According to Rudolf Laban: An Examination of His Unpublished Writings and Drawings (Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009); Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life (London: Dance Books, 1998).

* Lindsay and Vergo's Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art is a testament to his publication record.

* In Watching Weimar Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Kate Elswit does an admirable job of exploring the complexities of the period from a dance point of view.

^† The 1961 English edition also includes an introduction by Gropius and an additional 1927 lecture at Dessau by Schlemmer. Walter Gropius, The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1961).

* This is the fourth drawing in the original article, but appears as the second reproduction in the Lindsay and Vergo translation.

* Original designs are housed in the Kandinsky Archive of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and available online at “La Bibliothèque Kandinsky,” Centre Pompidou, www.centrepompidou.fr/Collections/Kandinsky-Library. My observations are based on the latter.

1. Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 100; Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. and ed. Hila Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 87; Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (1982; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1994), 206.

2. See, in particular, Thomas J. Hines, Collaborative Forms (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991); Susan L. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky, Gret Palucca, and ‘Dance Curves,’” MODERNISM/modernity, vol. 14, no. 3 (2007): 389–406; Nicolas S. Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion: A Comparative Analysis of the Stage Works of Schlemmer and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus,” Dance Research, vol. 32, no. 1 (2014): 23–42.

3. Adrian Glew, introduction to Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Boston: MFA Publications, 2006), vii.

4. Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 49–51.

5. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. Lindsay and Vergo, 205.

6. Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 100–101.

7. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. Lindsay and Vergo, 206.

8. Isadora Duncan, Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future): Eine Vorlesung (A Lecture), ed. Karl Federn (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903), 11.

9. Isadora Duncan, “The Dance,” Theatre Arts Magazine, vol. 2, no. 1 (December 1917): 21–22; Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1928).

10. Duncan, Der Tanz der Zukunft, 19.

11. Ibid., 26.

12. Naoko Kobayashi-Bredenstein, Wassily Kandinskys frühe Bühnenkompositionen: Über Korperlichkeit Und Bewegung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 61–62.

13. Ernst Schur, Der Moderne Tanz (Munich: Gustav Lammers, 1910).

14. See Edward Ross Dickinson, “‘Must We Dance Naked?’: Art, Beauty, and Law in Munich and Paris, 1911–1913,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 1 (January 2011): 95–131.

15. Claudia Jeschke and Gabi Vettermann, “Isadora Duncan, Berlin and Munich in 1906: Just an Ordinary Year in a Dancer's Career,” Dance Chronicle, vol. 18, no. 2 (1995): 217–29.

16. John Ernest Crawford Flitch, Modern Dancing and Dancers (London: Grant Richards, 1912); Hans Brandenburg, Der Moderne Tanz (Munich: Georg Müller, 1913).

17. M. T. H. Sadler, in Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 100, fn.

18. Ian Strasfogel, “The Creation of The Yellow Sound,” The Yellow Sound: Marymount Manhattan Theater [program], 1982; Rainer Stamm, “Alexander Sacharoff: Dance and the Fine Arts,” in Die Sacharoffs: Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters (Two Dancers within the Blaue Reiter Circle), eds. Frank-Manuel Peter and Rainer Stamm (Köln: Wienand Verlag, 2002), 11–45; Shulamith Behr, “Kandinsky and Theater: ‘The Monumental Artwork of the Future,’” in Vasily Kandinsky and the Total Work of Art: From Blaue Reiter to Bauhaus (New York: Neue Galerie, 2013), 65–85.

19. Wassily Kandinsky, “Report to the Pan-Russian Conference, 1920,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 474, (first published in Vestnik Rabotnikov Iskusstv, Bulletin of Art Workers).

20. Vivian E. Barnett, Kandinsky Watercolours: Catalogue Raisonée, Volume One, 1900–1921 (London: Sotheby's Publications, 1992), 215.

21. Stamm, “Alexander Sacharoff,” 21–22.

22. Ibid., 22–23.

23. Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 139–41.

24. Ibid., 140.

25. Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony; Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (1914; repr., New York: Dover, 1977); Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, trans. Hila Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946);Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, trans. M. T. H. Sadleir and re-trans. by Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison, and Ferdinand Osterstag (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947); Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

26. Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 116–17.

27. Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, 111–12.

28. Ibid., 112.

29. Wassily Kandinsky, “Content and Form [“Soderzhanie i forma”] Salon 2 … (Odessa), 1910–1911,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 87.

30. Ibid., 88.

31. Ibid., 89.

32. Behr, “Kandinsky and Theater”; Hines, Collaborative Forms; Kobayashi-Bredenstein, Wassily Kandinskys frühe Bühnenkompositionen; Stamm, “Alexander Sacharoff”; Susan A. Stein, “Kandinsky and Abstract Stage Composition: Practise and Theory, 1909–12,” Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 1 (1983): 61–66.

33. Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich, 92–103.

34. Georg Fuchs, Die Schaubühne der Zukunft (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1905); Georg Fuchs, Der Tanz (Stuttgart: Strecker and Schröder, 1906); Georg Fuchs, Die Revolution des Theaters, Ergebnisse aus dem Münchener Künstlertheater (Munich: Georg Müller, 1909); Georg Fuchs, Revolution in the Theatre: Conclusions Concerning the Munich Artists' Theatre, trans. Constance C. Kuhn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959).

35. Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 260, 263.

36. Ibid., 264.

37. Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow Sound, in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 281.

38. Strasfogel, “The Creation of The Yellow Sound,” n.p.

39. Kandinsky, Yellow Sound, in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 281.

40. Diary entry, December 1912, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 7–8

41. Mary Wigman, Die sieben Tänze des Lebens—Tanzdichtung (Jena, Germany: Diedrichs, 1921).

42. Arnold Schoenberg, letter to Kandinsky, August 19, 1912, in Jelena Hahl-Koch, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 54.

43. Hugo Ball, “Kandinsky [Lecture] Zurich April 7, 1917,” in Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes, (1974; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 233.

44. Schur, Der Moderne Tanz; Brandenburg, Der Moderne Tanz.

45. Letter dated May 17, 1914, cited in Klaus Lankheit, “A History of the Almanac,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Klaus Lankheit (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 33.

46. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, 10.

47. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction”; Behr, “Kandinsky and Theater”; Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion.”

48. Wassily Kandinsky, “Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 455–72.

49. Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 455–57; Clark V. Poling, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915–1933,” in Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915–1933 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1983), 27–30.

50. See, for instance, Irma Duncan and Alan Ross MacDougall, Isadora Duncan's Russian Days and Her Last Years in France (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929).

51. Kandinsky, “Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture,” 457.

52. Ibid., 464.

53. Ibid., 459.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 466.

56. Ibid., 467.

57. Wassily Kandinsky, letter to Hans Hildebrandt (1937), cited in Strasfogel, “The Creation of The Yellow Sound,” n.p.

58. Wassily Kandinsky, “aus ‘violett,’ romantisches bühnenstück von Kandinsky,” bauhaus, vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1927): 6.

59. Walter Gropius, ed. The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1961).

60. Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár, Die Bühne im Bauhaus: Bauhausbücher 4, eds. Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy (Munich: Albert Langen, 1924).

61. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer.

62. Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die abstrakte Bühnensynthese,” in Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923, ed. Karl Nierendorf (Weimar: Bauhaus-Verlag, 1923), 142–44; Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1926).

63. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction”; Susan Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus,” in New German Dance Studies, eds. Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 45–62; Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion.”

64. Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion,” 20

65. Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920).

66. Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy, and Molnár, Die Bühne im Bauhaus.

67. Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus.”

68. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction”; Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus”; Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion.”

69. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction.”

70. Ibid.

71. Wassily Kandinsky, “Tanzkurven: Zu den Tänzen der Palucca” (Dance Curves: The Dances of Palucca), Das Kunstblatt, vol. 10, no. 3 (1926): 117–21.

72. Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction”; Funkenstein, “Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus”; Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion.”

73. Kandinsky, “Tanzkurven: Zu den Tänzen der Palucca,” 120, reproduced in translation as “Dance Curves: The Dances of Palucca,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 521. Kandinsky, “Tanzkurven: Zu den Tänzen der Palucca,” Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche.

74. “Dance Curves: The Dances of Palucca,” Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 522.

75. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Hila Rebay and Howard Dearstyne (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1947).

76. Ibid., 83.

77. Ibid., 100.

78. Wassily Kandinsky, “And, Some Remarks on Synthetic Art (Und, Einiges über Synthetische Kunst),” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 716, originally published as “Einiges über Synthetische Kunst,” Internationale Revue i10, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1927): 4–10.

79. Kandinsky, “And, Some Remarks on Synthetic Art.”

80. Ibid., 713.

81. Ibid., 717.

82. Wassily Kandinsky, “Modeste Mussorgsky: Bilder einer Ausstellung” (Pictures at an Exhibition), Das Kunstblatt, vol. 14, no. 8 (1930): 249–51.

83. Ludwig Grote, “Bühnenkomposition von Kandinsky,” Internationale Revue i10, vol. 2, no. 13 (August 1928): 4–5.

84. Poling, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years”; Funkenstein, “Engendering Abstraction”; Sutil, “Mathematics in Motion.”

85. Steve Smith, “Museum Gathers Piano, Paintings and Video in a Blended Work,” New York Times, September 29, 2012, C5.

86. Poling, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years,” 72.

87. Grote, “Bühnenkomposition von Kandinsky,” 5.

88. Poling, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years,” 73.

89. “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 750, originally published as Wassily Kandinsky, “Modeste Mussorgsky: Bilder einer Ausstellung.”

90. Ibid.

91. Poling, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years”; Behr, “Kandinsky and Theater.”

92. Wassily Kandinsky, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 749, referring to Nina Kandinsky, Kandinsky und ich (Munich: Kindler, 1976), 159.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Huxley

MICHAEL HUXLEY is currently reader in dance at De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom, and director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance. His articles have been published in a number of books, and he has written for a range of dance periodicals, including Research in Dance Education; Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices; Journal of Dance, Movement and Spiritualities; and Discourses in Dance. His published research has focused on early modern dance and dance history. Huxley served as a board member of the Congress on Research in Dance for ten years; as chair of the editorial board for Dance Research Journal (2005–2010); as senior academic adviser in dance and chair of the advisory board for the UK Subject Centre PALATINE; and as project leader for De Montfort University's Centre for Excellence in Performance Arts (2005–2010). His most recent book is The Dancer's World 1920–1945: Modern Dancers and Their Practices Reconsidered (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2015).