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Page 5
Of course colour-music is no new idea. That is to say attempts
have been made to play compositions in colour, by flashes and
harmonies. [Footnote: Cf. "Colour Music," by A. Wallace
Rimington. Hutchinson. 6s. net.] Also music has been interpreted
in colour. But I do not know of any previous attempt to paint,
without any reference to music, compositions which shall have on
the spectator an effect wholly divorced from representative
association. Kandinsky refers to attempts to paint in colour-
counterpoint. But that is a different matter, in that it is the
borrowing from one art by another of purely technical methods,
without a previous impulse from spiritual sympathy.
One is faced then with the conflicting claims of Picasso and
Kandinsky to the position of true leader of non-representative
art. Picasso's admirers hail him, just as this Introduction hails
Kandinsky, as a visual musician. The methods and ideas of each
rival are so different that the title cannot be accorded to both.
In his book, Kandinsky states his opinion of Cubism and its fatal
weakness, and history goes to support his contention. The origin
of Cubism in Cezanne, in a structural art that owes its very
existence to matter, makes its claim to pure emotionalism seem
untenable. Emotions are not composed of strata and conflicting
pressures. Once abandon reality and the geometrical vision
becomes abstract mathematics. It seems to me that Picasso shares
a Futurist error when he endeavours to harmonize one item of
reality--a number, a button, a few capital letters--with a
surrounding aura of angular projections. There must be a conflict
of impressions, which differ essentially in quality. One trend of
modern music is towards realism of sound. Children cry, dogs
bark, plates are broken. Picasso approaches the same goal from
the opposite direction. It is as though he were trying to work
from realism to music. The waste of time is, to my mind, equally
complete in both cases. The power of music to give expression
without the help of representation is its noblest possession. No
painting has ever had such a precious power. Kandinsky is
striving to give it that power, and prove what is at least the
logical analogy between colour and sound, between line and rhythm
of beat. Picasso makes little use of colour, and confines himself
only to one series of line effects--those caused by conflicting
angles. So his aim is smaller and more limited than Kandinsky's
even if it is as reasonable. But because it has not wholly
abandoned realism but uses for the painting of feeling a
structural vision dependent for its value on the association of
reality, because in so doing it tries to make the best of two
worlds, there seems little hope for it of redemption in either.
As has been said above, Picasso and Kandinsky make an interesting
parallel, in that they have developed the art respectively of
Cezanne and Gauguin, in a similar direction. On the decision of
Picasso's failure or success rests the distinction between
Cezanne and Gauguin, the realist and the symbolist, the painter
of externals and the painter of religious feeling. Unless a
spiritual value is accorded to Cezanne's work, unless he is
believed to be a religious painter (and religious painters need
not paint Madonnas), unless in fact he is paralleled closely with
Gauguin, his follower Picasso cannot claim to stand, with
Kandinsky, as a prophet of an art of spiritual harmony.
If Kandinsky ever attains his ideal--for he is the first to admit
that he has not yet reached his goal--if he ever succeeds in
finding a common language of colour and line which shall stand
alone as the language of sound and beat stands alone, without
recourse to natural form or representation, he will on all hands
be hailed as a great innovator, as a champion of the freedom of
art. Until such time, it is the duty of those to whom his work
has spoken, to bear their testimony. Otherwise he may be
condemned as one who has invented a shorthand of his own, and who
paints pictures which cannot be understood by those who have not
the key of the cipher. In the meantime also it is important that
his position should be recognized as a legitimate, almost
inevitable outcome of Post-Impressionist tendencies. Such is the
recognition this Introduction strives to secure.
MICHAEL T. H. SADLER
REFERENCE
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