New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

It is a strange business – how, in one sense, we can ‘know about’ something for many years and yet, in another, not ‘know’ it at all. I have long been aware of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, ‘The Blue Rider’ movement, and its radical artistic adventures in the early twentieth century. Individually, I have enjoyed many of the works of its main contributors: the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and, with less educated conviction, the artist-composer Arnold Shoenberg. Then, suddenly, I find these prophetic artists seeming to say everything I have ever wanted to say – although I have never known quite how.

Some background might be useful. Undoubtedly the visionary inspiration for ‘The Blue Rider’ came from Wasssily Kandinsky, although from the start it was an essentially collaborative venture, and would never have left the starting gate without the committed involvement of many other artists, mostly painters and musicians. The name was the title chosen by Kandinsky and Marc for the movement’s first and most famous publication, ‘The Blue Rider Almanac’ of 1912. This is a picture of the cover, an original design by Kandinsky for general use as a symbol of the movement:

The Almanac was a bibliographical expression of the rationale underlying a number of exhibitions staged under the same name. The movement was essentially eclectic - hence the unusual juxtaposition of painters and musicians. More than that, however, ‘The Blue Rider’ deliberately avoided identification with any one off-the-shelf artistic style – and this was the first feature forcibly to strike me in its potential to dialogue with more recent movements and ideas.

Kandinsky was clear in his conviction that rigid alignment to any single artistic style seals a death warrant on genuine creativity. He spells this out in considerable detail in his now famous treatise, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ – one of the few major texts out of the western world exclusively dedicated to a dialogue between art and spirituality. In it he suggests that, at any given moment of cultural history, there are rarely more than a few artistic pioneers who actually live on the leading edge, at the top of the artistic pyramid, as it were. These few are those who are able to cut themselves free from the shackles of all previous styles and schools of thought, and are genuinely able to ‘do a new thing’. They put down markers ahead of their time, and effectively create the possibility for new cultural futures. Contrastingly, the majority of artists, working within one or more already established styles might seem to create the new but, in reality, their work is no more than a fresh example of something that has already become dated and lifeless. They seem to put down markers too, but these are already behind the crest of the advancing cultural wave.

This is an fascinating model for understanding the continuing movement of artistic styles, and goes some way towards explaining one of those things which has remained a mystery to me for many years – precisely why it is that new artistic expressions generate such extreme vitriolic responses, not only in the public at large, but also in the more rarefied communities of the art establishment. It has happened over and over again with each new generation of artists; even though it is also well understood that the same works of art, pilloried in one generation, will almost certainly become the priceless and sought after treasures of the next. The pattern has been repeated generation after generation, though rarely with greater force than in the turbulent years around the turn of the twentieth century. I have written elsewhere (‘God and the Art of Seeing’) about the scathing reception given to Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Sick Child’, in Norway in the mid-1880s; and the venomous reception given to Monet’s now world famous images of water lilies and haystacks is now well-documented as one of the conundrums of art history.

I had already learned to recognise a familiar sociological motif at work in this phenomenon, the creation and preservation of a closed circle, an establishment – but Kandinsky, I think, offers a more subtle window of understanding. It is not just that the boundaries of the establishment and its club are threatened; more than that, genuine pioneers are doomed to be misunderstood, because they are actually thinking what up until then has remained literally unthinkable. Because what they are thinking has not previously been thought, there do not exist any readily accessible conceptual categories with which to facilitate its reception. (I am reminded here of Kuhn’s analysis of the way in which revolutions take place in models of scientific thinking, paradigm shifts as he calls them.) Cultural critics, exclusively drawing on categories derived from the past, simply do not have the apparatus with which to interpret and therefore appreciate the arrival of the genuinely new.

By commending freedom from commitment to any single artistic style (the Almanac brings together and affirms examples of works of art from many different eras and many different locations) Kandinsky is encouraging an attitude which is, at least, more likely to be able to embrace the genuinely new and to experiment freely beyond the boundaries of local fashion. Examples, peppering the Almanac, are described by Kandinsky as ‘the best’ from the leading edge in earlier specific times and places; his message is that their value deserves to be honoured, but that it would be foolishness to extol them as ‘the best’ for our own unique time and place. They did their pioneering work in their own time and place, but most of their creative potential is now exhausted. This is a very strong statement concerning the contextual nature of aesthetic values.

All of which fascinates me enormously when I begin to think about movements within religions, and the passionate commitments people make to religious and/or spiritual styles – past and present. I am reminded, for example, of the derisory anger which my own enthusiasm for the early charismatic movement in the 1970s generated amongst more traditional Baptists; and I am also reminded of my repeated discovery of ‘sects within sects’, dedicated groups of followers of this or that, still passionately committed to forms of believing which belong to moments in the Christian era now long dead. It makes me want to do a Kandinsky. I want to create a ‘spiritual almanac’ which affirms and commends a wide variety of spiritual resources from a great range of times and places. I want, for example, to commend and to enjoy the icons of early Christian centuries, to be moved by the wild and sometimes terrifying writings of so-called ‘desert fathers’, to benefit from the quiet reflectivity of contemplative mystics, men and women, throughout the centuries; I would even like to discover how to participate in the exuberance of contemporary pentecostal praise - and so on, and so on. The freedom to affirm and commend all these might then, in turn, free me to be able to recognise that as yet un-named somewhat, the special gift for this particular time and place, which I am in the gravest danger of overlooking whilst I remain too embroiled in a single style from the past. I might miss what Kandinsky described as the ‘spiritual in art’, and which today some Christian prophets might choose to describe as ‘what God’s Spirit is doing in our time’. All of which feels remarkably at home in the period we tend to label postmodern – as if we had really significantly moved on from early twentieth century. I am not so sure that we have.

In this ‘breaking with styles’, emphasised by the creators of the Almanac, something quite extraordinary was taking place. The overall direction of ‘The Blue Rider’ movement was clearly orientated towards an affirmation of ‘the abstract’ - something which had not consciously found favour in the cultural history of the west for more than a millennium. In this context, ‘the abstract’ must not to be heard in negative terms, a bid for all that is obscure and inaccessible to interpretation; rather, it should be heard as a massively positive bid to undermine the dominant post-Enlightenment paradigm with its sterile, and too often exclusive, commitment to analytical reason.

It is easiest to illustrate this from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg first met Kandinsky back in 1911 and each, it seems, immediately recognised in the other something which could draw them together in a single movement. Schoenberg was not entirely unknown as a painter, mainly of portraits, many of himself - though painting was never his strongest mode of artistic expression. He is best known for his experiments with ‘free’ or so-called atonal music – that is, with music which has freedom from the formal conventions in western harmonic traditions. In one of the Almanac’s short essays, by Kulbin, entitled ‘Free Music’, it is argued that, by breaking with the particularity of one harmonic tradition, music is merely re-claiming what has remained unscathed in ‘nature’ despite the development of human cultural history. “The music of nature is free in its choice of notes – light, thunder, the whistling of the wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes.” The remarkable thing is that a culture constrained by a very particular harmonic tradition should continue to extol the song of the nightingale as something of peculiar beauty. In commending atonal music, Kulbin enumerates many of the delights in store for the open-eared listener, singling out the distinctively new experiences generated by what he calls “… the close connection of tones and the processes of close connection.” I think it was these ‘close connections’ which, at first, I found most difficulty in appreciating; but with the passage of time, I now can find these quite extraordinarily moving.

In his own celebrated essay in the Almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg himself goes on to argue that music must also resist every compulsion to be programmatic, to replicate, as it were, patterns already laid down in the other arts. So in setting words to music, Schoenberg deliberately refuses to conform to stereotypical assumptions. Traditionally musicians had often felt obliged to match words expressing urgency with rapid tempos, and words expressing restfulness with slow and sombre tones; rather, Schoenberg argues that music must be free to create its own forms of expression, breaking its slavish congruence with other media, and opening up fresh potential to complement and enlarge the possibilities for inspiration.

The reception of ‘free music’, of course, had all the hallmarks that I have already associated with the work of painters, and Schoenberg’s music was rubbished by most of his contemporary critics. The Almanac argues, not entirely surprisingly, that the professional cultural critic, already tied in allegiance to particular styles, is precisely the person who is least likely to be able to ‘hear’ the prophetic inspiration (Kandinsky’s ‘inner sound’) in new forms, be they visual or musical. The ear of the critic has been so ‘tuned’ to the styles of previous times, that there is now no way for ‘the new’ to be heard. As Kandinsky also put it, the critic is a theoretician, and the theoretician is a person capable of little more than discovering ‘mistakes’ in the genuinely ‘new’, however inspired this ‘new’ might be. The theoretician is structurally bound by the ‘rules’ of the past, and is disabled for doing other than negating that which is emerging in the present with genuine significance for the future.

I have no difficulty in relating all this to my own slow and sometimes reluctant journey towards an appreciation of ‘modern’ music. Today I value a measure of freedom to hear the previously unhearable, to be free to test everything for what it is, good or bad, riding as loose as possible to inherited conventions.

Everything Schoenberg affirms about music, Kandinsky parallels in his own crucial essay within the Almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’. Kandinsky is effectively declaring his own right to paint atonally, abstractly, playing the palette of colours and shapes with fresh freedom, expressing real moments of the human spirit which cannot be contained in any previous conventions of concerning form. Kandinsky claims this as the only way to release what he calls the ‘inner sound’.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of form is what, of course, the critics cannot bear. Franz Marc’s horses are the ‘wrong colours’; Schoenberg’s musical phraseology, in his ‘Herzgewächse’ (‘Heart’s Foliage’) for example, does not sufficiently correlate with verbal tones in the libretto. But that is the very point; in a fresh, although internally coherent way, the music provides the possibility of a new, equally valid, depth of insight as yet unheard in the history of music.

One fascinating conviction expressed in the Almanac, and shared by artist and musician alike, is that, in their new-found freedom, they are re-discovering things already known by the majority of children in their infancy, but strangled out of their artistic vocabulary by the processes of formal education – usually by the age of six! Kandinsky is ruthless on this point. He writes, “For every fire there is a cooling off. For every early bud – the threatening frost. For every young talent – an academy. These are not tragic words but a melancholy fact. The academy is the surest way of destroying the power of the child. Even the greatest, strongest talent is more or less retarded in this respect by the academy. Lesser talents perish by the hundreds. An academically trained person of average talent excels in learning practical meanings and losing the ability to hear his inner sound. He produces a ‘correct’ drawing that is dead.” Am I hearing a description of theological education trapped in that cul-de-sac generated at the pinnacle western liberalism? Even Kandinsky is not reluctant invoke the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament for support, pointing out Jesus’s specific allusion to the openness of children to God’s coming kingdom – the starting point for a very stimulating conversation concerning the relationship between artistic and religious forms.

From a religious perspective, I am fascinated by two powerful implications of the Almanac’s analysis of western culture. The first is simply this insight into the freedom of the child to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the truth, the prophetic word of God’s Spirit. This is something I have also found amongst people labelled as ‘learning disabled’ – and I find myself musing, as does Jean Vanier on the basis of massive experience by comparison with my own, just who it is in our culture that is disabled in their learning – by a lack or a surfeit of it.

The second runs a little further with this powerful affirmation of ‘the abstract’, peaking in the early twentieth century, and energised by a forceful rejection of the exclusive dominance of the analytical method – which, since the Enlightenment, had posed as the key to all significant truth claims. What ‘The Blue Rider’ group do with such skill is to expose this intellectual blind alley for the dead end it had always been. Whether we look at the playful coloured shapes of Kandinsky, or listen to the ear-stretching tonal games of Schoenberg, the common claim is that these artefacts are able to touch ‘depths’ in the human spirit, which have largely remained untouched by the dominant western cultural inheritance for many years. Tapping back into ‘natural’ forms and ‘primitive’ styles, largely untouched and certainly undervalued for many centuries, these artists speak into their own time and their own place with unique power.

One thing, of course, which they would not want us to do is to idolise their own heavily contextualised achievements in such a way that these too should become dampers on our own contemporary creativity. The invitation from ‘The Blue Rider’ is to ‘ride again’, and again, and again …

All of which, it seems to me, speaks volumes to any who are seeking to explore the potential of contemplative prayer – to which I so frequently return. As I have written in earlier blogs, a clear pre-requisite for such an exploration is liberation from the exclusivity of western obsession with ‘conceptual’ patterns of thought. Until it is possible to think again as a child, and to discover the role of the pre-conceptual and even the non-conceptual, in a fuller vocabulary of human knowing, God will not merely remain a mystery, God will remain a nonsense.

Once again I am reminded of a repeated caution in the writings of Thomas Merton. Merton reminds his readers over and over again not to become reliant on any one ‘mechanism’ of prayer or any one spiritual discipline. It is not that these disciplines are irrelevant - far from it they are essential equipment for the exploration; it is rather that they do not of themselves a guaranteed pathway to enlightenment or deeper insight. Insight only comes as a gift of God’s Spirit and, as such, will only come unsolicited, free from the constraints of any pre-determined conceptualisation (as free as the blowing of the wind, says Jesus in the Fourth Gospel). What we need, then, if we are to discover prayer that has contemplative depth, is a freedom akin to that affirmed in the birth of modern abstract art, which learned again old lessons about ways that deep truth is disclosed, revealed even. Rarely does fresh revelation depend exclusively on old forms, be they geometrical patterns, musical scales, or liturgical prayers. New wineskins will be in constant demand, as old ones will never be able to contain the ferment of the new wine.

I like all that – and could preach a pretty respectable Christian sermon on it too!

Just a little bibliography:
‘The Blue Rider Almanac’, first published 1912 (Tate Publishing 2006)
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published 1911 (Dover Publications 1977)
‘Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider’, Scala Publishers, 2003