Thoughts on Kandinsky and Picasso (AF)

​

 

                                                                                                            November 20, 2022

A. M. French

 

 

I’m convinced of a few things. Whether these ideas ae factually and materially true or not is immaterial to me. Facts may remain in the timeline on the page as to colors on the face of a canvas. The test comes from practice. This is my practice, perhaps a belief system, who can tell?

 

For the topic of the splintered mirror of fragmented reality, as depicted so marvelously in Picasso’s two pieces that we discussed in class, I would like to explore the question of “how” as a function of the wording in Kandinsky’s thoughts (“what/how” p. 8).

 

In Kandinsky’s words, “[Picasso] has achieved the logical destruction of matter, not, however, by dissolution but rather by a kind of parceling out of its various divisions and a constructive scattering of these divisions about the canvas.”  P. 18. 

 

The physical-material meaning of Dissolution has to do with a recombining of its molecular structure. This describes a minute difference between dissolution as soluble versus dispersible wherein particles are held in suspended in solution, as we may in fact find in certain pigments in media. Our eyes may or may not perceive this, depending on the particulate size and adhesion. (by mechanical or electrical forces) of the pigment, for example. This is only important to the artist when one works with the media to cause creation of art (but such creation does not need awareness of the form of its matter itself, but rather the feel and skill of the artist). 

 

A dissolution may be likened by reference to an anecdotal story told by the author to help explain a way of perception of sub-visual particles, namely atoms by analogy to a certain memory he had of a decorative item, a paperweight in the shape of a dog:

 

            On my writing-table at home I have an iron letter-weight in the shape of a Great Dane… I have known it for many years. I saw it on my father’s writing desk … Many years later, when my father died, I took the Great Dane, because I liked it, and I used it. It accompanied me to many places, until it stayed behind in Graz in 1938, when I had to leave in something of a hurry. … And three years ago, when my wife visited Austria, she brought it to me, and there it is again on my desk.

            

I am quite sure it is the same dog, the dog that I first saw more than fifty years ago on my father’s desk. But why am I sure of it? That is quite obvious. It is clearly the peculiar form  or  shape (German: Gestalt) that raises the identity beyond doubt, not the material content. Had the material been melted and cast into the shape of a man, the identity would be much more difficult to establish. And what is more: even if the material identity were established beyond doubt, it would be of very restricted interest. I should probably not care very much about the identity or not of that mass of iron, and should declare that my souvenir had been destroyed. ...[t]he identity of the material, if there is any, plays a subordinate role. – Erwin Schrodinger, Science and Humanism.

 

We see in Picasso’s work, therefore not a dissolution (and then, reconstitution or reformation) of the subject depicted in the piece, i.e., the rum bottle, but rather a scattering and reassembly in a form that contains the material aspects of the subject and the resultant form itself is at question. It is similar to the “multi-faceted diamond” which reflects a single object; a refraction certainly, but the life force becomes something more. 

 

My conviction on the “how” is that I believe a methodology, perhaps employed by Picasso, perhaps not, is for the artist to move the brush across the entire canvas at once bringing forth the subject, the form across the two-dimensional “screen” as the material (the pigment) manifests the diffraction of that seen by the eye into compartmentalized images. We may think of an explosive breaking-apart and this image freeze-framed as in a cinematic devise. However, it is my observation that works in art show us more than a deflagration of the subject into parts seen on the surface of the object, but rather, fields fragmented by the instantaneous burst of a reflected life-energy-field, as these microseconds are snapshots of the subject’s being in past and future “lives.” Herein lies Kandinsky’s “spirits.”

 

The problem of a verbal definition of the “how” remains. Conceptually, we can imagine the sensory visual, but he visual is by its nature fleeting, unfixed unless frozen in the progression of the frames moving in time. By this I mean as reflection, a single infinitesimally thin slice of the refracted light in the sequence of Time. If the artist focuses on a single element, the others are lost; the artist must necessarily work the entire canvas with the initial sketching, an outline if you will. This can be crafted by several layers of color applied over the entire field until form is imaged onto the screen (canvas in this case) with sufficiently to allow the artist to finish the detail, fragment by fragment as the stages of progress evolve.