Composition VIII

The subtractive test, form by form. Take away the haloed black circle and the canvas loses its centre of gravity: the scattered sharp forms at the lower right have nothing to be set against, and the field drifts right with no pole. Take away the fan of crossing lines at the lower right and the opposite pole goes, the place where the field is most acute and most dense. The two masses, the open ground between them and the diagonal tension across it are required. What yields is the middle order: several small circles in the upper cluster, a number of thin lines and some small triangles could be moved or removed and the balance would hold. The density is chosen, not compelled one by one, and the method is accumulation balanced rather than Mondrian’s stricter reduction.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Credited fully for what it discloses through image, and two things can be stated that hold. First, geometric form is not neutral or cold: a circle, an acute angle and a crossing of lines are each charged, and set together they produce tension, pressure and release that the eye feels before it names them. The black circle weighs down while the small angles strike. Second, an abstract field can be organised as counterpoint, independent voices of form sounding at once, in consonance and dissonance, held together by nothing but their relations. The canvas shows both rather than asserting them. What holds it is the kind of truth: a condition of perception and feeling, not an articulated human or social condition, and much of what the canvas gives is a state, buoyant, alert and calm.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Elevation is real and of one kind: a lifted, airy delight with a cosmic undertone. It comes first in the black circle, which reads as a body in space, a dark sun or planet with a corona, its halo a glow among hard edges. It recurs in the upper right, where transparent circles overlap and change colour where they cross, so that the forms seem weightless and suspended; and in the open ground, which lets the field breathe so that its many sharp events never crowd into noise. What holds it is its height of kind. There is no grandeur of scale and no terror; transport is gentle rather than overwhelming, and the brightness is sustained across the field rather than rising to repeated summits. The prewar Compositions reached for storm. This canvas reaches for poise.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The circle as cosmos, sun or planet, the music of the spheres: the black circle with its corona invites the reading, and Kandinsky’s own writing on the circle as the most cosmic of forms supports it as doctrine. The canvas as an orchestra of voices, painting as music, is the governing analogy of his programme and comes with the title. But here the archetype belongs to the doctrine before it belongs to the particular. The forms carry a myth his theory brings to every painting of these years, and build none of their own. The prewar Compositions built the deluge, the last judgement, the rider and resurrection into their structure; this canvas sets them aside. A cosmic order evoked by circles is real, and stays below the gate.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Two inheritances, and the departure is from the first. One is Kandinsky’s own prewar abstraction: fluid, loosely bounded, explosive in colour and apocalyptic in theme, by 1914 the most famous claim of any painter on non-objective painting. The other is the geometric abstraction he met in Russia between 1914 and 1921, in Suprematism and Constructivism. Here hard edge replaces flowing contour, compass and ruler replace the loaded brush, and an open, calm ground replaces the thronged field. The cost was real: a painter in his late fifties staked the manner on which his authority rested, and some read the turn as a surrender to the Constructivists he had quarrelled with in Moscow. Held below the gate because the vocabulary was not his invention: Malevich and the Constructivists had placed it before him.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, since it has nothing but form, and what it knows is tension between kinds of form. The soft halo on the black circle is set against hard edges everywhere else, so the canvas knows two kinds of edge, atmospheric and drawn, and their meeting. The open ground lets each form act as a single voice, where a filled field would make a texture. The diagonal opposition of the heavy round pole at the upper left and the sharp angular pole at the lower right is the counterpoint; turn the horizontal field upright and the polarity becomes a fall rather than a tension across. Held below the top because much of the vocabulary is common to the canvases of 1923 to 1926, and in the middle order another arrangement of small forms would change little of what is known.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: about a century of exhibition, and a large literature on Kandinsky in which this canvas is regularly treated as the chief statement of his geometric period. The questions stay open. Is the geometric turn a renewal of his programme or a retreat from it? How far is the canvas his answer to Suprematism, and how far his own development? Do the forms carry the fixed meanings his teaching assigned them, the yellow triangle and the blue circle, or does the canvas exceed his theory? Is the musical analogy structural or only a title? The surface yields at two distances: the whole as two poles in tension, the detail as a crowd of small transactions where colours cross. Held below the higher figures because many of the questions concern the period, the theory and the career rather than this canvas alone.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of abstract painting in Germany and Europe in the early 1920s. The intrinsic force is a real but partial reorganisation: geometric construction joined to expressive, musical and spiritual intent, so that geometry became a language of feeling, against the Constructivist claim that it served utility and against the older idea that feeling needed the free brush. That synthesis was Kandinsky’s own. The discount: abstraction itself belongs to his prewar canvases and to others, and geometric abstraction first to Malevich and Mondrian. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the Bauhaus, where he taught form and colour from these principles, and Point and Line to Plane (1926), into teaching, design and the geometric abstraction of the interwar years; through the Guggenheim’s founding collection, which made him the type of non-objective art for an American public; and, more diffusely, into painting after the war.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival over 103 years, weighed in order. Form: whole, one canvas, with no cut, loss or later hand known, in the row for a work between seventy years and two centuries old, where the usual figure is 9.0 to 9.1. Presence: continuous and wide but not the widest. The canvas is in the Guggenheim’s collection, often on view and much reproduced as the emblem of Kandinsky’s geometric phase, but its public is that of a major museum’s signature work, not of a universal image; fame is presence, not proof, and lifts the figure only within the row. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no loss, overpaint or structural damage known, so only the general risk is charged. Against it, the vocabulary has passed into design and decoration, and a style become ornament can be seen through its copies. So far the canvas has outlived them. Set at the foot of the usual figure.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The lines, arcs and circles are exact, laid as if with ruler and compass, and their crossings are calculated so that angles read sharp or open by design. The transparent circles change colour where they overlap, a considered mixture and not an accident, and the halo is graded so that the hardest mass in the field glows. The light ground is modulated, warm in places and cool in others, so the forms hang in an atmosphere rather than on a flat sheet, and the weights are spread across a wide field without symmetry. The costs: in places the drawing is diagrammatic, line laid as construction rather than worked, and the paint is thinner and less varied in touch than in the prewar canvases. The precision sometimes reads as the draughtsman’s rather than the painter’s.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the soft-haloed black circle at the upper left, and a small hard-edged chequered grid or a thin acute angle at the lower right. They obey one law, and the canvas states it: every element is a geometric form acting on every other across an open field, each with its own charge, none depicting anything. The halo is the circle’s charge made visible, not a second physics. The law holds through a range much wider than Mondrian’s: curve and straight, closed and open, round and acute, soft and hard, transparent and opaque, warm and cool. Narrowness is not the case here, and that counts for the work. What holds it a step below the top is the middle order, where the law permits rather than governs: many small forms obey it without being required by it, and at points the field comes close to inventory.

Score: 8.5 / 10

An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four, unevenly integrated. The cosmic order is held in the circle as sun or planet, in a field that reads as space. Music is held as counterpoint, voices of form sounding at once. Consciousness is held in the viewer’s felt response to tension, which is the work’s medium. Geometry is held as a lawful order of form, and the first three are integrated through it: geometry is the means by which cosmos, music and feeling are held together. A fifth, the spiritual, is present as Kandinsky’s doctrine and is not made visible on its own. What holds the axis lowest is absence: no person, no family, no labour, no city, no state, no history. Nothing of 1923, of postwar Germany or of the Bauhaus as a community enters the frame. That is the form’s choice, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 6.3 / 10