Subject is not contemporary artists who may claim to be 'influenced' by the early Kandinsky in some way. There are always some of those, and the best of luck to them. I am more interested in what a truly contemporary awareness can make of the early Kandinsky in the light of Tate Modern's recent exhibition. Kandinsky really did believe, in common with others of his generation, that painting could embody the deepest meanings of his time - that 'colours in a certain order' could penetrate the depths of consciousness, deliver perceptual sensations that went right to the heart of cognition and awareness. In this sense he was a modern painter - one who believed that meaning could be embedded in a medium. A century later, we are more likely to see painting reach for quotation, irony or detachment - to wear the consciousness of the 'end of painting' directly on its sleeve. The question is therefore whether contemporary painting has abandoned the mission of modernity or whether modernity in Kandinsky's sense can still be claimed to be the language we speak. On the one hand, most artists today will tell you that modernist depth is no longer achievable - that the medium of painting cannot bear the weight of deep consciousness or revelatory sensation (and that in any case utopias are not to be trusted). On the other hand, Kandinsky's painting is sensuously rich. We need to ask questions about the workings and also about the relevance of its pleasures now. I want to suggest that the abstractness or objectlessness that is claimed for the early Kandinsky is no longer usefully thought of as a matter of 'veiling' images from Biblical scenes or the lives of the Saints - and that the terminology of 'inner sounds' and 'the epoch of the Great Spiritual' is pretty much exhausted today. I believe that, right from the start, abstractness was never intended to mean the end of pictorial culture as such; rather that what counted as 'the pictorial' and the culture of the pictorial was being put under pressure to change very fast and in some unpredictable ways. We may look at a painting of Kandinsky's pre-Moscow period (before the late part of 1914) and notice that, even though lacking in middle-sized objects bathed in rational light and exhibiting their familiar colour, several other marks of the traditional scheme of painting remain: the sense of a near-ground at the lower edge whose entities are somehow closer to the eye; a turbulent middle distance in which 'something happens'; and a sense of a rear-ground near the picture's upper edge in which the tops of buildings or skies or at any rate 'higher events' occur. Almost all Kandinsky's paintings before 1921 contain something like this spatial scheme - even if the 'events' as I have called them seem to belong, not to the rational spatial continuum of ordinary reality (middle-sized things having a relation to human scale) but to sub-aqueous or cosmic reality (the very small or the very large) where different laws of physics and optics apply. To say that different laws of nature apply is to say that light, colour and movement happen differently in the zones of the minute and the massive respectively. We can see today that these shifts into the aqueous or the cosmic are among the earliest of Kandinsky's major pictorial inventions - even if he refers to them infrequently in his writings of the time. And these scale-effects (as I want to call them) would become important in the light of the path that painting was soon to follow.
