Entwurf zu Blauer Fleck

The present watercolor Entwurf zu Blauer Fleck, belonging to a crucial phase in the artist’s career as he drew ever closer to pure abstraction, was executed during turbulent times for Kandinsky. In 1910 he had set out on the route to total abstraction. In early 1911 the group that he had formed two years earlier, the Neue Kunstlervereinigung München (NKVM) of which he was then president, was on the verge of breaking up due to the artistic differences of its members. Originally the artists, who included Alexej von Jawlensky, Alfred Kubin, Gabriele Münter and Franz Marc, desired to find expression through painting of their external impressions and inner experiences–aiming at an artistic synthesis of senses. In January 1911, Kandinsky resigned from the presidency of the NKVM, and in the following December, having had Composition VII rejected by the NKVM jury, he, Marc, Münter and Kubin resigned from the society. Kandinsky felt that the group had strayed too far from their original aims by becoming too decorative. To him, they were no longer sufficiently independent of those artists from whom they had originally formed the society to distance themselves artistically. Kandinsky believed that traditional representative art was dead, but that abstract art still needed a subject to survive. The subject had to be an experience or emotion which should be communicated through an abstract language.

According to Vivian Endicott Barnett, the title of the present work is based on its resemblance to several drawings in the Lenbachhaus, on one of which Münter had written Zu Blauer Fleck. While there is no final painting titled Zu Blauer Fleck, the present work has strong links with the abstract landscape Improvisation 30 (Kanonen), namely, the large blue oval at the center of the composition (H.K. Roethel and J.K. Benjamin, no. 452; fig. 1). Münter also ascribed the subtitle Blauer Flek = Kanonen, as indicated by her handwriting next to the painting's entry in the artist’s Handlist III. Kandinsky has described the “Improvisations” as being “chiefly unconscious, for the most part suddenly arising expressions of events of an inner character, hence impressions of ‘internal nature’” (quoted in op. cit., p. 30). It was with the “Improvisations” that the artist was finally able to free his loose and brilliantly colored forms almost completely from representational reality.