Die künstlerische „Doppelbegabung“ und das „Gesamtkunstwerk“ der Moderne. Das Experimentierlabor des Blauen Reiters

At the beginning of the twentieth century art had to respond to the needs of Modernity: with Kandinsky words, the new aim of art was to express the “inner necessity” in order to give voice to the visionary interior power of the human soul. “The inner sound” of art was experimented mainly within the Circle of the “Blauer Reiter” in Munich: this group of artists, under the spiritual and aesthetic leadership of Wassily Kandisky and Franz Marc, was mostly constituted by “double talented” artists, who tried to expand the boundaries of their own expressive languages by experimenting with mixed techniques derived from other arts. Their aim was to leave behind the representational art of the past to achieve a new intense expressive power by combining different artistic languages in an encompassing synthesis. Thanks to their ability in intermedial working, they theorized and experimented the reunion of separate art languages – like painting, music, literature, sculpture –, in order to create the “work of art” of the future. Particularly rich in experimental consequences was the relationship between the painter-composer Arnold Schönberg and the painter, poet and music enthusiast Wassily Kandinsky in 1911. Schönberg took part to the movement not only as musician, publishing in the Almanac of the “Blauer Reiter” (1911) an essay about the relation of words and music, but also as painter, since two paintings of him appeared in the publication. Even more relevant is Schönberg’s and Kandinsky’s reciprocal attempt of integrating features of the artistic expression of the other. This is the case of Kandinsky’s painting Impression III – Konzert, in which he tried to render his own impressions by listening to the innovative Streichquartett op. 10 and Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 composed by Schönberg. Together with other “double talents”, like the artists Franz Marc, David Burliuk, both painters and writers, or the artists Michail Alexjewitsch Kusmin and Thomas Alexandrowitsch Hartmann, both composers and painters, Kandinsky developed the principles of the total artwork of the future: thanks to his own experience and that of his friends as double talents, the experiments of the “Blauer Reiter” strived at unifying and blending together related and collaborating arts, in order to make their boundaries disappear and, giving birth to a new expressive world of equivalents and relations.