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Plea for a graphic art (3) – A tipping point in creation?

 

A graphic approach to the work of one of the founders of modern art, Wassily Kandinsky. This is how I could present the ambition of the research notes I have just published. The first of them (“Plea for a graphic art (1) – “dissecting” with Wassily Kandinsky”) questions a method: “dissecting art”, and more precisely reducing painting to its basic elements. Which are essentially graphic: points, lines, and their various configurations (broken, wavy, fragmented in the latter case) and combinations that these simple objects offer. The second (“Plea for graphic art (2) – Drawing, a new creative perspective) questions an art of drawing, in particularly focusing on the Improvisations series where the significance of graphic processes is manifest. Traced freehand, the lines thus acquire a structuring character and the painter chooses to use gestures that I consider fully graphic, as in the case of the treatment of colors which seems to be conceived in the manner of watercolor. This research (in progress, we are in a notebook) aims to investigate the relationships between art and graphic design, and more precisely to understand the specificity of my subject of study in order to consider ways to explore it.

 

 

At the foundation of art: graphics?

Figure 1. Kandinsky, Wassily, 1926. “Free straight lines with common center” and “Free straight lines without common center”. In Point and line on plane. Paris: Editions Gallimard, “Folio essais”, 2003, p.84. © Editions Gallimard

 

These relationships and specificities are indeed not obvious, and firstly according to Kandinky himself as he writes in Point and line on plane: “Even at present there exist some art theorists who look askance at the use of point or line in painting. They would like to see the many venerable barriers preserved, which until recently isolated with apparent finality two fields of art from each other — that of painting and that of the graphics.” (p. 34). These statements already outline a certain position: “painting” does not refer to a material, or rather to a substance with the capacity to obscure its support (as in the case of Monet’s Folies Bergères). Here, we see the emergence of the refusal of a certain mystique, evident for example in Gérard Gasiorowski’s work who (as well synthesized by Jean-Paul Gavard-Pellet (2022)) claims to wants to engage with “Painting”. That is to say with a being born in Lascaux, enriched by numerous masters, and endowed with an unrivaled artistic aura (which he caricatures through an imaginary Academy Worosis Kiga, painted fiction regrouping master painters and students rewarded for their docile technique).

 

 

Art: a material and a tradition?

Figure 2. Gérard Gasiorowski, AWK. Academy Worosis Kiga, livre édité chez Maeght, 1994. © Gérard Gasiorowski and Maeght.

 

This approach, which I choose to call “material”, of art is certainly thought in contrast with the “spiritual” aspect cherished by Kandinsky, and it is for that reason that it interests me to the greatest extent. It is not just 70 years that separate the two artists, but also a certain relationship to graphic design: where Gasiorowski seeks to valorize a material, placing it as a common ground across a range of practices deployed throughout art history, Kandinsky turns its devaluation into an instrument of rupture. “At all events, there exists no inner reason for this separation” (Kandinsky, 1926, p.34) between painting and graphics. And the act of abolishing it even allows for the exploration of a little-known set of unrecognized artistic possibilities: “In that particular field of painting known as graphic, the point develops its autonomous powers with special clarity: the material tools offer to these powers many different possibilities in the way of diversity of form and size” (Kandinsky, 1926, p.46).

 

 

Material or spiritual: two forms of exploration?

In the Flowers series, Gérard Gasiorowski paints the same motif (two pots, two flowers) using the same arrangement (four sheets) until he exhausts a stock of paper in the studio that is never replenished. It’s noteworthy: the series is based on two contrasting efforts, a painting treated in the manner of plaster for the pot, and fireworks for the flower.

Figure 3. Gérard Gasiorowski, Fleurs n°085/86, livre édité chez Maeght, 1973-1983. © Gérard Gasiorowski and Maeght.

 

To put it another way: placing creation beyond any form of material (“Painting” with Gasio’s cap) and materiality allows it to be renewed. And I think that this is the nature of graphic design according to Kandinsky, and the reason that compels one to follow the “one way to arrive finally at their own graphic expression — analytic separation into fundamental elements” (Kandinky, 1926, p.99). The “dissection” we evoked earlier is indeed an opportunity for the construction of a new vocabulary of visibility: “accentuation” (which can be “a gradual, or a spontaneous, increase or decrease in strength” (Kandinsky, 1926, p.89)), “intensification” (which can be “quantitative and qualitative” (Kandinsky, 1926, p.96))… As Peg Weiss clearly shows in a fascinating article (1975), reading Point and line on plane means engaging in a true discovery of the line which can become a vector of colored (“something soft and velvet like”) or musical (“the lyric oversounds the dramatic” (Kandinky, 1926, p.97 for both)) sensations.

 

 

The consecration of graphic design?

Decorative design with circles and wavy lines by Kandinsky (between 1902 and 1904)

Figure 4. Drawing reproduced in Weis (1975, p.273), pencil on paper. Städtische Galerie, Munchen. © Städtische Galerie

 

If there is a renewal of creation, it also pertains to its domain of practice and skills, as Peg Weiss shows well by exploring one of the least known aspects of the famous painter’s work: “his enthusiasm for the applied arts” and his exploration of “areas of craftmanship” (Weiss, 1975, p.271). Indeed, is rarely discussed his work as a graphic designer executed in a style typical of the “Jugendstil period, particularly in the simplification and stylization of forms, the flattening of perspective, and the use of a winding or wavy line to bind the composition and to set up that characteristic surface rhythm” (Weiss, 1975, p.272). Perfect illustration, the designs created for jewelry preserved within its notebooks (cf. figure 4). 24 years earlier, we can see the gestures which will be highlighted in Point and line on plane: for example, the graphic tension between the simplicity of the circle that encloses the entire composition, and the complexity of the circles and doubles lines that it encloses.

 

 

Graphic as “apercu”?

Three designs for pedants by Kandinsky (between 1902 and 1904)

Figure 5. Drawing reproduced in Weis (1975, p.274), pencil on paper. Städtische Galerie, Munchen. © Städtische Galerie

 

This “striking example of Kandinsky’s genius for abstraction and synthesis” (Weiss, 1975, p.272) is, above all, another demonstration of his interest in graphics, expressed in eloquent terms in a correspondence dated 1904: “Graphic art is style, graphic art is apercu, lyric, extremely personal epigram; graphic art is no striving after truth-tonature, but rather yearning for subjective language” (Weiss, 1975, p.276). The idea that an art “applied” for purposes we would today call “industrial” arises from a desire (“yearning”) for expression (“subjective language”) is, in any case, radically new. It certainly sheds light on a resolutely disruptive proposition that aims to reposition art at the center of technology and society (Kandinky, 1926, p.34): rather than just distinguishing “painting” and “graphics”, we should differentiate between “hand painting” and “print painting”. Faced with a confusion (“”graphic” has lost its clarity — it is not uncommon for watercolour to be classified with the graphics”), the problem needs to be framed differently: not in terms of the specificity of the “means” of art and a mode of expression, but in terms of a mode of publicization or, to put it differently, a medium.

 

References

KANDINSKY, Vassily (1926). Point and line to plane. Dearstyne, Howard. Reba, Hilla (translation). New-York City: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the museum of non-objective painting, 1947. URL : https://www.wassilykandinsky.net/book-pointlinetoplane.html (accessed June 4, 2024).

GAVARD-PELLET, Jean-Paul (2022). Peinture et la « non-peinture ». TK-21. La revue, n°133-134. https://www.tk-21.com/Peinture-et-non-la-peinture (accessed June 24, 2024).

WEISS, Peg (1975). Kandinsky and the “Jugendstil” Arts and Crafts Movement. The Burlington Magazine, 117(866), 270–279. http://www.jstor.org/stable/878002

 

 

 


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Benoît Berthou (24 juin 2024). Plea for a graphic art (3) – A tipping point in creation? Mediagraphic. Consulté le 9 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/11vwh


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