BEELDEN IN VEELVOUD

6. Wassily Kandinsky,
Improvhatlon Deluge
(Large Studyfor
Composilion VI),
1913, oilon canvas,
95 x 150 cm,
Stadtische Galerie
ini Lenbachhaus,
Munich.
we find the most likely candidate for Kandinsky's final vïsual source —
namely, the volume devoted to the deluge and storm drawïngs.35
The title of Rouveyre's volume is Études et dessins sur l'atmosphère. The term
'atmosphere' was already used in 1899 by Müntz to characterize Leonardo's
drawings of the deluge and storms and it was therefore also adoptcd by
Pcladan in 1910. Tt is remarkable that the same term often turns up in
Kandinsky's Überdas Geisiigewho uses it to refer to the invisible realm of
inner thoughts and emotions.36 As already said, Kandinsky thought hè
owed it to his own time and to posterity to depict this spiritual atmosphere
in a non-figurative way, thus abandoning the Renaissance tradition of
which Lconardo was such an outstanding representative. The important
thing to stress however is that: in comparison with his written texts, Leonardo's
own drawings seem to testify ro a quite different, almost non-Renaissance
approach towards the dcpiction of storms and the deluge (fig. 5).
It is as if decorative patterns prevail in them over narrative details, making
these drawings look like further evidence to support the notion that hè was
an avant-garde artist long before this term was devised. In 1903, for example,
Bernard Berenson dcscribed them as being full of'poetic force and
decorative beauty'.37 Kandinsky himsclf must have seen them as the expression
of a kindred artist, one who was concerned above all with the
composition of abstract patterns of repetitive and parallel curving Unes and
of overlapping or juxtaposed amorphous forms, rather than with creating
illusions. This must surely have been the decisive reason for him to embrace
Leonardo's drawings with such fervour.
464 Paul van den Akker