Kandinskij in Italia: tra ricordo e visione, alla ricerca di una "nuova qualità" del colore

Abstract

This essay reconstructs Vasilij Kandisnkij’s journey accompanied by Gabriele Münter, on the Ligurian Riviera between December 1905 and April 1906. The reconstruction focuses on the role that Kandinskij gives to the memory and to the power of imagination to acquire and to "represent" solicitations by the vast repertory of art. Furthermore it takes into consideration testimonies, documents, few notes written by the artist and the paintings and drawings of the notebooks, works which are largely preserved at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus of Monaco of Bavaria. The memory of the trip to Italy, the first performed in 1869 at the age of three years old with his parents, has similarity with a Carl Blechen’s painting that the Russian artist could see on his arrival in Monaco or through publications at the end of the nineteenth century. The texture of the painting (Schlucht bei Amalfi, 1831), showing a foreshortening of the Italian landscape, will be resumed in 1900 by Kandinskij in his painting Landscape, among the earliest evidence of the gallery of small paintings that will mark the first decade of the entire production of the twentieth century and that will lead to the season of Murnau. Italy and the Ligurian coast will provide to the artist an additional solicitation to look to a new color quality, starting a process of recognition of the spirit.