The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wassily Kandinsky · the sixth of the canvases the painter named Compositions · oil on canvas, 195 by 300 cm · one horizontal field of colour and line with no horizon and no ground, about two centres, a blurred one at the left and a hard one at the right · painted in Munich, dated 1913 · State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg · the one canvas scored as it stands, whole, with nothing in it replaced; the studies, the painting on glass of the Deluge from which it grew and the painter’s essay on its making are context
Mode
History painting with its subject removed; a Composition, carrying the apocalyptic subject at full scale in colour and line alone
Mythos
The Flood, the world ended by water and begun again; built in the making, from the Deluge on glass, and evoked in the result
Phase
One canvas of 1913, painted in Munich after a long course of studies; the consolidation at full scale of a turn begun in the Improvisations of 1910 and 1911
Presentation
Oil on canvas, 195 by 300 cm; soft, bled edges and close values at the left, sharp line and hard contrast at the right, and washes, stains, patches and black hatching between
Register
Dissolution and violence, transport and dread, in one field; a storm with two centres and no still place outside it
Scale
One field of 5.85 square metres, larger than the body, seen whole only from several paces and read in detail only from close
Governing Proposition
A canvas three metres wide, painted in Munich in 1913, gives a flood with nothing of a flood left in it: no ark, no drowned, no dove, no horizon and no ground. It grew from a painting on glass of the Deluge whose motifs could still be read, and over a long course of studies its subject was given up. What remains is the event as force, heard twice: at the left a soft, blurred haze of rose and violet where colour dissolves, at the right a hard knot of black line cut across hot colour, and between them diagonal currents that make the two one field. The wager of the canvas is that a catastrophe and the renewal that follows it can be shown as one event of colour and line, with nothing left to name.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Wassily Kandinsky painted Composition VI in Munich and dated it 1913. It is oil on canvas, 195 by 300 centimetres, a horizontal field of 5.85 square metres, one high to a little over one and a half wide, and it is in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It is the sixth of the canvases he named Compositions. Composition VII, painted later in the same year and nearly the same size, is another work. The work here is the one canvas as it stands; the studies for it, the earlier painting on glass from which it grew and the essay the painter wrote on its making are evidence of how it was made, and none of them is the work.
There is no horizon on it, no ground and no point of view. There are two centres. At the left is a soft, rose-tinged, blurred mass, built of bled edges and close values, where colour dissolves into a haze of rose and violet and the eye is let go. At the right is a hard knot of sharp dark lines and harsher reds and blues, where black lines cut across hot colour like breaking timbers. Between them diagonal currents run across the field, and they are what makes the two centres one picture. Around and among them lie thin washes and stains, dense patches, and fine black hatching, the whole held at a high pitch of colour from edge to edge.
The field is about three and a half times the area of Broadway Boogie Woogie and more than eight times that of The Starry Night. It is larger than the body: it can be seen whole only from several paces, and read in detail only from close, and at neither distance is there an edge or a ground to stand on. The viewer is inside the flood rather than before a picture of it. Under scrutiny the structure holds. Take away either centre and the canvas becomes a single storm with no counterweight; take away the currents and the centres fall apart. Much of the rest could be moved, thinned or doubled, and the picture would stand.
Movement II
The picture began with a flood. By the painter’s own account it grew from an earlier painting of his on glass, a Deluge, and from that through a long course of studies to the canvas. The painting on glass kept its motifs where they could be read: the Flood there is a story, with water and boats and those it overtakes. The canvas keeps none of them. There is no ark, no drowned and no dove, and the title is not Deluge but Composition. The subject that set the work going was given up on the way to it.
The two paintings stand as an experiment the painter made for himself, the same theme with and without its objects. The painting on glass knows a story of the Flood. The canvas knows the Flood as force: that a catastrophe can be shown as the collision of colour and line, and that its destruction and the new world after it are one rhythm, the soft centre and the hard heard as two voices of one event. Restore the objects, and it becomes a picture of a flood. Reduce it, and the viewer stands outside the event. Take away the counterpoint, and the renewal goes with it.
What is lost is the particular. The Flood is the deepest of the old stories, the world ended by water and begun again, and here it ordered the making; on the canvas it is not kept as any particular flood, because nothing particular is kept. The literature reads vestiges of the studies in the field, waves, the oars of boats, falling forms, but they cannot be read as such without a key, and they sit there as a residue of the earlier form, which the picture neither needs nor abolishes. A viewer who has not been told the genesis sees turbulence, agitation and release. The myth is built in the making and evoked in the result.
Movement III
The law of the canvas is the painter’s own: colour and line treated as forces, each with an inner sound, set against one another in counterpoint, so that contrast is the structure of the picture and not its disturbance. The blurred haze at the left and the black lines at the right are as far apart as two elements on the canvas can be, and they obey that one law. Warm and cool, wash and line, dissolution and violence, the near-empty and the crowded are all held in it, and the diagonals that run between the centres are the law in motion.
The making carries it. Two opposite handlings are set in one field and each is fully realised: the soft, bled edges and close values of the left, the sharp line and hard contrast of the right. The range of mark, from thin wash and stain to dense patch to fine black hatching, is held under one hand across three metres, and the colour does not drop from its pitch. The diagonals make a field this crowded legible as two centres and a current. The heights come in two registers: dread at the right, where the event is most violent, and transport at the left, where it dissolves; and the grandeur of a field with nowhere to stand.
The density is also the cost. In passages the forms overlap with no clear priority, and the eye cannot tell intended ambiguity from crowding; at the thickest crossings the counterpoint gives way to noise, and line is in places quick to the point of slackness. The summits compete, so that the eye is more often busied than lifted, and first sight gives tumult before it gives height. Many secondary patches and hatchings could be other than they are. The long course of studies shows a field searched for rather than found, and the search shows in the paint.
Movement IV
Behind the canvas stands the European history picture and its apocalyptic subjects, the Flood and the Last Judgement, as painting had carried them for five centuries. Behind Kandinsky’s own path stand his paintings on glass of saints and riders, Russian and Bavarian in source, and the Fauve and Jugendstil colour he had left behind. Out of that inheritance the canvas makes a cataclysm at the scale of a history painting with its subject removed, bodies, water and ark dissolved into colour and line on a field without horizon, ground or point of view. It was a painter of established name staking a monumental canvas on a picture most of his public could not read.
The break was not made here first. Kandinsky’s Improvisations of 1910 and 1911 had already left the object behind, and in 1911 the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich refused his Composition V: that refusal was the price the turn actually cost. What this canvas adds is the scale. Before the Compositions, abstraction had been a matter of studies and small canvases; with this canvas and Composition VII, painted later the same year, non-objective painting took the ambition and the size of the history picture. Composition VI consolidates the turn at full scale, and the seventh makes the fuller statement.
In the same year Kandinsky published an essay on the making of this picture, printed in the album that the Sturm in Berlin issued in 1913 on his work from 1901 to 1913. It traces the canvas from its beginnings, and it is paraphrased here, not quoted. With it the picture became a demonstration: a canvas whose method was made public in its own year, its genesis set down in the painter’s own words, beside his analogy between painting and music. Part of what the form knows is said there more fully than in the paint, and much of the force of the turn belongs to the Improvisations, to the seventh Composition and to On the Spiritual in Art.
Movement V
The canvas has come through 113 years whole: one canvas, with no cut, no alteration and no later hand known on it. Its condition in detail is not known here, and nothing beyond the ordinary risk of an oil of its age is charged. It went to Russia, and it was in Russian museums through the Soviet decades, under a state that turned against the avant-garde; how long it was kept from public view is not settled here. In those years its reach came by reproduction and by the name of the series. The American painters who took abstraction to mural scale in the 1940s knew Kandinsky largely through the collection of Solomon Guggenheim in New York, not through this canvas.
It now hangs in the Hermitage, and it has outlived the conditions that made it. Nothing on its surface depicts 1913. Those who see in it the war of 1914 coming bring that from outside: the canvas holds the natural order as water and storm, the sacred as the Flood and the Judgement behind it, consciousness as the inner sound the painter made his subject, and time as before and after, destruction and creation in one field; history it does not hold. Nor does it hold a person, a family, labour or a state. What it holds, the two centres place and the current joins.
The questions have not closed. Is the canvas abstract, or a veiled image whose apocalyptic subjects can be recovered, as Rose-Carol Washton Long argued for the Compositions in Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (1980)? How far does the theosophical and apocalyptic programme govern what is seen? Is it a picture or a score? The field does not settle them, and its forms do not settle into one reading of near and far. The rose haze at the left still lets the eye go, the black lines at the right still break across the colour, and between them the currents still run, carrying a flood that has no water left in it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, at two levels. At the structure it holds. The two centres cannot go: the soft, rose-tinged, blurred mass at the left and the hard knot at the right, with its sharp dark lines and harsher reds and blues, are the picture’s argument, one event heard twice, as dissolution and as violence. Take either away and the canvas is a single storm with no counterweight. The diagonal currents cannot go, since they make two centres one field, and the horizontal format is compelled: a deluge is a spread, and the eye must travel. What gives is the population. Many secondary patches and hatchings could be moved, thinned or doubled without loss, more of the surface than in Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.7), and the long course of studies shows a field searched rather than found.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited as fully as through words, and two things can be stated that hold. First, a catastrophe can be shown without a single depicted body or wave: the Deluge is given as the collision of colour and line, so that what is disclosed is the event’s force rather than its look. Second, destruction and new creation are one event, carried on the canvas as the counterpoint of the soft centre and the hard. These are propositions, not moods. What holds the axis is that much of what the field gives is a state, agitation and release, and the second proposition is legible more from the picture’s known genesis than compelled by the paint: a viewer who has not been told sees turbulence. It stands below Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.1).
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation is real, in two registers, and it recurs across the field. Dread at the right centre, where black lines cut across hot colour like breaking timbers, the event at its most violent. Transport at the left, where colour dissolves into a rose and violet haze and the eye is let go. Grandeur in the scale: three metres of field with no horizon or edge to stand on, so that the viewer is inside the flood rather than before a picture of one. The diagonals carry the eye between the centres with a motion no small canvas could give. What holds it is frequency against density: the summits compete, and first sight gives tumult before height. Above Broadway Boogie Woogie (8.0) for range; below The Starry Night (9.2) and Water Lilies (9.0).
Score: 8.3 / 10
The archetype is the deepest there is: the Flood, the world ended by water and begun again. In the making it is built. By the painter’s account the picture grew from his painting on glass of the Deluge, and the structure of destruction and renewal bears load in the two centres. But on the canvas the myth is dissolved by design. The title is Composition, not Deluge; there is no ark, no drowned and no dove; and the vestiges the literature reads in the field, waves, oars, falling forms, are not legible as such without a key. The particular is not kept, because there is none: where the axis asks that the particular acquire the archetype and remain itself, here it was given up to reach it. Built in the making, evoked in the result.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the European history picture and its apocalyptic subjects, the Flood and the Last Judgement, as painting had carried them for five centuries; in Kandinsky’s own case it came through his glass paintings of saints and riders, Russian and Bavarian in source, and the Fauve and Jugendstil colour he had left behind. The departure: a cataclysm at the scale of a history painting with its subject removed, bodies, water and ark dissolved into colour and line on a field without horizon, ground or point of view. The stake: a painter of established name putting a monumental canvas on a picture most of his public could not read. Held below the top because the swerve was not first made here: the Improvisations of 1910 and 1911 made the break, and Composition V, refused by the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1911, paid its cost.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, and the controlled experiment exists. The Deluge painted on glass, its motifs still visible, knows a story of the Flood; this canvas knows the Flood as force. That knowledge, that a catastrophe can be shown as the collision of colour and line and that its destruction and renewal are one rhythm, exists only as this unobjective field. Restore the objects and it becomes a picture of a flood. Reduce the scale and the viewer stands outside the event. Remove the counterpoint of blurred and hard and the renewal goes. Held below Broadway Boogie Woogie (9.1) for two reasons: the vestigial motifs are a residue of the earlier form, which the picture neither needs nor abolishes; and part of what the form knows is said more fully in the painter’s essay than in the paint.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: 113 years, and a literature on Kandinsky’s move into abstraction that has not closed, in which this canvas is a central case because its genesis is documented in the painter’s own words. Is it abstract, or a veiled image, the argument Rose-Carol Washton Long made central in Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (1980), reading hidden apocalyptic imagery in the Compositions? How far does the theosophical and apocalyptic programme govern what is seen? Is the canvas a picture or a score, given the painter’s analogy with music? The field yields on return: its forms do not settle into one reading of near and far. Held lower because much of the argument concerns the Compositions as a series, with Composition VII taking the heaviest share, and much of the return has been to the reproduction rather than the canvas.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Field: European painting from 1910 to 1914, and the move to abstraction. Intrinsic force: with Composition VII, this canvas made non-objective painting a monumental genre, carrying the ambition and scale of the history picture into abstraction, which before the Compositions had been a matter of studies and small canvases; and the essay printed with it in 1913 made it a demonstration, a picture whose method was published. The discount is large. Much of the force belongs to the series and to Composition VII (9.0), the fuller statement, and much to the Improvisations and to On the Spiritual in Art. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the American painters who took abstraction to mural scale in the 1940s knew Kandinsky largely through Solomon Guggenheim’s collection in New York, not through this canvas, which was in Russia; its own reach came by reproduction and by the series’ name.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the image is whole, one canvas, with no cut, alteration or later hand known, and at 113 years it stands on the step from seventy years to two centuries, where a whole canvas usually holds 9.0 to 9.1. Presence is charged. The canvas has been in Russian museums through the Soviet decades, under a state that turned against the avant-garde, and in those years its reach came by reproduction; how long it was kept from public view is not settled here, and no span is given. It now hangs in the Hermitage, it has outlived the conditions of its making, and nothing on its surface depicts 1913. Fabric: oil on canvas, no damage known, the general risk of its age charged. Held below the step for the absence, as Water Lilies (8.9) is held for its dark decades.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a canvas three metres wide, to the same anchors as any medium. The making bears load where it counts. Two opposite handlings are orchestrated in one field and each fully realised: the left built of soft, bled edges and close values, the right of sharp line and hard contrast. The range of mark, from thin washes and stains to dense patches to fine black hatching, is held under one hand; colour is sustained at high pitch across the width; and the diagonals make a field this crowded legible as two centres and a current. The costs are real. The density congests passages where forms overlap without clear priority, and the eye cannot tell intended ambiguity from crowding; line is in places quick to the point of slackness. Below Broadway Boogie Woogie and The Starry Night (9.0).
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the blurred rose haze of the left centre and the sharp black lines of the right. They obey one law, and the law is the painter’s: colour and line as forces with an inner sound, set in counterpoint, contrast as the structure rather than its disturbance. The soft and the hard are the two voices of one event, and the diagonals between them are the law in motion. The range is wide for one field: warm and cool, wash and line, dissolution and violence, the near-empty and the crowded. Two things resist. The vestiges of depiction the literature reads, the waves and the oars, belong to an older law, the picture of a thing, and sit in the field as a second physics half erased; and at the densest crossings counterpoint gives way to noise. Narrowness is not the limit here; residue is.
Score: 8.4 / 10
An unobjective field holds few orders, and this one holds more than most. The natural order: water, flood and storm, given as force. The sacred: the Flood and, behind it, the Last Judgement, the world ended and begun again. Consciousness: the inner sound the painter made his subject, the viewer’s experience as the work’s medium. Time: before and after, destruction and creation held in one field. They are integrated: the two centres place the destruction and the renewal, and the current joins them. History is not credited; the readings that see the war of 1914 coming bring it from outside. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is nearly everything else: no person, no family, no labour, no state. It stands with Broadway Boogie Woogie (6.6) and Water Lilies (6.5).
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Made at 8.6 and The Living Form at 8.5. A whole canvas of 113 years that has outlived the conditions of its making and the decades its reach came by reproduction; two opposite handlings, soft and hard, each fully realised in one field three metres wide, with a range of mark held under one hand; and a form that knows the Flood as force where the painting on glass it grew from knew a story, the knowledge going if the objects were restored, the scale reduced or the counterpoint removed.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the natural order, the sacred, consciousness and time are held and joined by the two centres, and there is no person, family, labour or state, and no history the canvas itself holds. Next above it, The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8: the canvas discloses a catastrophe as force, but much of what it gives is a state, the renewal is legible more from its genesis than from the paint, and the Flood that ordered the making is dissolved in the result.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short, and The Unconcealment at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 fall well short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. The twelve sum to 97.3, an average of 8.11 that displays 8.1.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it is held by the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, in 2026 (oil on canvas, 195 by 300 cm, painted in Munich and dated 1913) and of its documented genesis; not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the one canvas as it stands: no part of it is known to have been lost, replaced or reworked by another hand, and nothing stands in place of an original. The format, the scale, the two centres over a field with no horizon and no ground, and the genesis from the Deluge are known securely; the placing of individual forms only in outline. The studies, the earlier painting on glass of the Deluge from which, by the painter’s account, the picture grew, Kandinsky’s essay on its making in the Sturm album of 1913, and Composition VII, painted later the same year, are context, and none is scored. The essay is paraphrased and not quoted; no words of the painter’s are quoted, and the canvas carries no inscription that is quoted. The vestiges of the Deluge that the literature reads in the field are reported as readings, not as forms. Its keeping in the Soviet decades is weighed only as a fact of survival, and none of it is charged to the painter. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the building in which the canvas hangs, the route by which it entered the museum, how long the picture was carried before the final canvas and how long the final campaign took, what the painter wrote of the picture’s meaning beyond its genesis, the span of years it was kept from view, its condition in detail, and the number of its forms and hues.