Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "bernhard"

Ever-helpful Google put a nice design over its home page recently- it was Wassily Kandinsky’s birthday. If he was still with us, he would be 148.

Mostly this blog is about writing, and while Kandinsky did write, and beautifully in his way, it is his painting that we love. I first saw a real Kandinsky, as opposed to a print or a picture in a book, in the Zurich art gallery in 1984, and it floored me. It was from his last period, when he made squiggles and blots and interesting shapes and somehow managed to fit them into a harmonious whole – he saw much of his art as a visual representation of music – and I loved it. They’d squashed it into a wee alcove as part of a section on the anarchist (or so-called anarchist) Dada movement. I don’t know if Kandinsky was ever a part of this protest movement that flourished in Zurich during the First World War (he was in Russia at the time); he later taught at the Bauhaus in Berlin, the progressive German art/architecture school shut down by the Nazis, along with his mate from the pre-war Munich period, the Swiss wunderkind Paul Klee.

That trip to Europe from New Zealand where I live, which began in Zurich in 1984, changed my ideas about art a lot – looking in galleries and museums I resolved on returning to New Zealand to concentrate on displaying original art works in future in my home and move away from prints of the greats. Kandinsky’s single abstract in the Zurich kunsthaus sent me in that direction, and it is a good direction to go in. Today my home throbs with the living work of many artists – “originals”. They may not be perfect and indeed aren’t. So far nothing has happened in my life to enable me to buy a Picasso, a Braque, a Klee or a Kandinsky. But there is something about engaging with an original artwork, whether it be a painting, sculpture, original print, weaving, photo, or lithograph, that sets it apart from a mass-produced copy, even when the copy is of an acknowledged masterpiece and the reproduction high-quality. My relationship with these original works is individual, as unique and unrepeatable as the works themselves, and the sense of harmony and love that I draw from having these in my home in place of reproductions is something I wish for you, dear reader. There is nothing like it. I promise.

There is however more where Kandinsky is concerned. I didn’t see any other of his works on that trip; it was not until I cycled the Danube in 2000 that I ran into a super collection of his breakthrough paintings in Munich. These are from his so-called “Blaue Reiter” (Blue Rider) period and they are as unlike his later work as his earlier. These were in a special gallery called Lenbachhaus, essentially created around the collection itself, as the former home of a lover of Kandinsky’s who had bequeathed her collection to the public, including works by her and Klee.

Some of Kandinsky’s pre-Blaue Reiter work was there too, and it also did change my life. It was terrible. Kandinsky’s attempts to paint quasi realist and impressionist art were pretty hopeless; in the “typical” sense of how we appreciate art, in terms of drawing and representing figures and so on, Kandinsky couldn’t paint, at least then. Suddenly he threw all that aside, and began producing a stunning range of almost non-representational canvases of terrific power, not yet abstract as they would later be, and far from his most famous squiggles, but well past anything the impressionists ever did. Whatever the truth about his technique, what changed for Kandinsky changed in his mind, and the entire human race, including all those who will never see anything by him, original or reproduction, is in his debt.

Of course we can’t all be like Kandinsky, and suddenly metamorphose from Sunday painter to genius with colour and abstract compositions. But we can learn a great deal from his example. He freed himself in his head and kept going…

As a writer, I am only too conscious of my own limitations. Some of my stuff is ok; I get a frisson of pleasure when I turn out a well-crafted phrase, or dialogue, or paragraph of description, and when somehow this fits into a coherent whole, it is even better. But so far anyway I have not had the genius breathed into me that would allow me to suddenly go from hack thriller author to amazo-wildman of literature that Kandinsky seems to have had as an artist in Munich in the years before 1914.

I would definitely like to. The so-called experimental writers don’t appeal to me much, unless we count Celine, who was not really experimental but expressive in a new way. Lately, reading Thomas Bernhard, a Celinist with his own voice, I can see how perhaps this is possible for me. Writing is not painting. It has its own rules and they are extremely complex: language as speech and then written expression is the most complicated thing we humans do, or so I say. The infinite variety of expression that is the result shows this. But we can obey the rules by flouting them, as Celine and Bernhard show and as Kandinsky in art proved.

There is more to this that may locate a decisive break in human culture in Munich via Kandinsky, Klee and – Adolf Hitler. Like Kandinsky, Hitler had some talent as a painter, but not much. I have seen a number of Hitler’s watercolours, in Florence in 1984. They were not bad – just not very good. Perhaps they were even better than Kandinsky’s from the same rough period apart from a very suggestive inability to render people. The future mad dictator just couldn’t do it: his very nicely turned out opera house featured awkward stick figures in the foreground. But while Hitler fired his resentment at being rejected by art school into a passion for mass murder, Kandinsky headed in a completely new way.

Hitler washed up in Munich before the war, apparently to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft, but keen as to help shed an ocean of blood. There is a photo of him in the crowd in the city on the announcement of war in 1914, his face eager, delighted, euphoric…he went on to get an Iron Cross. Kandinsky had to flee via Switzerland to avoid internment, leaving his canvases behind.

After the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, Kandinsky returned to Germany and ended up in France after the Nazis came to power, dying in Paris in 1944. He left more canvases behind in Moscow, seized by a bemused revolutionary government that willingly traded his work for favours with western capitalists. Klee joined Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and also died during the war, in his native Switzerland after a protracted illness.

Apart from his terrific art – apparently to be subject of a show in Britain soon, and how I would like to go! – is Kandinsky’s focus and desire. He just loved to paint, and brought pleasure to millions. Thanks, Wassily.

Hello there. It is a crisp and windy morning in the quaint village near the Ruahine range in New Zealand where I am presently parked in a tranquil cottage not far from the railway line. That may seem a contradiction as the wagons roll along the track, but it isn’t – the noise, even at 3 AM, is not at all irritating.

For months I have been working through the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering evidence, the second of his non-fiction books I have read. That makes it sound like a chore, which in a sense it has been – I am not the only one to complain about the small type of the edition I bought that has made the physical act of reading literally tiresome. This is especially true as one of Bernhard’s stylistic trademarks is not to have paragraphs. He starts, and keeps going. . .and going. . .and going. The writing is however a pleasure in itself; he is arguably the best post-war writer of all I have read. That’s saying a great deal when you consider wonderful stylists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass, but for me it is true.

Even though I enjoy and admire his fiction, Bernhard’s memoirs show him at his finest. There is a gritty integrity to Gathering evidencethat for any writer is a challenge, as there also is to his shorter piece, Wittgenstein’s nephew. Bernhard did not flinch from the world he saw, experienced and depicted, and did not hesitate to draw tough-minded conclusions plainly if without rancour.

Celine, whose approach and style must have influenced Bernhard, wrote that “first you’ve got to pay for it – then you can use it”. Celine’s point was about fiction, made up stories that the French writer argued needed to be based on personal experience. In Celine’s case this experience was often harrowing, if self-inflicted. Bernhard started off badly, an unwanted child born out of wedlock in the Netherlands where his mother had gone to give shameful birth, and made his mark through tough-minded assertiveness. He paid for it and paid for it, then mined it, magically transforming the dross of an often terrible youth into gold.

There were differences between Celine and Bernhard. Celine’s anti-Semitism drove him unwillingly into the arms of France’s Vichy collaborators in their outpost in Sigmaringen, Germany, while Bernhard, who began his adult life as a reporter for a socialist newspaper, turned his most cruel microscope on Austria’s Catholics and Nazis and later on the poseurs of a rekindled Austrian cultural renaissance. Yet both were anarchists. . .and felt deeply for those whose lives were blighted by the system that surrounded and shaped them.

What makes them cousins of the pen beyond perspective, however, is style. Bernhard took his cue from an apparently unending scroll while Celine famously used the ellipse, but for both, the effect was the appearance of raving that is anything but. A film of a Billy Connolly routine shows the wonder comic’s style was very much like that. Connolly tells stories, seems to wander and then comes back to the beginning to make his point. “You thought I had forgotten, hadn’t you?” he scolded his audience. “This is my technique!” Just so. What seems to be effortless and even artless, is high art.

Bernhard wrote the five parts of his memoir in a certain order, ending them with his earliest experiences. The translator of Gathering evidence (or perhaps an editor) chose to put the last one first, to keep the memoir chronological. I should have skipped that one, and read it last as was Bernhard’s intention. I understand what he was doing, and I may read that section again.