Cossacks
Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944) · 1910 to 1911
At first the canvas is a burst of colour: a rainbow arching over the middle, a red patch at the top left, blue hills, a scatter of black lines. Then the objects appear. Two Cossacks on horseback fight with sabres at the top, their tall orange hats and red lances just legible; three more stand in a row on the right with lances raised; below the rainbow is a fortress on a hill, and a flock of birds crosses the sky. Kandinsky is halfway between picture and abstraction, and he wants you to feel the moment when the subject slips away.
The painting is a fragment of a larger work, Composition Four, and it repeats that picture's left side almost exactly. Look at the way the lines work independently of the colour: the black contours of the horses and lances float over patches of pigment that do not follow them. Kandinsky believed that colour and line had direct effects on the soul, like music, and that a painting could be composed like a symphony. The rainbow is the hinge of the picture, a bridge between the battle above and the calm below.
Kandinsky painted this in Munich in nineteen ten and eleven, the years in which he wrote his book On the Spiritual in Art and founded the Blue Rider group with Franz Marc. The Cossack subject comes from his Russian childhood and from memories of the nineteen five revolution in Moscow, when he saw Cossack troops in the streets. The painting was bought for the Tate in nineteen thirty eight, one of the first abstract works to enter a British public collection, and it has been a landmark of the modern galleries ever since.
Did You Know? Kandinsky claimed that as a child he heard colours as sounds, and he composed this painting as though it were a piece of music.
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