Kunstsammlung NRW

From “horseradish” to “billy goat”

Marion Ackermann on Wassily Kandinsky’s names for the color white

April 1, 2014

There are countless variants of the color white, and more than 1000 different white pigments. How are all of these manifestations of white to be named? Wassily Kandinsky hit upon an original solution to this problem.

Writing was always extremely important to Kandinsky – at times, textual even preceded visual expression. Although a native of Russia, he wrote in German, albeit in an unconventional and direct fashion. He authored theoretical texts, poems, and theater works. “White” is mentioned frequently, albeit not much more so than the other colors. Only after repeated readings does one peculiar aspect of his texts become conspicuous: they refer to an astonishing number of objects that are evocative of various conceptions of white.

Mentioned, for example, in the volume of poetry entitled Klänge (Sounds), dating from 1913, are (often with multiple repetitions) “horseradish,” “birch,” “birch grove,” “piebald horse (apple) (the reference being to “Apfelschimmel,” i.e. the German for “dappled”), “billy goat,” “teeth,” “paper,” “cloud,” “cauliflower,” “foam,” “snow,” “frost,” “chalk,” and “paste.” Moreover, Kandinsky combines the word “white” in an associative fashion with various substances as a color adjective: “white curtain,” “white path,” “white leap,” “white paper,” “white horse,” “grayish-white houses,” “decorative white houses,” “white panel,” “white watering can,” “white wall,” “white arch,” “white person,” “white 3,” “raven-black horse, that becomes ever whiter through white, hot foam,” “white lips painted with chalk,” “white face,” “little white blossoms that looked like flat little saucers,” “the white-haired toy bunny.”

Or we can turn to his autobiographical Rückblicke (Reminiscences), also from 1913. With the sentence “everything ‘dead’ trembles,” Kandinsky characterizes the artist’s capacity to awaken to life actually dead material, discarded objects, through “abstract vision” – whether a white cigarette butt in gray ash, or a white trouser button in a dark puddle. Elsewhere, he describes how as a child, for whom every object became an experience, he would free the white bast fiber from branches (“tempted to lick it”), thereby thematizing the impact of synesthesia.

Through Kandinsky’s words, a multiplicity of manifestations of the color white is evoked in the reader's imagination. I look forward to your responses and thoughts as you walk through this exhibition in the K20 and compare the various white tones in the paintings. How would you describe your experience of white in words?

Marion Ackermann is the Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the curator of the exhibition “Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian – The Infinite White Abyss.” In her contribution to the exhibition catalogue, she investigates the color white in the work of these three artists. (Verlag Snoeck, 232 pages, museum edition available for €39).