On the (un)seeable in Wassily Kandinsky’s Klänge

Abstract In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944) published a limited edition of Sounds (Klänge), an illustrated book of poems that applied many of the theories discussed in his publication On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). In Sounds, Kandinsky strove to train readers to sensorially perceive images hidden in visual and verbal abstraction. In both word and image, the artist explored various realizations of boundedness, repetition, and concealment with the aim of evoking various effects in readers. Ultimately, according to Kandinsky’s theories, the fluidity between the “seeable” and “unseeable” allowed the “inner sounds” of the book’s words and woodcuts to resonate with readers in moments of perceptual clarity. Published on the brink of World War I, Sounds was released into a world that was about to change drastically. Although it influenced numerous avant-garde artists in the inter- and postwar periods, a newfound pessimism overshadowed Kandinsky’s idealistic aspiration. His utopian belief that abstraction would facilitate the arrival of a “Great Spiritual Epoch” ceded to a view of abstract art as a means of expressing the irrationality and brokenness of things. Today, Sounds is significant because of its influential form and content, its novel multisensorial aims, and its liminal sociohistorical context.