Wassily Kandinsky's 'Sky Blue' taught me how to look at art- and reminded me that I will never be (truly) alone
On the loneliness of liminal spaces, interpretation, and the salvific power of abstract art
On a warm spring morning in 2007, Mum summoned my sister and me to the kitchen and announced an imminent expedition to a mysterious art exhibition. She hurried us to the car, inserted the latest Maroon 5 album into the CD player, and in a flash we were headed to Milan.
In my head, that exhibition still plays like my earliest experience of art. Sure, I have unwillingly retained faded memories of snotty kids eating their packed lunch in the halls of some mouldy museum on one of many primary school trips; but there was a certain intentionality this time, paired with the intimacy shared between a mother and their daughters escaping to the city to indulge in some art, that felt like a first.
Funny that the city had felt like an escape. Mum was born and raised in Milan, but had moved to a small town of less than 4,000 souls when she married my Dad. That was hard on her, to use a euphemism. The more apposite words of Mary Oliver, in her poem Flare, would say: my mother, alas, alas/ did not always love her life/ heavier than iron it was/ as she carried it in her arms, from room to room […]. Having lost her sense of belonging, left alone to create a whole new familiarity and without a solid support group, she started to fall victim to loneliness, slowly but inexorably.
As a child, I felt a great deal of responsibility for my Mum’s happiness. It is quite possible that the exhibition occupies such a special place in my heart because it’s one of my fondest memories of Mum looking relaxed and at ease in her city. I can still see a sparkle of mischievousness in her eyes- a playfulness, or perhaps just a sense of freedom. This meant that that day, I would have nothing to worry about. I could feel free too.
I was twelve years old at the time, still trapped in the body of a nine-year-old girl, and with the fervid imagination and playfulness of one. I was treading through the muddy waters of middle school, a personal hell if you ask me- three years that still haunt me for their sense of total inadequacy, lack of belonging, and grief. My friends seemed to be doing puberty just right; I felt lost, left behind, trying constantly to play catch-up, but I was running in quicksand. It seemed that all my peers were getting some secret code to crack the world of adulthood and merrily leave childhood. I wasn’t. I still enjoyed playing at home, making up whole worlds in my head; the sole idea of make-up made my unblemished face itch; and I clearly had zero interest in boys (nor boys had any in me, fret not).
The exhibition, I soon found out, was ‘Kandinsky and Abstract Art in Italy’, held at Palazzo Reale. I had no idea who Kandinsky was, but I was sold by the musicality of his name, and by the sense of adventure.
Amidst the array of works on show at the exhibition, ‘Sky Blue’ did things to me that would transfer well into my adult life.
The canvas appears as a blue patch, seemingly a sky, bordered in a slightly lighter tone to possibly represent clouds. Within this milky background, bizarre, brightly-coloured creatures perform a playful ballet, in a slow-motioned free-fall. The chaos is only apparent, as the shapes are carefully placed onto the canvas, though it’s no doubt that this flood of mythical creatures signals a step back from the geometrical forms and compositional structure that Kandinsky had strictly observed in his previous work.
The painting is part of the prolific abstract work that the artist produced in his Paris years, between 1934 and 1944. Art historian Hajo Düchting argues that the most significant shift in the artist’s later paintings was in the use of colour, which became playful, diverse, and which deviated from conventional rules. Colour is precisely what my eidetic memory recalls of seeing this painting for the first time: an explosion so vivid, almost singing on the canvas; it filled my eyes up to my sclerae, until colour was all my gaze could contain.
To be specific, ‘Sky Blue’ is a work of biomorphic abstraction, a term that was coined by the art historian Alfred Barr in the catalogue of the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art held at the MoMa in New York. ‘Biomorphic’ per se means exhibiting the appearance, or possessing the qualities, of a living thing. Though the term sounds scientific, the visual language of biomorphic art is based on shapes that are not representative or geometric, but that possess something uncanny familiar: we cannot quite pinpoint where we have seen them before, yet we are able to recognise them, and to connect to them on a primal, subconscious level.
The canvas’s subject matter has been assimilated to plankton, or to other small aquatic organisms, almost viewed through the lens of a microscope. In an article published in 1935 in the Danish journal Konkretion, Kandinsky stated:
This experience of the ‘hidden soul’ of all things that we see with the unaided eye, through a microscope or through a telescope, I call ‘inner sight’. This sight penetrates the hard shell, the ‘external’ form, into the interior of things and lets us perceive the inner ‘pulsation’ of things with all our senses.
‘Sky Blue’ is pure form, a painting of fantasy and poetry, and the creatures that populate it exemplify the model of art that Kandinsky has generously donated to us: non-representational, but understandable in substance. The canvas does not present the observers with much to say; rather, it invites them to feel.
And my young heart was feeling a lot. I was occupying a cruel liminal space- too old to be a child, too young to be an adult, ostracised by both cities and seemingly with nowhere to go.
A lonely place to be in.
I was having a tough time decoding a number of realities within and around me- my late-blooming body; the precarious balance of my family dynamics; my peers’ sudden changes in interests and demeanours; the world seeming more unsafe and chaotic almost overnight. When Kandinsky was a child, his parents divorced and he went to live with an aunt. Of young Kandinsky, Düchting writes: ‘The sensitive boy fled from these tensions into an inner world of mystery and fairy-tale’. I, too, was a sensitive girl, and I was seeking refuge from my own tensions in an ever-evolving, rich inner world of fantasy and play.
I had expected this whole art thing to be yet another code that I had to add to my interminable list. Instead, my debut to the art world was marked by a playful gang of half-animal, half-mythical creatures- something that I could easily relate to. Here was a grown-up artist, an adult, bringing his internal fantastic dimension alive on canvas, and I immediately understood it. ‘Sky Blue’ was unknowingly bridging the gap between my two worlds- the one that I was about to reluctantly leave, and the one that I was struggling to get access to.
‘Understanding’ the painting felt instinctive and unreasoning. As my bewildered eyes followed the curvatures of those strange organisms, I felt my loneliness disintegrate into minuscule particles, like the grains of sand that Kandinsky had mixed to the paint. At a time when I was drowning under too much deciphering to do, to be presented with a work of art that was not asking to be interpreted, nor demanding of me to prove my decoding abilities, made me feel seen.
Nothing was wrong with me. I was enough.
Susan Sontag would suggest that twelve-year-old me possessed ‘[…] that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did’.
Her influential essay Against Interpretation (1964), published in the eponymous collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays, is an exploration of how content has historically prevailed over form in the arts. In it, Sontag questions the contemporary quest for understanding, and man’s relentless nature of homo significans, sense-maker, in favour of a need to recover our sensual capabilities.
The essay is a plea to leave art alone. Ever since Greek philosophers proposed the theory of art as mimesis, (mere) imitation of reality, to Western consciousness art has become problematic, and in need to justify herself. And it’s the defence of art that has given rise to the familiar distinction between form and content, and subsequently to interpretation.
Sontag’s strongest argument against interpretation is that in certain cultural contexts this hermeneutic exercise causes an impoverishment of our senses. Imagine her writing this in 1964:
Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odours and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the reality is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.
Now, pause and take some time to ponder Sontag’s words. Think about how much more information, production and overall superfluity have flooded our world and annihilated our feelings since. If interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, this is certainly a loss that, now more than ever, we cannot afford to make.
Interpretation, however, is not invincible. To Sontag’s eyes, abstract art, as with the case of any programmatic avant-gardism (think Pop Art), was born as an experiment with form at the expense of content, and therefore as a reaction to interpretation. With virtually no content to interpret, she claims, abstract art escapes the stifling philistinism of interpretation. It takes the veil off our eyes, and just shows us the damn thing. How luminous, how enough it is.
So, how can we look at art without hypertrophying our intellect? To Sontag, the way is to unleash the primeval within ourselves, to allow ourselves ‘[…] to see more, to hear more, to feel more’. In order to recover our senses, a shift is necessary from a prescriptive to a descriptive vocabulary, one able to articulate an accurate and loving criticism of the work of art’s form.
After all, as Sontag opened her essay:
The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical.
And that is exactly how I encountered ‘Sky Blue’ for the first time.
Two years ago, and fifteen after our first encounter, I got to see ‘Sky Blue’ again.
I had decided to fly myself to Paris for a long weekend, on a solo birthday trip. I treated myself to sunshine, walks along the Seine and daily trips to Shakespeare and Company for apple pie and iced coffees. And oh, so much art.
My only companion throughout the trip had been Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, and I should have picked up on the nomen omen. Though I was not quite in an emergency yet, I was starting to show the early signs of one- a gnawing anxiety and a loneliness that were slowly deteriorating my mind and body, one silent jab at a time. Of Laing, I had devoured the bestseller The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, which I had aptly read at a time when, confined within the four walls of my room, unable to see my loved ones (or anyone, for that matter) as a mysterious virus was making its way around the globe, I had felt a loneliness so bleak it had started to veer towards utter hopelessness. That is the one time I can still remember so clearly, of how a stranger’s voice was able to fill a void that I felt I was disappearing in with each passing day.
When I landed in Paris, that vacuum was still there, right in my chest, but for a different reason. I was finding myself in yet another liminal space, only this time it was a relationship that I could not decipher. An asphyxiating one, at that. Similar to what the mimetic theory had done to art in Sontag’s essay, this relationship had put me in the position to constantly justify myself: my 9-5 non-creative, corporate job, my music taste, my hobbies, my opinions, my small circle of friends, and all the other different ways in which I was apparently lacking.
Being in a relationship that I was deeply unsatisfied with also contributed to a sense of loneliness that, to various extents, I had felt my whole life. As I walked the streets of Paris, overwhelmed by a euphoric sense of possibility, loneliness still found its way to me, like a faithful pup. I soon realised that what I had packaged to myself as an empowering, shiny solo trip was in reality pure escapism. I hadn’t really wanted to spend my birthday by myself: what my heart had really longed for was the chance to feel special, away from a person whom I had allowed to make me feel small and insignificant. A break from the hamster-wheel chase of validation and affection, from the pain of dismissal.
At that point, I just wanted to be seen more, heard more, and felt more, but I was still in absolute denial of how detrimental the relationship was being to me. I felt constantly pressed under a block of dense concrete, or suffocated by a humidity so thick it was getting close to saturation. I had lost all sense of self, mostly of self-worth- small, grey, a ghost of the woman I used to be. I was in desperate need of some cool air; I wanted my colours back.
And I dealt with it the best way I’d known how to: turning to beauty, turning to art.
When I discovered that ‘Sky Blue’ was hanging on one of the walls of the Centre Pompidou, I almost teared up. I made my way to the museum on a Friday, as the sun was setting and casting a golden, liquid light on the quais. I felt intoxicated by the promise of an evening of art, made possible by the extended weekend opening hours, and thrilled in the same delightful anticipation that I’d felt while waiting for a loved one at the airport’s arrivals.
I started roaming the inside-out building of the Centre, letting the artworks guide me through the air-conditioned rooms. I marvelled at pieces from Yves Klein, Joan Miró and Mark Rothko, and took diligent note of the unexpected shapes of Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture in my pocket journal. Then, finally, I entered the room.
It happened casually, as if my legs were answering a calling that my brain could not quite grasp. My body knew what it needed. And what it needed was now there, just a few metres away from me. ‘Sky Blue’ was resting on a white wall, no visitor in sight. As I approached the canvas, hands clammy around the building’s map, my heartbeat quickened, Stendhal syndrome-esque.
The tag on the wall said ‘Bleu de ciel’. My jaw dropped.
Seeing ‘Sky Blue’ at that time of my life felt like ripping an ever-cloudy sky and letting some blue seep through. Its vision inundated me; I once again took all that blue in, let my lifeless irises soak it in, until all colour was back.
As an adult, I had worried about how I was supposed to look at art. Which details to focus on, what it meant, how I was expected to feel, even- the dogmatism of interpretation had not spared me growing up. On the morning of my expedition to the Centre Pompidou, I had found myself strolling lazily through the Jardin du Luxembourg. It was a bright, cloudless morning, and the park was in full spring bloom. After a bit of wandering around, I was called to one of the garden’s beloved green chairs, perfectly positioned under the shade of a majestic chestnut tree. My hands searched for Funny Weather inside my tote bag, took the book out, and for a pocket of time that felt like pure bliss, I quieted my mind and abandoned myself to the written words.
The chapter I read in that perfect hour, comfortably my favourite one in the book, details the life and work of American painter Agnes Martin. For decades, Martin produced grids, sets of horizontal and vertical lines that Laing describes as capturing ‘the abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, innocence; happiness itself’. Martin described herself as an abstract expressionist, and her subject as feeling- in that, not too dissimilar to Kandinsky’s abstract art.
About Martin’s grids, Laing wrote:
They were designed to dodge the burden of representation, to stymie the viewer in their incorrigible habit of searching for recognisable forms in the abstract field. They aren’t made to be read, but rather responded to, enigmatic triggers for a spontaneous upwelling of pure emotion.
When I saw ‘Sky Blue’, only a few hours later, Laing’s words were still echoing in my head. At first, the urge to read the painting’s description almost took over me. Having felt repeatedly misunderstood and often unappreciated in life meant that looking for meaning and making sure I understood, really understood, down to the finest detail, was an essential part of who I was; it was embroidered on the fabric of my being. But that time, instead of worrying about reading the painting, I gave myself permission to just respond to it.
I looked at the canvas and was suddenly reminded of the richness of my inner world, the beauty of it, and of how much of it I was wasting by trying to make someone else see it. In that moment, just like that time years before, ‘Sky Blue’ made me realise that I was enough, and that I would never be truly alone, as long as I stayed true to myself. And so, on a warm spring evening in 2022, I was reunited with my twelve-year-old self; I borrowed some of her innocence, and felt at home within myself.
I could not help but grin when I realised that the name of the Agnes Martin chapter in Funny Weather is 'Nothing but blue skies’. I have never-ending love for the circular memory that makes any textual or visual fragment remind me of others. Finding patterns, connecting the dots and noticing how experiences inform each other and the pieces fall into place even years apart. It’s been seventeen years for me, from the moment I stepped into Palazzo Reale and marvelled at ‘Sky Blue’ for the first time to now, getting these words on (digital) paper and serendipitously finding all these relations between feelings, works of art and chapters’ names. I look back, and smile at the generous gifts of writing: a chance to reflect, and the opportunity to heal.
Throughout my life, ‘Sky Blue’ has got my back whenever the walls of my personal Tower of Babel were beginning to crumble down and make the world around me seem incomprehensible. It patiently helped me navigate the idiosyncrasies of languages I did not yet know how to speak, or perhaps it made me feel more at ease with my own analphabetism. It’s no surprise that since my first encounter with the painting, I have developed an endless appreciation for the act of consuming art in silence. To this day, I find myself disappearing into a soundproof bubble whenever I look at a work of art, which is also the reason why I like to reserve the experience to my solo time. Consuming art has become a self-indulgent, sacred, mostly solitary ritual; a way of remembering who I am, and where my place in the world is.
This essay was inspired by This Artwork Changed My Life, a creative collaboration between contemporary art and visual culture magazine Elephant and online art marketplace Artsy. Its aim is to share the stories of life-changing encounters with art. You have just read about mine.
And you- have you ever encountered an artwork that changed your life? Tell me in the comments!