Musil on Chagall, Kandinsky, and Munch
(Another cut passage)
In February, 1924, Robert mentioned an “interesting Russian exhibition” of Chagall, Kandinsky, and Lissitzky, and that he was looking forward to the Munch show at a new gallery specializing in the Moderns on Gruenergasse. On February 29th, in a review in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung he wrote that Chagall’s lithographs were “masterpieces of handicraft” that represented the “memory a quarter hour past” of life; the “excessive detail of objects and their characteristics” have melted away, leaving only a “memory like a fence with some shreds still caught on it; but as is well known, we don’t see these gaps (unless we examine our memory) but rather what has remained”—and Chagall had succeeded in finding the unmistakable and unlabored expression of this remembered imagery. “Gentle” Kandinsky’s abstract watercolors did not, in Musil’s opinion, get beyond “the batiked metaphysics of his teacher Maeterlinck or his own agreeable book, On the Spiritual in Art.” On May 2nd Robert reviewed the Munch exhibition, concluding that after viewing works from all periods of Munch’s career one “preserves a conception not only of his well-known power to excite (that was a great influence on both Impressionism and Expressionism) but also of his own astonishing excitability. He has succeeded with extraordinary attempts that could only be possible through a great force of personal synthesis, but at the same time he has continuously taken up contemporary influences which he has regurgitated in a weaker manner.” Musil acknowledged that everyone had both “superficial and deep works,” but in Munch he saw the cause not in a difference of condition but as if it were a matter of a “second I”. The most favorable interpretation: “the expression of a Pantagruelist temperament.” [i]
