Klänge Pl.25 1913

Kandinsky made this woodcut, 'Klänge Pl.25', without a date, using a block of wood and some carving tools. What I see here is a world of shapes, hard-edged, butting up against each other, and suggesting something almost organic. I can imagine him, maybe listening to music, carefully gouging out the wood, leaving these dark, declarative marks. The black ink feels so definitive. I wonder if he felt like he was wrestling with the material, trying to find a balance between control and letting the material speak. There is a tension here between abstraction and representation. Kandinsky's got this idea of 'inner necessity', the idea that art should express the artist's inner state, and for me, this print is an exploration of that idea. Like he's paving the way for other artists and other ways of seeing.