Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

28 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Mitrinovié’s presence in Munich was also noted by Paul Klee (1879-1940), the Swiss-born painter and associate of Kandinsky’s:

Mitrinovié, a Serbian, came to Munich and gave a lecture about the new art, Kandinsky etc. He also approached me. Had me lend him some of my works so that he could immerse himself in them. A nice man with a peasant face.

Often comes to our music sessions. Made this classic utterance: “Yes, Bach knew how to write it, you know how to play it, and I know how to listen to it.

The lecture referred to by Klee was delivered in the Great Hall of the Museum in Munich on February 27th 1914, entitled “Kandinsky and the New Art: or ‘Taking Tomorrow by Storm’”. In the programme the theme of the lecture was described as “the new art” and “the spiritual development of our time in its organic relationships with the past.” Mitrinovic was later to claim that in the lecture he had forecast the violence that was to erupt in war before the end of the year, on the basis of his study of contemporary artists. This sense of impending violence was one that Kandinsky also experienced very strongly. In a letter to Michael Sadler concerning a painting he had sent to the Englishman in 1914 to which Sadler had given the title “War in the Air,” Kandinsky wrote: “I knew that a terrible struggle was going on in the spiritual sphere, and that made me paint the picture I sent you.”*

It was undoubtedly Kandinsky’s vision of the intrinsic links that existed between the spiritual realm, the creative work of the artist, and the ultimate transformation of the human order which attracted Mitrinovic. Kandinsky had given fullest expression to these views in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in 1912, in which he presented his justification for abstract art. |

He looked to the creation of a new age of spirituality after the years of materialism—‘“the nightmare of materialism, which turned life into an evil, senseless game.”> He wrote that “to each spiritual epoch corresponds a new spiritual content, which that epoch expresses by forms that are new, unexpected, surprising, and in this way aggressive.”® He thus saw the role of the artist as crucial in relation to the development of the new spirituality. True works of art were not only expressions of some profound emotion or spiritual experience, “produced by internal necessity, which springs from the soul”; they also had the power to “nourish the spirit."”? A true work of art “has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this