QUADRI DI UN ESPOSIZIONE

As early as 1907 Kandinsky designs stage compositions in which he tries to bring to life the aesthetic insights that are maturing in him and that already find evidence in his writings. In 1922 he moved to Weimar invited from Gropius, where he continued to to explore certain aspects of artistic creation between music and image until to Dessau, between April 4 and 11, 1928, the project "Pictures of an Exhibition" came to life in the Friedrich-Theater. The pictorial image opens up in a completely original way to the third dimension, with few references to the Bauhaus theater style: two dancers appear in costumes reminiscent of Schlemmer, and two figures appearing in silouhettes recall Malevic and Arcipenko.

"He uses a stage with proscenium and is based on the elements of Baroque theater with passage ways, pulleys, everything moves by means of strings, even the light is a new thing. Only Kandinsky knows how to give to these theatrical patterns a new content ... he was a kind of father for modern theater, from Kagel to Robert Wilson. We are faced with a birth, a birthing, which reveals how images are liberated, emancipated, exist only with music, but without man, or with man reduced to set the images in motion and to maneuver the mechanics." So stated Martin Rupprecht in a 1983 interview, as he prepared to to reconstruct the show based on past notes from Felix Klee, son of Paul, who had been Kandinsky's assistant.

Musorgsky had composed Pictures of an Exhibition because he was strongly inspired by the exhibition of drawings by the Russian painter Viktor Hartmann who died prematurely to 39 years old. Kandinsky's performance is a complex stage composition, which is presented as an interaction of landscape, music, color, light and geometric shapes that draw inspiration from those paintings, some of which have been lost. The protagonists are colored surfaces and plastic shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles and other abstract geometric figures, which, in a black space, form sixteen moving pictures harmoniously inspired by Musorgsky's music.

The April 4, 1928 premiere at the Friedrich Theater in Dessau was a huge success. The production was quite complex as the scenes had to be constantly moved and the lighting in the hall had to change constantly in accordance with Kandinsky's precise instructions and the music played on the piano. Unfortunately, the original set design did not survive.

The project of reconstructing the performance started in 1983 from Kandinsky's sixteen original watercolors and the script made from Felix Klee where every transformation of images and every light effect found their exact notation in music. The intent was to preserve almost in their entirety the same theatrical tools that had been used for the first performance in 1928, such as velvet, wood, sheet metal, ropes, papier-mâché, lamps to incandescence, and a simple screen from projection.