Chaos in Art: Comparing Kandinsky and Pollock

Visually, both Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII and Jackson Pollock’s No. 2 constitute a chaotic arrangement of colors and images with no apparent relation to one another. The randomly scattered paint, large canvas, and over-clamped figures all build a similar visual chaos in both paintings. Despite the mayhem, the two paintings differ in the inner emotions each artist wanted to express and the nature of the “chaos.” While for Kandinsky the chaos represents the smooth and melodic sentiments raised by music, for Pollock the chaos depicts the more spontaneous and impulsive emotions. The authors’ differing goals lead Kandinsky to ponder and refine his painting to capture a more universal theme and Pollock to develop his “drip” painting method

2, however, shares this same lack of discernable pattern. If anything, the painting takes the abstraction in Kandinsky’s further. There are no objects in this painting, only paint. With black, white, gray, and yellow paint splattered across the canvas, the viewer’s familiarity with the subject is stripped to even below the blurring of figures. Familiar sights – trees, sky, or people – are completely absent. There are small patches of yellow dotting the figure and thin black lines running down the canvas, but why they are drawn is a mystery known only to the artist. Why does the white paint thin out in some areas while it bubbles in others? Why did Pollock choose yellow instead of a blue? Again, in trying to decipher the meaning, the mind ironically becomes more confused yet more

2 is otherworldly. Because the subject matter, emotion, is an entity that cannot be observed, its depiction results an equally confusing and incomprehensibility. Seen under the same light used to see the world, the image cannot be more ambiguous: it resembles nothing. But there is an artistic purpose to this madness. While Kandinsky seeks to capture music, Pollock aims to capture his changing emotional states. The incomprehensibility, however, adds another dimension to the painting. Faced with nothing familiar, the viewer is forced to question not the painting but the painter’s mind itself, leading to a deeper understanding of the depicted emotions. What could he have possibly been