SOURCE: "Kandinsky's Ethnography: Scientific Field Work and Aesthetic Reflection," in Art History, Vol. 17, No. 2, June, 1994, pp. 182-208.

In the following essay, McKay discusses Kandinsky's ethnographic essay "From Materials on the Ethnography of the Sysol and Vechegda Zyrians: The National Deities" and relates it to his autobiographical essay "Reminiscences. "

This article explores how, in two essays written at separate moments of his adult career, Wassily Kandinsky represented the same ethnographic fieldwork experience in quite differing terms. The first of these essays is a scientific one: Kandinsky's 'From Materials on the Ethnography of the Sysol and Vechegda Zyrians: the National Deities (According to Contemporary Beliefs)' appeared in 1889 in the Ethnographic Review, a newly established forum for Russian ethnographic studies.¹ This was based on fieldwork research which he undertook in the late spring of 1889, whilst a student at Moscow University. 2 This ethnographic treatise is the main object of my initial...