Bearers of Light: The Search for the Sacred in Vera Komissarzhevskaya and Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky and Komissarzhevskaya probably never met. Where they certainly did meet is in the common ground of their conception of the role of the artist. Both saw their work as the product of an inescapable inner need and both viewed it as sacred. In the chaotic years of the early twentieth century, Komissarzhevskaya, Kandinsky and Elena Guro, actress, painter and poetess, were important reference points for many Russian artists and intellectuals. For them art was a way to study, an instrument that allowed them to explore another dimension of reality, to make the invisible, visible, to reveal the hidden essence of things. The search for common roots between these artists has focused the analysis in the field of archaeology and visual arts and has discovered, in Scythian art, Shamanism and the cult of the Mother Goddess, new perspectives for the interpretation of expressive form in these artists.