On the contrary, he argued that Orientalism is a manifestation of the power relationship that underlies the broader «Western’ imperial project, and as such it says more about the moral and political concerns of «the West’ than it does about any «Oriental’ reality.58 The proliferation of inverted commas in the preceding sentences reflects the sensitivity which surrounds these terms in the wake of the debate.59 For the purpose of this study, inverted commas will be used for these essentialised terms to represent the way in which they were used by Kandinsky (and others) in the period.

While Said’s work did not engage significantly with painting, his arguments were systematically applied to nineteenth century French Orientalist painting by Linda Nochlin in her article, «The Imaginary Orient’.60 Nochlin’s article translates the standard themes of Orientalist ideology into the visual language of painting: among them, the mystery of the East, the vice of idleness, the harmonious religious practices, and of course lasciviousness and the sexual availability of submissive women. All of these appear in Kandinsky’s Orientalist paintings and need to be examined both in relation to their status as century-old themes, and to their particular manifestation in his twentieth century modernism. Significantly, Nochlin also identifies four conspicuous absences in Orientalist art: the absence of history, in which the Oriental world is «a world without change, a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals, untouched by historical processes;’ the absence of the Western colonial presence; the absence of artistic interpretation, bringing with it the implication of scientific objectivity; and finally the «apparent absence of art’, the eradication of all artistic traces to create a «pseudo-realist’ painting.61 These, as shall be seen below, provide a method for interpreting the complex interplay of the conventional and the unconventional in Kandinsky’s abstract-Orientalist works.

The criticisms of Said have been manifold.62 A significant critique for present purposes comes from J.J. Clarke in his book Oriental Enlightenment. Clarke accepts much of Said’s analysis, particularly his exposure of hidden and suppressed ideological agendas, but he argues that Said’s analysis is too restricted in its dogmatic identification of Orientalism with the dominant imperialist ideology.63 Clarke asserts that in some cases it also represents, «a counter-movement, […] albeit not a unified or consciously organised one, which in various ways has often tended to subvert rather than to confirm the discursive structures of imperial power.»64 It was not, he argued, simply a question of «power’ and «domination’; it was an attempt to confront the structures of knowledge and power and to engage with «Oriental’ ideas in ways that confronted the «painful void in the spiritual and intellectual heart of Europe’.65 Elements of this interpretation are anticipated by Kandinsky’s work.

Homi Bhabha has proposed, in his complex, multi-disciplinary chapter, «The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’, an alternative to the binary oppositions identified by Said.66 Bhabha also largely agrees with Said’s thesis that Orientalism is a «regime of truth’ which creates «the Orient’ as a unified zone of the world.67 He produces a more subtle reading, however, with his focus on stereotyping.68 He is not interested in the stereotype as a wholly positive or negative characterisation; rather, he explores its inherent «ambivalence’: an expression of ««otherness» which is at once an object of desire and derision.»