Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian: ??????? ??????????, first name sometimes spelled as "Vasily," "Vassily" or "Vasilii") (December 4, 1866 – December 13, 1944) was a Russian-born French painter and art theorist. One of the most important 20th-century artists, alongside Picasso and Matisse, he is credited with painting the first abstract works in the history of modern art.

Artistic periods

The creation by Kandinsky of purely abstract work did not arrive as an abrupt change, but rather as the fruit of a long development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal experience of painting. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of the spirit and deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central aspect of his art.

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Artistic scholar Hajo Duechting has divided Kandinsky's artistic development into six periods:

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• Beginnings (Moscow 1866–1896)
• Metamorphosis (Munich 1896–1911)
• Breakthrough to the Abstract (The Blue Rider 1911–1914)
• Russian Intermezzo (1914–1921)
• Point and Line to Plane (The Bauhaus 1922–1933)
• Biomorphic Abstraction (Paris 1934–1944)

Kandinsky biographer Messer divides his art into three periods:

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• Early Period: approximately 1900 to 1914
• Middle Period: from the early 1920s until the early 1930s
• Late Period: from the 1930s until 1944.

Youth and inspirations (1866-1896)

Kandinsky's youth and life in Moscow brought inspiration from a variety of sources. As a child he would later recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated with color. This is probably due to his synaesthesia which allowed him to quite literally hear as well as see color. The fascination with color continued as he grew up in Moscow, although he seems to have made no attempt to study art. In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic group that traveled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. He tells in Looks on the past that he had the impression to move into a painting when he entered in the houses or the churches decorated with the most shimming colors. His study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background was reflected in his early work. Kandinsky would write a few years later that 'Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with the strings'.

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It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of Monet and was particularly taken with a depiction of a haystack which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the object itself.

Related Topics:
1896 - Munich - Hay

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Artistic metamorphosis (1896-1911)

Kandinsky's time at art school was helped by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students and he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. Unfortunately very little exists of his work from this period, though presumably it was extensive. This changes at the beginning of the 20th Century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and no doubt fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness.

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Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903) which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium view, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider. Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

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From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe, until he came to live in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908 – 1909) painted at this time shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow, and one red. A procession of some sort with three riders and several others crosses at the bottom. The face, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each of a single color, and neither they or the walking figures display any real detail. The broad use of color in The Blue Mountain, illustrate Kandinsky's move towards art in which the color itself is presented independently of form.

Related Topics:
1906 - 1908 - Europe - Bavaria - Murnau - 1909

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The Blue Rider (1911-1914)

:See also Der Blaue Reiter

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The paintings of this period are composed of large and very expressive colored masses evaluate independently from forms and lines which serve no longer to delimitate them or to bring them out but which combine between them, are superimposed and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an extraordinary force.

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The influence of music has been very important on the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by nature and as it doesn?t try to represent vainly the exterior world but simply to express in an immediate way the inner feelings of the human soul. Kandinsky used sometimes musical terms to designate his works : he called many of his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled "compositions" some others much more elaborated and worked at length, a term which resonated in him like a prayer.

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In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his voice as an art theorist. He helped to found the Munich

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New Artists' Association in and became its president in 1909. The group was unable to integrate the more radical approach of those like Kandinsky with more conventional ideas of art and the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then moved to form a new group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, also called The Blue Rider and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

Related Topics:
1909 - 1911 - Der Blaue Reiter - Franz Marc - World War I - 1914 - Russia - Switzerland - Sweden

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Kandinsky's writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise On the Spiritual In Art, which was released at almost the same time, served as both a defense and promotion of abstract art, as well as an appraisal that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed that color could be used in a painting as something autonomous and apart from a visual description of an object or other form.

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Return to Russia (1914-1921)

During the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky deals with the cultural development politic of Russia, he collaborates in the domains of art pedagogy and museum reforms. He devoted his time to artistic teaching with a program based on forms and colors analysis, as well as the organization of the artistic culture Institute at Moscow. He made little painting during this period. He meets in 1916 Nina Andreievskaia who will became his wife the next year. Kandinsky received in 1921 the mission to go in Germany at the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius. The next year, the Soviets have officially forbidden all form of abstract art because judged as harmful for socialist ideals.

Related Topics:
Bauhaus - Weimar - Walter Gropius

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The Bauhaus (1922-1933)

The Bauhaus was an architecture and innovative art school which had as objective to merge plastic arts with applied arts, and whose teaching was built on the theoretical and practical application of the plastic arts synthesis. Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and courses on advanced theory and conducted painting classes and workshop, where he completed his colors theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of lines, will lead to the publication of its second major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.

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Geometrical elements have taken an increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This period has been for him a period of intense production. The freedom of which testifies each of his work, by the treatment of planes rich in colors and in magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow ? red ? blue (1925), Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was increasing at this time.

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The main forms which constitute this large painting of two meters of width entitled Yellow ? red ? blue are a yellow vertical rectangle, a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle, while a multitude of black straight or sinuous lines and of arcs of circles, as well as some monochromatic circles and some colored checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of forms and of the main colored masses present on the canvas only correspond to a first approach of the inner reality of the work whose right appreciation necessitates a much deeper observation, not only of forms and colors involved in the painting, but also of their relation, their absolute position and their relative disposition on the canvas, of their whole and reciprocal harmony.

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In front of the hostility of the right political parties, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in Dessau from 1925. Following a fierce slander campaign from the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been close at Dessau in 1932. The school pursued its activities in Berlin until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky leaves then Germany and settles in Paris.

Related Topics:
Weimar - Dessau - Nazis - Berlin - Paris

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The great synthesis (1934-1944)

In Paris, he is quite isolated, as abstract painting, particularly geometric, is not recognized : the artistic tendency into the fashion were impressionism and cubism. He lives and realizes his work in a small apartment where a studio has been fit up in the living room. Biomorphic forms with supple and non geometric outlines appear in his paintings, forms which evoke externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist inner life. He uses original colors compositions which evoke the Slavonic popular art and which look like precious watermark works. He uses also sand mixed to the colors to give a granular texture to his painting.

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This period corresponds in fact to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he uses the all the elements, even enriching them. He paints in 1936 and 1939 the two last major compositions, these canvas particularly elaborated and slowly ripped that he had stopped to produce since many years. Composition IX is a painting with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form evokes a human embryo in the womb of his mother. The small squares of colors and the colored bands seem to stand out against the black background of Composition X as stars fragments or filaments, while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large maroon mass which seems to float in the upper left corner of the canvas.

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In Kandinsky?s works, some characteristics are really obvious while certain sonorities are more discrete and like veiled, that?s to say they reveal only progressively to those who make the effort to deepen their connection with the work and to refine their sight. We must not content with a first and very superficial impression or a coarse identification of the forms that the artist has used and which he has subtly harmonized and put in pitch in order to enter efficiently in resonance with the soul of the observer.

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Assessment

From the death of Wassily Kandinsky and during thirty years, Nina Kandinsky has never stopped to diffuse the message and to divulge the work of her husband. All the works in her possession have been legated to the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, where we can see the largest collection of his paintings.

Related Topics:
Centre Georges Pompidou - Paris

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Along with Piet Mondriaan and Kazimir Malevich, Kandinsky is considered a pioneer in abstract art, undoubtedly the most famous. He was a synaesthete who could, quite literally, hear colors. This effect of color was a major influence on his art, and he even named some of his paintings "improvisations" and "compositions" as if they were works of music and not painting. Works by Kandinsky have been recently sold for as much as US$25 million.

Related Topics:
Piet Mondriaan - Kazimir Malevich - Abstract art - Synaesthete

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