Wassily Kandinsky Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Like The Art Story on Facebook Follow The Art Story on Google+ "Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential." Synopsis One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representative canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color.

Kandinsky's art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II. Key Ideas Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries. Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society. Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation. Most Important Art Composition VII (1913) Commonly cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky's pre-World War I achievement, Composition VII shows the artist's rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes.

The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers. Preoccupied by the theme of apocalypse and redemption throughout the 1910s, Kandinsky formally tied the whirling composition of the painting to the theme of the cyclical processes of destruction and salvation. Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Kandinsky maintained several symbolic references in this painting. Among the various forms that built Kandinsky's visual vocabulary, he painted glyphs of boats with oars, mountains, and figures. However, he did not intend for viewers to read these symbols literally and instead imbued his paintings with multiple references to the Last Judgment, the Deluge, and the Garden of Eden, seemingly all at once.

Oil on canvas - Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Like The Art Story on Facebook Biography Childhood Wassily (Vasily) Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow to well educated, upper-class parents of mixed ethnic origins. His father was born close to Mongolia, while his mother was a Muscovite, and his grandmother was from the German-speaking Baltic. The bulk of Kandinsky's childhood was spent in Odessa, a thriving, cosmopolitan city populated by Western Europeans, Mediterraneans, and a variety of other ethnic groups. At an early age, Kandinsky exhibited an extraordinary sensitivity toward the stimuli of sounds, words, and colors. His father encouraged his unique and precocious gift for the arts and enrolled him in private drawing classes, as well as piano and cello lessons. Despite early exposure to the arts, Kandinsky did not turn to painting until he reached the age of 30. Instead, he entered the University of Moscow in 1886 to study law, ethnography, and economics. In spite of the legal focus of his academic pursuits, Kandinsky's interest in color symbolism and its effect on the human psyche grew throughout his time in Moscow.

In particular, an ethnographic research trip in 1889 to the region of Vologda, in northwest Russia, sparked an interest in folk art that Kandinsky carried with him throughout his career. After completing his degree in 1892, he started his career in law education by lecturing at the university. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training Despite his success as an educator, Kandinsky abandoned his career teaching law to attend art school in Munich in 1896. For his first two years in Munich he studied at the art school of Anton Azbe, and in 1900 he studied under Franz von Stuck at the Academy of Fine Arts. At Azbe's school he met co-conspirators such as Alexei Jawlensky, who introduced Kandinsky to the artistic avant-garde in Munich.

In 1901, along with three other young artists, Kandinsky co-founded "Phalanx" - an artist's association opposed to the conservative views of the traditional art institutions. Phalanx expanded to include an art school, in which Kandinsky taught, and an exhibitions group. In one of his classes at the Phalanx School, he met and began a relationship with his student, Gabriele Munter, who became his companion for the next 15 years. As he traveled throughout Europe and northern Africa with Munter from 1903 until 1909, Kandinsky familiarized himself with the growing Expressionist movement and developed his own style based on the diverse artistic sources he witnessed on his travels. Kandinsky painted his breakthrough work, Der Blaue Reiter (1903) during this transitional period. This early work revealed his interest in disjointed figure-ground relationships and the use of color to express emotions rather than appearances - two aspects that would dominate his mature style.

In 1909, he was one of the founding members of Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM, or New Artists Association of Munich), a group that sought to accommodate the avant-garde artists whose practices were too radical for the traditional organizations and academies of the time. His paintings became more and more abstracted from the surrounding world as he gradually refined his style. He began titling works Improvisation, Composition, or Impression to further stress their distance from the objective world and continued to use similar titles throughout the rest of his career. Mature Period In 1911, in response to the rejection of one of Kandinsky's paintings from the annual NKVM exhibition, he and Franz Marc organized a rival exhibition and co-founded "Der Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider) - a loose association of nine Expressionist artists that included August Macke, Munter, and Jawlensky. Though their aims and approaches varied from artist to artist, in general the group believed in the promotion of modern art and the possibility for spiritual experience through the symbolic associations of sound and color - two issues very near and dear to Kandinsky's heart.

Despite the similarities between the group's moniker and the title of Kandinsky's 1903 painting, the artists actually arrived at the name "Der Blaue Reiter" as a result of the combination of Marc's love of horses and Kandinsky's interest in the symbolism of the rider, coupled with both artists' penchant for the color blue. During their short tenure, the group published an anthology (The Blue Rider Almanac) and held three exhibitions. Additionally, Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), his first theoretical treatise on abstraction that articulated his theory that the artist was a spiritual being that communicated through and was affected by line, color, and composition. He produced both abstract and figurative works at this time, but expanded his interest in non-objective painting. Composition VII (1913) was an early example of his synthesis of spiritual, emotional, and non-referential form through complex patterns and brilliant colors. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 led to the dissolution of Der Blaue Reiter, but, despite their short tenure, the group initiated and deeply inspired the highly influential German Expressionist style.

After Germany declared war on Russia, Kandinsky was forced to leave the country. He traveled to Switzerland and Sweden with Munter for almost two years, but returned to Moscow in early 1916, which effectively ended their relationship. In Moscow he courted and married Nina Andreevskaia, the young daughter of a Czarist colonel. While there, he not only became familiar with the art of Constructivists and Suprematists like Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, but also lived in the same building as Aleksander Rodchenko, and met other avant-garde luminaries like Naum Gabo, Lyubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova. With the October Revolution in 1917, Kandinsky's plans to build a private school and studio were upset by the Communist redistribution of private wealth and instead, he worked with the new government to develop arts organizations and schools. Despite his participation in the development of the officially sanctioned new institutions, he felt increasingly removed from the avant-garde. His search for spirituality in art did not meld with the utilitarian aesthetic advocated by the young government and the artists it embraced.

In 1921, when architect Walter Gropius invited Kandinsky to Germany to teach at the Weimar Bauhaus, he accepted and moved to Berlin with his wife, gaining German citizenship in 1928. As a member of the innovative school, Kandinsky's artistic philosophy turned toward the significance of geometric elements - specifically circles, half-circles, straight lines, angles, squares, checkerboards, and triangles. In 1926, he published his second major theoretical work, Point and Line to Plane that outlined his ideas about a "science of painting." In both his work and theory he shifted from the romantic, intuitive expression of his pre-war canvases to an emphasis on constructively organized compositions. Late Period and Death When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school in 1933, Kandinsky was forced to leave his adopted home in Germany and moved to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. He and his wife Nina settled in a small apartment in a suburb of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and were granted French citizenship in 1939.

While in France, his style again shifted and he experimented with biomorphic forms, which were more organic than the harsh geometric shapes of his Bauhaus paintings. Although he continued to paint until his last year, Kandinsky's output slowed during the war and his art fell out of favor as the referential images of Cubism and Surrealism came to dominate the Parisian avant-garde. Despite his distance from the aesthetic forefront, Kandinsky continued to refine his style and revisited many of his previous themes and styles during this period, synthesizing elements of his entire oeuvre into vast, complex works. His late style combined the expressive palette of his earliest non-objective Compositions from the early 1910s with the more structured elements he investigated while at the Bauhaus as well as the biomorphic forms popularized by the Surrealists, like Joan Miró and Jean Arp. The Nazis confiscated 57 of his canvases during their purge of "degenerate art" in 1937, but despite the Fascist proscription against his art, American patrons - notably Solomon R. Guggenheim - avidly collected his abstract work.

His works became key to shaping the mission of the museum Guggenheim planned on opening dedicated to modern, avant-garde art. With over 150 works in the museum's collection, Kandinsky became known as the "patron saint of the Guggenheim." He died in December of 1944 in relative, but serene, isolation. Legacy Kandinsky's work, both artistic and theoretical, played a large role in the philosophic foundation for later modern movements, in particular Abstract Expressionism and its variants like Color Field painting. His late, biomorphic work had a large influence on Arshile Gorky's development of a non-objective style, which in turn helped to shape the New York School's aesthetic. Jackson Pollock was interested in Kandinsky's late paintings and was fascinated by his theories about the expressive possibilities of art, in particular, his emphasis on spontaneous activity and the subconscious. Kandinsky's analysis of the sensorial properties of color was immensely influential on the Color Field painters, like Mark Rothko, who emphasized the interrelationships of hues for their emotive potential.

Even the 1980s artists working in the Neo-Expressionist resurgence in painting, like Julian Schnabel and Philip Guston, applied his ideas regarding the artist's inner expression on the canvas to their postmodern work. Kandinsky set the stage for much of the expressive modern art produced in the twentieth century. Influences and Connections Kandinsky Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com 4 References Life Born in Moscow , Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa . He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics . Quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law ) at the University of Dorpat —he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied first in a private school, then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921.

There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Influences Later in life he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow . In Looks on the Past, he tells how the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that, on entering them, he felt he was moving into a painting. This experience, and his study of the region's folk art (particularly the use of bright colours on a dark background), can be seen in much of his early work. He was interested in geometry in art and philosophy. The creative aspect of the form is expressed by a descending series of circles, triangles and squares.

[3] [4] [5] Artistic periods Art of Wassily Kandinsky: Periods, Influences & Architecture - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com Art of Wassily Kandinsky: Periods, Influences & Architecture Watch short & fun videos Start Your Free Trial Today An error occurred trying to load this video. Try refreshing the page, or contact customer support. You must create an account to continue watching Register for a free trial Are you a student or a teacher? I am a student Start Your Free Trial To Continue Watching As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Plus, get practice tests, quizzes, and personalized coaching to help you succeed. Coming up next: Members & Works of the Blue Rider Group You're on a roll. Keep up the good work!

Your next lesson will play in 10 seconds 0:01 Demystifying Kandinsky 0:32 The Influence of Color 1:49 Inner Necessity 2:24 The Blue Rider (1911-1914) 4:04 Bauhaus (1922-1933) Add to Add to Add to Want to watch this again later? Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Custom Courses are courses that you create from Study.com lessons. Use them just like other courses to track progress, access quizzes and exams, and share content. Teachers Organize and share selected lessons with your class. Make planning easier by creating your own custom course. Students Create a new course from any lesson page or your dashboard. From any lesson page: Click "Add to" located below the video player and follow the prompts to name your course and save your lesson. From your dashboard: Click on the "Custom Courses" tab, then click "Create course". Next, go to any lesson page and begin adding lessons. Edit your Custom Course directly from your dashboard. Personalize: Name your Custom Course and add an optional description or learning objective.

Organize: Create chapters to group lesson within your course. Remove and reorder chapters and lessons at any time. Share your Custom Course or assign lessons and chapters. Teacher Edition: Share or assign lessons and chapters by clicking the "Teacher" tab on the lesson or chapter page you want to assign. Students' quiz scores and video views will be trackable in your "Teacher" tab. Premium Edition: You can share your Custom Course by copying and pasting the course URL. Only Study.com members will be able to access the entire course. Create an account to start this course today Try it free for 5 days! Instructor: Ivy Roberts Ivy is a Doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University studying media studies and cultural history Explore the life and works of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Discover the influences that drove the three distinct periods of his artistic style. Learn about his affiliations with the Blue Rider and Bauhaus. Demystifying Kandinsky Art historians attribute Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky with painting the first purely abstract artwork. The concept of abstraction, accompanied by the range of styles in which Kandinsky painted, accounts for the mystification surrounding his identity as a modern artist.

In this lesson, we will pull back the veil to reveal the drive behind creating abstract art, as well as look at the different styles of Kandinsky against their historical background. The Influence of Color Kandinsky began his career as an artist later in life than most, at around the age of 30. The first period of his artistic career, from approximately 1896 to 1909, is marked by a style akin to Post-Impressionism. Around the turn of the century, he witnessed this new kind of art coming out of France. The trend toward abstraction, accompanied by the evocative use of color, inspired Kandinsky. He was particularly drawn to the works of French painter Claude Monet. Perhaps Kandinsky was so attracted to Monet because, more so than any of his contemporaries, his works showed how color could be an expression of mood apart from the objects they represented in paint on canvas. Kandinsky associated representational painting with materialist values and abstraction with spirituality. Look at a painting by Monet, such as Sunrise. Now imagine that you had never seen a sunrise, never seen the ocean. The sun becomes an orange globe; the waves are just lines.

Kandinsky wrote, 'Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.' Inner Necessity Kandinsky sought to move away from the representation of objects to a pure expression of what he called 'inner necessity.' He wrote, 'The inner need is built up of three mystical elements: personality, style dictated by the zeitgeist, and pure artistry.' Kandinsky's theory of art, based in inner necessity, constructs an image of the artist as a representative of the cultural, historical, and political zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. He is a 'spiritual warrior' whose mission it is to express himself with honesty and passion. The Blue Rider (1911-1914) The second distinct period of Kandinsky's work solidified in his association with the short-lived German art collective called The Blue Rider. Along with German artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider group published an almanac of artwork and writing, as well as staged exhibitions between 1911 and 1914.

The group took its name from Kandinsky's 1903 painting, referring to the use of color more so than its style of composition. Kandinsky and the members of Blue Rider were united through their philosophy of color, spirituality, and spontaneity. They believed that painting could be like improvisational music and composition, and that color could be used in composition like tones in an orchestra. But of utmost importance was the practice of art as spiritual enrichment, expression, and exploration. During this period he began to refer to his paintings as improvisations or compositions, much like music. And just like music can convey emotions and feelings that the listener will associate with visual images, Kandinsky believed that color could be used in composition distinct from the form. Color could express a pure emotion, rather than simply depict a hue of a representational object, or even a visual form. Think of the pink in a sunset. That hue can mean something to you without relation to the sky. Now imagine you saw that same hue in a painting. Does it mean the same thing when splattered on a canvas as it did when you saw it in the sky? × Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky, c.

1913 or earlier Born On White II, Der Blaue Reiter Movement Expressionism ; abstract art Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( Russian : Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, Vasiliy Vasil’yevich Kandinskiy,; 4 December (16 December by the Gregorian calendar ) 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first recognised purely abstract works. [1] Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa , where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school . He enrolled at the University of Moscow , studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law ) at the University of Dorpat —Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich , studying first at Anton Ažbe ‘s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts .

He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Communist Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. Contents Der Blaue Reiter (1903) Kandinsky’s creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty , fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art. Youth and inspiration (1866–1896) Early-period work, Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St.

Ursula (1908) Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. [2] [3] Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources while in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, including law and economics. Later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting. This experience, and his study of the region’s folk art (particularly the use of bright colours on a dark background), was reflected in much of his early work. A few years later he first likened painting to composing music in the manner for which he would become noted, writing, “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.

The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”. [4] Kandinsky was also the uncle of Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968). In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy where his teachers would eventually include Franz von Stuck . [5] He was not immediately granted admission, and began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet . He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of Haystacks ; this, to him, had a powerful sense of colour almost independent of the objects themselves. Later, he would write about this experience: That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory.

Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour. [6] — Wassily Kandinsky Kandinsky was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner ‘s Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism. He was also spiritually influenced by Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the best-known exponent of theosophy . Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the form is expressed by a descending series of circles, triangles and squares. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) echoed this theosophical tenet. Illustrations by John Varley in Thought Forms (1901) influenced him visually. [7] Metamorphosis Art school, usually considered difficult, was easy for Kandinsky. It was during this time that he began to emerge as an art theorist as well as a painter.

The number of his existing paintings increased in the beginning of the 20th century; much remains of the landscapes and towns he painted, using broad swaths of colour and recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky’s paintings did not feature any human figures; an exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904), in which Kandinsky recreates a highly colourful (and fanciful) view of peasants and nobles in front of 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. The horse is muted while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of colour and brightness. This work demonstrates the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field is collapsed into a flat, luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Colours are used to express Kandinsky’s experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature.

Perhaps the most important of his paintings from the first 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 medium blue, which casts a darker-blue shadow. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, 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). Some art historians believe that a second figure (perhaps a child) is being held by the rider, although this may be another shadow from the solitary rider. This intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, became an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years; it culminated in the abstract works of the 1911–1914 period. In The Blue Rider, Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colours than in specific detail. This painting is not exceptional in that regard when compared with contemporary painters, but it shows the direction Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow), until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau . In 1908 he bought a copy of Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater . In 1909 he joined the Theosophical Society. The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was painted at this time, demonstrating his trend toward abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow and one red. A procession, with three riders and several others, crosses at the bottom. The faces, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each a single colour, and neither they nor the walking figures display any real detail. The flat planes and the contours also are indicative of Fauvist influence. The broad use of colour in The Blue Mountain illustrates Kandinsky’s inclination toward an art in which colour is presented independently of form, and which each colour is given equal attention.

The composition is more planar; the painting is divided into four sections: the sky, the red tree, the yellow tree and the blue mountain with the three riders. Odessa Port, 1898 Murnau, train & castle, 1909 Blue Rider Period (1911–1914) Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), 1912, oil on canvas, 47 3/8 x 55 1/4 in. (120.3 x 140.3 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show . Kandinsky’s paintings from this period are large, expressive coloured masses evaluated independently from forms and lines; these serve no longer to delimit them, but overlap freely to form paintings of extraordinary force. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul.

Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings “improvisations” and described more elaborate works as “compositions.” In addition to painting, Kandinsky was an art theorist; his influence on the history of Western art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his paintings. He helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association), becoming its president in 1909. However, the group could not integrate the radical approach of Kandinsky (and others) with conventional artistic concepts and the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then formed a new group, the Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) with like-minded artists such as August Macke , Franz Marc , Albert Bloch , and Gabriele Münter . The group released an almanac (The Blue Rider Almanac) and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky back to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden .

His writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise “On the Spiritual In Art” (which was released in 1910) were both a defence and promotion of abstract art and an affirmation that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed that colour could be used in a painting as something autonomous, apart from the visual description of an object or other form. These ideas had an almost-immediate international impact, particularly in the English-speaking world. [8] As early as 1912, On the Spiritual In Art was reviewed by Michael Sadleir in the London-based Art News. [9] Interest in Kandinsky grew apace when Sadleir published an English translation of On the Spiritual In Art in 1914. Extracts from the book were published that year in Percy Wyndham Lewis ‘s periodical Blast , and Alfred Orage ‘s weekly cultural newspaper The New Age . Kandinsky had received some notice earlier in Britain, however; in 1910, he participated in the Allied Artists’ Exhibition (organised by Frank Rutter ) at London’s Royal Albert Hall .

This resulted in his work being singled out for praise in a review of that show by the artist Spencer Frederick Gore in The Art News. [10] Sadleir’s interest in Kandinsky also led to Kandinsky’s first works entering a British art collection; Sadleir’s father, Michael Sadler , acquired several woodprints and the abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII in 1913 following a visit by father and son to meet Kandinsky in Munich that year. These works were displayed in Leeds , either in the University or the premises of the Leeds Arts Club , between 1913 and 1923. [11] The Cow, 1910 Aquarell 6 Return to Russia (1914–1921) The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.

— Wassily Kandinsky [12] From 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky dealt with the cultural politics of Russia and collaborated in art education and museum reform. He painted little during this period, but devoted his time to artistic teaching, with a program based on form and colour analysis; he also helped organize the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. In 1916 he met Nina Andreievskaya (she died in 1980), whom he married the following year. His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected by the radical members of the Institute as too individualistic and bourgeois. In 1921, Kandinsky was invited to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar by its founder, architect Walter Gropius . Bauhaus (1922–1933) Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and the course on advanced theory at the Bauhaus ; he also conducted painting classes and a workshop in which he augmented his colour theory with new elements of form psychology.

The development of his works on forms study, particularly on points and line forms, led to the publication of his second theoretical book (Point and Line to Plane) in 1926. His examinations of the effects of forces on straight lines, leading to the contrasting tones of curved and angled lines, coincided with the research of Gestalt psychologists, whose work was also discussed at the Bauhaus. [13] Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in both his teaching and painting—particularly the circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This period was intensely productive. This freedom is characterised in his works by the treatment of planes rich in colours and gradations—as in Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky illustrates his distance from the constructivism and suprematism movements influential at the time. The two-meter-wide Yellow – red – blue (1925) consists of several main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, an inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle; a multitude of straight (or sinuous) black lines, circular arcs, monochromatic circles and scattered, coloured checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity.

This simple visual identification of forms and the main coloured masses present on the canvas is only a first approach to the inner reality of the work, whose appreciation necessitates deeper observation—not only of forms and colours involved in the painting but their relationship, their absolute and relative positions on the canvas and their harmony. Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), formed in 1923 with Klee , Feininger and von Jawlensky , which lectured and exhibited in the United States in 1924. Due to right-wing hostility, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in Dessau in 1925. Following a Nazi smear campaign the Bauhaus left Dessau in 1932 for Berlin , until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then left Germany, settling in Paris . Small worlds I, 1922 Soft Hard, 1927 Great Synthesis (1934–1944) Living in an apartment in Paris, Kandinsky created his work in a living-room studio.

Biomorphic forms with supple, non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings—forms which suggest microscopic organisms but express the artist’s inner life. Kandinsky used original colour compositions, evoking Slavic popular art. He also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular, rustic texture to his paintings. This period corresponds to a synthesis of Kandinsky’s previous work in which he used all elements, enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions, the type of elaborate canvases he had not produced for many years. Composition IX has highly contrasted, powerful diagonals whose central form gives the impression of an embryo in the womb. Small squares of colours and coloured bands stand out against the black background of Composition X as star fragments (or filaments ), while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover a large maroon mass which seems to float in the upper-left corner of the canvas. In Kandinsky’s work some characteristics are obvious, while certain touches are more discreet and veiled; they reveal themselves only progressively to those who deepen their connection with his work.

[14] He intended his forms (which he subtly harmonized and placed) to resonate with the observer’s soul. Brown with supplement, 1935 Kandinsky’s conception of art The artist as prophet Composition VII—according to Kandinsky, the most complex piece he ever painted (1913) Writing that “music is the ultimate teacher,” [15] Kandinsky embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. The first three survive only in black-and-white photographs taken by fellow artist and friend Gabriele Münter . While studies, sketches, and improvisations exist (particularly of Composition II), a Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s resulted in the confiscation of Kandinsky’s first three Compositions. They were displayed in the State-sponsored exhibit “ Degenerate Art “, and then destroyed (along with works by Paul Klee , Franz Marc and other modern artists). Fascinated by Christian eschatology and the perception of a coming New Age, [16] a common theme among Kandinsky’s first seven Compositions is the apocalypse (the end of the world as we know it).

Writing of the “artist as prophet” in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky created paintings in the years immediately preceding World War I showing a coming cataclysm which would alter individual and social reality. Having a fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity , [17] Kandinsky drew upon the biblical stories of Noah’s Ark , Jonah and the whale, Christ’s resurrection , the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation , Russian folktales and the common mythological experiences of death and rebirth. Never attempting to picture any one of these stories as a narrative, he used their veiled imagery as symbols of the archetypes of death–rebirth and destruction–creation he felt were imminent in the pre- World War I world. As he stated in Concerning the Spiritual In Art (see below), Kandinsky felt that an authentic artist creating art from “an internal necessity” inhabits the tip of an upward-moving pyramid. This progressing pyramid is penetrating and proceeding into the future. What was odd or inconceivable yesterday is commonplace today; what is avant garde today (and understood only by the few) is common knowledge tomorrow.

The modern artist–prophet stands alone at the apex of the pyramid, making new discoveries and ushering in tomorrow’s reality. Kandinsky was aware of recent scientific developments and the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. Composition IV and later paintings are primarily concerned with evoking a spiritual resonance in viewer and artist. As in his painting of the apocalypse by water (Composition VI), Kandinsky puts the viewer in the situation of experiencing these epic myths by translating them into contemporary terms (with a sense of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion). This spiritual communion of viewer-painting-artist/prophet may be described within the limits of words and images. Artistic and spiritual theorist Composition VI (1913) As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and theorizing with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also expressed the communion between artist and viewer as being available to both the senses and the mind ( synesthesia ).

Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that (for example), yellow is the colour of middle C on a brassy trumpet; black is the colour of closure, and the end of things; and that combinations of colours produce vibrational frequencies, akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky also developed a theory of geometric figures and their relationships—claiming, for example, that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul. These theories are explained in Point and Line to Plane (see below). Kandinsky’s legendary stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky ‘s “ Pictures at an Exhibition ” illustrates his synaesthetic concept of a universal correspondence of forms, colors and musical sounds. [18] In 1928 in the theater of Dessau Wassily Kandinsky realized the stage production of “Pictures at an Exhibition”. In 2015 the original designs of the stage elements were animated with modern video technology and synchronized with the music according to the preparatory notes of Kandinsky and the director’s script of Felix Klee. During the studies Kandinsky made in preparation for Composition IV, he became exhausted while working on a painting and went for a walk.

While he was out, Gabriele Münter tidied his studio and inadvertently turned his canvas on its side. Upon returning and seeing the canvas (but not yet recognizing it) Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, saying it was the most beautiful painting he had ever seen. He had been liberated from attachment to an object. As when he first viewed Monet’s Haystacks , the experience would change his life. In another episode with Münter during the Bavarian abstract expressionist years, Kandinsky was working on his Composition VI. From nearly six months of study and preparation, he had intended the work to evoke a flood, baptism, destruction, and rebirth simultaneously. After outlining the work on a mural-sized wood panel, he became blocked and could not go on. Münter told him that he was trapped in his intellect and not reaching the true subject of the picture. She suggested he simply repeat the word uberflut (“deluge” or “flood”) and focus on its sound rather than its meaning. Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed the monumental work in a three-day span.

Theoretical writings on art Kandinsky’s analyses on forms and colours result not from simple, arbitrary idea-associations but from the painter’s inner experience. He spent years creating abstract , sensorially rich paintings, working with form and colour, tirelessly observing his own paintings and those of other artists, noting their effects on his sense of colour. [19] This subjective experience is something that anyone can do—not scientific, objective observations but inner, subjective ones, what French philosopher Michel Henry calls “absolute subjectivity” or the “absolute phenomenological life “. [20] Concerning the spiritual in art Published in 1912, Kandinsky’s text, Du Spirituel dans l’art, defines three types of painting; impressions, improvisations and compositions. While impressions are based on an external reality that serves as a starting point, improvisations and compositions depict images emergent from the unconscious, though composition is developed from a more formal point of view. [21] Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a pyramid —the artist has a mission to lead others to the pinnacle with his work. The point of the pyramid is those few, great artists.

It is a spiritual pyramid, advancing and ascending slowly even if it sometimes appears immobile. During decadent periods, the soul sinks to the bottom of the pyramid; humanity searches only for external success, ignoring spiritual forces. [22] Colours on the painter’s palette evoke a double effect: a purely physical effect on the eye which is charmed by the beauty of colours, similar to the joyful impression when we eat a delicacy. This effect can be much deeper, however, causing a vibration of the soul or an “inner resonance”—a spiritual effect in which the colour touches the soul itself. [23] “Inner necessity” is, for Kandinsky, the principle of art and the foundation of forms and the harmony of colours. He defines it as the principle of efficient contact of the form with the human soul. [24] Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content, the effect it produces on one who looks at it attentively. [25] This inner necessity is the right of the artist to unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes licence if it is not founded on such a necessity.

[26] Art is born from the inner necessity of the artist in an enigmatic, mystical way through which it acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject, animated by a spiritual breath. [27] The obvious properties we can see when we look at an isolated colour and let it act alone, on one side is the warmth or coldness of the colour tone, and on the other side is the clarity or obscurity of that tone. [28] Warmth is a tendency towards yellow, and coldness a tendency towards blue; yellow and blue form the first great, dynamic contrast. [29] Yellow has an eccentric movement and blue a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to move closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. [30] Yellow is a typically terrestrial colour, whose violence can be painful and aggressive. [31] Blue is a celestial colour, evoking a deep calm. [32] The combination of blue and yellow yields total immobility and calm, which is green. [33] Clarity is a tendency towards white, and obscurity is a tendency towards black. White and black form the second great contrast, which is static.

[30] White is a deep, absolute silence, full of possibility. [34] Black is nothingness without possibility, an eternal silence without hope, and corresponds with death. Any other colour resonates strongly on its neighbors. [35] The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose tonality is near that of green. Gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark, regaining little hope when it lightens. [36] Red is a warm colour, lively and agitated; it is forceful, a movement in itself. [36] Mixed with black it becomes brown, a hard colour. [37] Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and becomes orange, which imparts an irradiating movement on its surroundings. [38] When red is mixed with blue it moves away from man to become purple, which is a cool red. [39] Red and green form the third great contrast, and orange and purple the fourth.

[40] Point and Line to Plane Points, 1920, 110.3 × 91.8 cm, Ohara Museum of Art In his writings, Kandinsky analyzed the geometrical elements which make up every painting—the point and the line. He called the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints the basic plane, or BP. [41] He did not analyze them objectively, but from the point of view of their inner effect on the observer. [42] A point is a small bit of colour put by the artist on the canvas. It is neither a geometric point nor a mathematical abstraction; it is extension, form and colour. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, a star or something more complex. The point is the most concise form but, according to its placement on the basic plane, it will take a different tonality. It can be isolated or resonate with other points or lines. [43] A line is the product of a force which has been applied in a given direction: the force exerted on the pencil or paintbrush by the artist.

The produced linear forms may be of several types: a straight line, which results from a unique force applied in a single direction; an angular line, resulting from the alternation of two forces in different directions, or a curved (or wave-like) line, produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane may be obtained by condensation (from a line rotated around one of its ends). [44] The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: a horizontal line corresponds with the ground on which man rests and moves; it possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar to black or blue. A vertical line corresponds with height, and offers no support; it possesses a luminous, warm tonality close to white and yellow. A diagonal possesses a more-or-less warm (or cold) tonality, according to its inclination toward the horizontal or the vertical. [45] A force which deploys itself, without obstacle, as the one which produces a straight line corresponds with lyricism; several forces which confront (or annoy) each other form a drama.

[46] The angle formed by the angular line also has an inner sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (a triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (a circle), and similar to red for a right angle (a square). [47] The basic plane is, in general, rectangular or square. therefore, it is composed of horizontal and vertical lines which delimit it and define it as an autonomous entity which supports the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical lines: the horizontals giving a calm, cold tonality to the basic plane while the verticals impart a calm, warm tonality. [48] The artist intuits the inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky considered the basic plane a living being, which the artist “fertilizes” and feels “breathing”.

[49] Each part of the basic plane possesses an affective colouration; this influences the tonality of the pictorial elements which will be drawn on it, and contributes to the richness of the composition resulting from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds with looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes condensation and heaviness. The painter’s job is to listen and know these effects to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of authentic work and the result of an effort towards inner beauty. [50] This book contains many photographic examples and drawing from Kandinsky’s works which offer the demonstration of its theoretical observations, and which allow the reader to reproduce in him the inner obviousness provided that he takes the time to look at those pictures with care, that he let them acting on its own sensibility and that he let vibrating the sensible and spiritual strings of his soul.

[51] Miscellaneous information Art market In 2012, Christie’s auctioned Kandinsky’s Studie für Improvisation 8 (Study for Improvisation 8), a 1909 view of a man wielding a broadsword in a rainbow-hued village, for $23 million. The painting had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum Winterthur , Switzerland, since 1960 and was sold to a European collector by the Volkart Foundation, the charitable arm of the Swiss commodities trading firm Volkart Brothers. Before this sale, the artist’s last record was set in 1990 when Sotheby’s sold his Fugue (1914) for $20.9 million. [52] In popular culture The 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation refers to a “double-sided Kandinsky” painting. [53] No such painting is known to exist; in the 1993 film version of the play , the double-sided painting is portrayed as having Kandinsky’s 1913 painting Black Lines on one side and his 1926 painting Several Circles on the other side.

[54] In 2014, Google commemorated Kandinsky’s 148th birthday by featuring a Google Doodle based on his abstract paintings . [55] [56] A picture-book biography entitled The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art was published in 2014. Its illustrations by Mary GrandPre earned it a 2015 Caldecott Honor . His grandson was musicology professor and writer Aleksey Ivanovich Kandinsky (1918–2000), whose career was both focused on and centered in Russia. [57] [58] See also “Кандинский Алексей Иванович” (in Russian). Moscow Conservatory. Retrieved 19 November 2015. Books by Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky, M. T. Sadler (Translator), Adrian Glew (Editor). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. (New York: MFA Publications and London: Tate Publishing, 2001). 192pp.

ISBN 0-87846-702-5 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Wassily Kandinsky, M. T Sadler (Translator). Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover Publ. (Paperback). 80 pp. ISBN 0-486-23411-8 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ]. or: Lightning Source Inc Publ. (Paperback). ISBN 1-4191-1377-1 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Wassily Kandinsky. Klänge . Verlag R. Piper & Co., Munich Wassily Kandinsky. Point and Line to Plane. Dover Publications, New York. ISBN 0-486-23808-3 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80570-7 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] References in English John E Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long.

The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian art: a study of “On the spiritual in art” by Wassily Kandinsky. (Newtonville, MA.: Oriental Research Partners, 1984). ISBN 0-89250-131-6 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Magdalena Dabrowski. Kandinsky Compositions. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002). ISBN 0-87070-405-2 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Hajo Düchting. Wassily Kandinsky 1866–1944: A Revolution in Painting. (Taschen, 2000). ISBN 3-8228-5982-6 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Hajo Düchting and O’Neill. The Avant-Garde in Russia. Will Grohmann. Wassily Kandinsky. Life and Work. (New York: Harry N Abrams Inc., 1958). Thomas M. Messer. Vasily Kandinsky. (New York: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1997).

(Illustrated). ISBN 0-8109-1228-7 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ]. Margarita Tupitsyn, Against Kandinsky (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, 2006). Michel Henry : Seeing the Invisible. On Kandinsky (Continuum, 2009). ISBN 1-84706-447-7 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] Sabine Flach, “Through the Looking Gass”, in: Intellectual Birdhouse (London: Koenig Books, 2012). ISBN 978-3-86335-118-2 [ Amazon-US | Amazon-UK ] References in French

Question: From 1922-1933, with which School of Art was Wassily Kandinsky particularly associated?
Answer: Bauhaus