Wassily KANDINSKY Paintings, Fine Art Print, Posters, Art Painting

Wassily KANDINSKY Art Print Buy a Poster

Wassily KANDINSKY Paintings, Fine Art Print, Posters, Art Painting

Wassily KANDINSKY "Spitzen im Bogen, 1927"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Schweres Rot (Heavy Red), 1924"

Wassily KANDINSKY"Gelb-rot-blau (Jaune, rouge, bleu), 1925"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Im Blau, 1925"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Hommage à Grohmann, 1926"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Fixé, 1935"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Evenement doux, 1928"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Découpe, 1929"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Quinze, 1959"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Noeud rouge, 1936"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Composition IX, 1924"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Cercles sur fond noirs, 1924"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Cercle jaune, 1926"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Accord réciproque, 1942"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Carrés et cercles concentriques, 1913"

Wassily KANDINSKY "Les trois ovales, 1942"

Fine Arts Dictionary:Kandinsky, Wikipedia:Wassily Kandinskyassily

pronunciation: /kənˈdɪnski/; Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, Vasilij Vasil'evič Kandinskij; 4 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.^{[citation
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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 the private school of Anton Ažbe and 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.

His great-grandson, Anton S. Kandinsky, is also a New York-based artist working in a style called 'Gemism'^[1]^[2]
Artistic periods

An early period work "Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula" (Kandinsky 1908)

Kandinsky's creation of purely abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central aspect of his art.

Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources life in Moscow. Later in his life, he would recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated by colour as a child. The fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic research group that 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 had the impression that he was moving into a painting. The experience and his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colours on a dark background, was reflected in much his early work. A few years later, he first related the act of painting to creating music in the manner for which he would later become noted and wrote, "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul."

It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, that Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. He was not immediately granted admission in Munich and began learning art on his own. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet and was particularly taken with the famous impressionistic Haystacks which, 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. ”

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He was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.^{[citation
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Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the 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 basic Theosophical tenet.

Artistic metamorphosis (1896–1911)

Kandinsky's time at art school, typically considered difficult to get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students. It was during this time that he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. The number of existing paintings increased at the beginning of the 20^th century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of colour 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 colourful (and 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 colour and brightness. The work shows 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 the artist's experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature. Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's 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 a medium blue, 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. This type of intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, would become an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the (often nominally) abstract works of the 1911–1914 period. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colours 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.

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. The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was painted at this time and 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 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 some influences by the Fauvists. The broad use of colour in The Blue Mountain, illustrates Kandinsky's move towards an art in which colour is presented independently of form, and which each colour is given equal attention. The composition has also become more planar, as it seems that the painting itself is divided into four sections- the sky, the red tree, the yellow tree, and the blue mountain containing the three riders.

The Blue Rider (1911–1914)

See also Der Blaue Reiter

Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter (1903).

The paintings of this period are composed of large and very expressive coloured masses evaluated independently from forms and lines which serve no longer to delimit them but are superimposed and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an extraordinary force.

The influence of music has been very important on the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world but rather to express in an immediate way the inner feelings of the human soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to designate his works; he called many of his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he entitled more elaborated works "compositions".

In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his voice as an art theorist. In fact, Kandinsky's influence on the history of Western art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his paintings. He helped to found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists' Association) 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 August Macke and Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, called 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 home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

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 colour could be used in a painting as something autonomous and apart from a visual description of an object or other form.

Return to Russia (1914–1921)

In his own words, Composition VII was the most complex piece he ever painted (Kandinsky 1913)

“ 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 ^[3]

Through the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky dealt with the cultural development politics of Russia and collaborated in the domains of art pedagogy and museum reforms. He devoted his time to artistic teaching with a program based on form and colour analysis, as well as participating in the organization of the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. He painted little during this period. In 1916 he met Nina Andreievskaia, who in the following year became his wife. His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected by the more radical members of the Institute as too individualistic and bourgeois. In 1921 Kandinsky received the mission to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius.

The Bauhaus (1922–1933)

"On White II" (Kandinsky 1923)

The Bauhaus was an innovative architecture and art school whose objectives included the merging of plastic arts with applied arts, reflected in its teaching methods based on the theoretical and practical application of the plastic arts synthesis. Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and the course on advanced theory, and also conducted painting classes and a workshop where he completed his colour theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on forms study, particularly on point and different forms of lines, lead to the publication of his second major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.

Geometrical elements took on increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This period was a period of intense production. The freedom of which is characterised in each of his works by the treatment of planes rich in colours and magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow – red – blue (1925), where Kandinsky shows his distance from constructivism and suprematism movements whose influence was increasing at this time.

The large two meter width painting that is Yellow – red – blue (1925) consists of a number of main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle, while a multitude of straight black or sinuous lines, arcs of circles, monochromatic circles and scattering of coloured checkerboards contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of forms and of the main coloured masses present on the canvas only corresponds to a first approach of the inner reality of the work whose right appreciation necessitates a much deeper observation—not only of forms and colours 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.

Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), with Klee, Feininger and von Jawlensky formed in 1923. They lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1924.

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

The great synthesis (1934–1944)

Composition X, painted during WWII. (Kandinsky 1939)

In Paris he was quite isolated since abstract painting—particularly geometric abstract painting—was not recognized, the artistic fashions being mainly Impressionism and cubism. Kandinsky lived in a small apartment and created his work in a studio constructed in the living room. Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms but which always express the artist's inner life. He used original colour compositions which evoke Slavonic popular art and which are similar to precious watermark works. He also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular texture to his paintings.

This period corresponds, in fact, to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he used all elements, even enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two last major compositions; canvases particularly elaborate and slowly ripped that he hadn't produced for many years. Composition IX is a painting with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form give the impression of a human embryo in the womb. The small squares of colours and the coloured 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.

In Kandinsky’s work, some characteristics are obvious while certain touches are more discrete and veiled; that is to say they reveal themselves only progressively to those who make the effort to deepen their connection with his work. He intended his forms, which he subtly harmonized and placed, to resonate with the observer's own soul.

Kandinsky's conception of art

The artist as prophet

Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," 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" then destroyed along with works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists.

Influenced by Theosophy and the perception of a coming New Age, a common theme among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the Apocalypse, or 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. Raised an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky drew upon the Jewish and Christian stories of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, various Russian folk tales, 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 to 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 upwards moving triangle. This progressing triangle is penetrating and proceeding into tomorrow. Accordingly, what was odd or inconceivable yesterday is commonplace today; what is avant garde today (and understood only by the few) is standard tomorrow. The modern artist/prophet stands lonely at the tip of this triangle making new discoveries and ushering in tomorrow's reality. Kandinsky had become aware of recent developments in sciences, as well as the advances of modern artists who had contributed to radically new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

Composition IV and subsequent 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 along with requisite senses of desperation, flurry, urgency, and confusion. This spiritual communion of viewer-painting-artist/prophet is ineffable but may be described to the limits of words and images.

Artistic and spiritual theoretician

As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and theorizing with composer Arnold Schoenberg indicate, Kandinsky also expressed this communion between artist and viewer as being simultaneously available to the various sense faculties as well as to the intellect (synesthesia). Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that, for examples, yellow is the colour of middle-C on a piano, a brassy trumpet blast; black is the colour of closure and the ends of things; and that combinations and associations of colours produce vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky also developed an intricate 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 set forth in Point and Line to Plane (see below).

During the months of studies Kandinsky made in preparation for Composition IV he became exhausted while working on a painting and went for a walk. In the meantime, Gabriele Münter tidied his studio and inadvertently turned his canvas on its side. Upon returning and seeing the canvas—yet not identifying it—Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, saying it was the most beautiful painting he had seen. He had been liberated from attachment to the object. As when he first viewed Monet's Haystacks, the experience would change his life and the history of Western art.

In another event 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 only a three-day span.

Theoretical writings on art

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The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on colours doesn't result from simple arbitrary ideas associations, but from the inner experience of the painter, who has passed years creating abstract paintings of an incredible sensorial richness, working on forms and with colours, observing for a long time and tirelessly his own paintings and those of other artists, noting simply their subjective effect on the very high sensibility to colours of his artist and poet soul.

So it is a purely subjective form of experience that everyone can do and repeat taking the time to look at his paintings and letting acting the forms and the colours on his own living sensibility. These are not scientific and objective observations, but inner observations radically subjective and purely phenomenological which is a matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Originally published in 1911, Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a large triangle similar to a pyramid; the artist has the task and the mission of leading others to the top by the exercise of his talent. The point of the triangle is constituted only by some individuals who bring the sublime bread to other people. It is a spiritual triangle which moves forwards and rises slowly, even if it sometimes remains immobile. During decadent periods, souls fall to the bottom of the Triangle and men only search for the external success and ignore purely spiritual forces.

When we look at colours on the painter's palette, a double effect happens: a purely physical effect on the eye, charmed by the beauty of colours firstly, which provokes a joyful impression as when we eat a delicacy. But this effect can be much deeper and causes an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an inner resonance, which is a purely spiritual effect, by which the colour touches the soul itself.

The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle of the art and the foundation of forms and colours' harmony. He defines it as the principle of the efficient contact of the form with the human soul. Every form is the delimitation of a surface by another one; it possesses an inner content which is the effect it produces on the one who looks at it attentively. This inner necessity is the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a necessity. The art work is born from the inner necessity of the artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it acquires an autonomous life; it becomes an independent subject animated by a spiritual breath.

The first obvious properties we can see when we look at isolated colour and let it act alone; it is on one side the warmth or the coldness of the coloured tone, and on the other side the clarity or the obscurity of the tone.

The warmth is a tendency to yellow, and the coldness is a tendency to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first big contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to get closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial colour whose violence can be painful and aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial colour which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue with yellow gives the total immobility and the calm, the green.

Clarity is a tendency to the white and obscurity is a tendency to the black. The white and the black form the second big contrast, which is static. The white acts like a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. The black is a nothingness without possibility, which is an eternal silence without hope, and corresponds to death. That’s why any other colour resonates so strongly on its neighbors. The mixing of white with black leads to gray, which possesses no active force and whose affective tonality is near that of green. The gray corresponds to immobility without hope; it tends to despair when it becomes dark and regains little hope when it lightens.

The red is a warmth colour, very living, lively and agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to brown which is a hard colour. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives the orange which possesses an irradiating movement on the surroundings. When red is mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the green form the third big contrast, while the orange and the purple form the fourth one.

Point and line to plane

Kandinsky analyzed, in his writings, the geometrical elements which compose every painting, namely the point and the line, as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he called the basic plane or BP. He didn’t analyze them on an objective, exterior point of view, but on the point of view of their inner effect on the living subjectivity of the observer who looks at them and lets them act on his sensibility.

The point is, in practice, a small stain of colour put by the artist on the canvas. So the point used by the painter is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses a certain extension, a form and a colour. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, like a star or even 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 put in resonance with other points or lines.

The line is the product of a force. It is a point on which a living force has been applied in a given direction, the force applied on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist. The produced linear forms can be of several types: a straight line, which results from a unique force applied in a single direction, an angular line, which results from the alternation of two forces with different directions, or a curved or wave-like line produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be obtained by condensation, from a line rotated around one of its ends.

The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: the horizontal line corresponds to the ground, on which man rests and moves; it possesses a dark and cold affective tonality similar with black or blue. The vertical line corresponds to height which offers no support; it possesses a luminous and warm tonality close to white and yellow. A diagonal possesses by consequence a more or less warm or cold tonality according to its inclination according to the horizontal and to the vertical.

A force which deploys itself without obstacle as the one which produces a straight line corresponds to lyricism, while several forces which confront or annoy each other form a drama. The angle formed by the angular line possesses as well an inner sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red for a right angle (square).

The basic plane is, in general, rectangular or square, thus it is composed of horizontal and vertical lines which delimit it and define it as an autonomous entity which serves as support to the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tonality to the basic plane, while the verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. The artist possesses the intuition of this inner effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the basic plane as a living being that the artist "fertilizes" and of which he feels the "breathing".

Every part of the basic plane possesses a proper affective colouration which influences the tonality of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, and which contributes to the richness of the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to lightness, while the below evokes the condensation and heaviness. The work of the painter is to listen and to know these effects in order to produce paintings which are not just the effect of a random process, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort towards the inner beauty.

Quotations on Kandinsky

"The 'Pioneer' [Kandinsky] did not just produce a body of work whose sensuous magnificence and rich inventiveness eclipse even the most remarkable of his contemporaries. He also provided an explicit theory of abstract painting, exposing its principles with the utmost precision and clarity. So, the painted work is accompanied with a group of texts that at the same time clarify his work and make Kandinsky one of the main theorists of art. Facing the hieroglyphs of the last canvases of the Parisian period (which are said to be the most difficult), they provide the Rosetta stone on which the meaning of these mysterious figures is inscribed." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky, p. 2)

"Kandinsky was fascinated by the expressive power of linear forms. Lyricism is the pathos of a force whose triumphant effort enters into action and encounters no obstacle. Because the straight line results from the initiative of a single, unopposed force, its domain is that of the lyric. When two forces are present and thus enter in conflict, as this is the case with the curve or the zigzag line, we are in domain of drama." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky, p. 52)

"Kandinsky calls abstract the content that painting must express, that’s to say this invisible life that we are. In such a way that the Kandinskian equation, to which we have alluded to, can be written in reality as follows : Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky, p. 11).

Who2 Biography:Wassily Kandinsky, Artist

Born: 16 December 1866
Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
Died: 13 December 1944
Best Known As: Russian-born founder of Abstract art

Wasilly Kandinsky (or Vassilii Kandinskii) was a Russian painter whose works from 1910 are considered the first abstract paintings. Kandinsky had a law career in Moscow until he opted for art school in Munich in 1896 -- when he was almost 30. Within a decade he'd made a name for himself in Russia and in Europe, an Expressionist whose dazzling watercolors were influenced by Russian folk art and French Impressionists such as Claude Monet. Between 1910 and 1912 he wrote about non-objective "abstract" paintings and published On the Spiritual in Art, a work that solidified his position as the father of abstract art. Known for his ingenuity with geometric shapes and use of brilliant color, Kandinsky was successful in Europe and the United States. He spent his career in Russia (1914-21), Germany (1922-33, at the Bauhaus, alongside Paul Klee) and France (until his death).

Biography:Wassily Kandinsky

The Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was one of the great masters of modern art and the outstanding representative of pure abstract painting that dominated the first half of the 20th century.

Wassily Kandinsky produced his early work in Russia, his mature and most revolutionary work in Germany, and his later work in France. He invented a language of abstract forms with which he replaced the forms of nature. His ultimate intention was to mirror the universe in his visionary world. He felt that painting possessed the same power as music and that sign, line, and color ought to correspond to the vibrations of the human soul.

Kandinsky was born on Dec. 4, 1866, in Moscow; his father was a tea merchant. When he was 5 the family moved to Odessa. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. Between 1886 and 1892 he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. In 1889, as a member of an ethnographic mission to the Vologda district, he was highly impressed by the interior decorations of the village houses. In 1893 he accepted a position on the law faculty of the university.

Beginnings as an Artist

Only in 1896, when he was 30 years old, did Kandinsky decide to become an artist. Of importance for his artistic development was the exhibition of French impressionists in Moscow in 1895, particularly the works of Claude Monet. In Monet's paintings the subject matter played a secondary role to color. Reality and fairy tale intermixed - that was the secret of Kandinsky's early work, which was based on folk art, and it remained so even later although more intellectualized.

Between 1897 and 1899 Kandinsky attended the Azbé School of Painting in Munich, and in 1900 he was a pupil of Franz von Stuck. In 1901 Kandinsky founded the artists' group Phalanx and taught at their private art school. The following year he met the painter Gabriele Münter, with whom he lived until 1916. The works of his Phalanx period, from 1901 to 1904, are in the Jugendstil. In 1903 Kandinsky traveled to Venice, Odessa, and Moscow; in 1904 to Holland and Tunisia; in 1906 to Odessa and Rapallo. From 1905 on he was a member of the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. He spent 1906-1907 in Sèvres near Paris. He exhibited with the Brücke (Bridge) artists in Dresden and returned to Munich in 1908.

Kandinsky's early impressionist-inspired paintings and those of his Jugendstil period are strong in color, and color continued to dominate in his landscapes of Murnau, where he bought a house in 1909 (for example, Railway at Murnau, 1909-1910). He was one of the founders of the Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists' Associaton) in Munich in 1909, of which he became the chairman.

First Abstract Art

The year 1910 was crucial for Kandinsky and for world art. Kandinsky produced his first abstract watercolor, in which all elements of representation and association seem to have disappeared; he also wrote Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art), the first theorization of a nonobjective form of art ever elaborated by an artist and his most influential treatise. He met Franz Marc in 1910, and in 1911, after a trip to Russia, he met Paul Klee, Jean Arp, and August Macke. Kandinsky and Marc founded the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich in 1911 and exhibited with them. A second exhibition followed in 1912, and the Almanach Blauer Reiter was published. The exhibition was repeated in the Sturm Gallery in Berlin, for which a special Kandinsky album was issued.

In 1913 Kandinsky produced a series of color lithographs and prose poems Klänge (Sounds) and took part in the first Herbstsalon (Autumn Exhibition). The Blaue Reiter disbanded in 1914. In his early abstract works vehement linear strokes are combined with powerful patches of color, as in Composition V (1911) and With the Black Arch (1912).

Return to Russia

When World War I broke out, Kandinsky returned to Russia. In 1917 he married Nina Andreewsky. During the Russian Revolution the artist occupied an important post at the Commissariat of Popular Culture and at the Academy in Moscow. He organized 22 museums and became the director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture. In 1920 he was appointed professor at the University of Moscow. The following year he founded the Academy of Arts and Sciences and became its vice president. When, at the end of that year, the Soviet attitude to art changed, Kandinsky left Russia.

Years in Germany and France

In 1922 Kandinsky became a professor at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Together with Klee, Alexei von Jawlensky, and Lyonel Feininger he founded the Blaue Vier (Blue Four) group in 1924. When, in 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Kandinsky moved with it. In 1926 he published the principles of his teaching in Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane). His art from about 1920 to 1924 has been defined as his architectural period. The shapes are more precise than before; there are points, straight or broken lines, single or in bunches, and snakelike, radiating segments of circles; the color is cooler, more subdued, with occasional outbursts of earlier expressionist tonality. This period is exemplified in Composition VIII (1923). From 1925 to 1927 he emphasized circles in his paintings, as can be seen in Several Circles (1926).

Kandinsky became a German citizen in 1928, and the same year he designed sets for Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition for the Dessau Theater. In 1929 Kandinsky held his first one-man show in Paris and traveled to Belgium and the French Riviera. In 1930 he had another exhibition in Paris. For the large architectural exhibition in Berlin of 1931 he produced wall decorations. When the Bauhaus was closed in 1932, Kandinsky moved to Berlin, and the following year he left for Paris.

Kandinsky's romantic, or concrete, period, from 1927 to 1933, in which his use of pictorial signs was abundant and his color was softer, is exemplified in Between the Light (1931). It led to the last phase of his art, that spent in France, which was an intellectual synthesis of his previous strivings.

Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. He met Joan Miró, Robert Delaunay, and Piet Mondrian, and a friendship developed with Antoine Pevsner, Arp, and Alberto Magnelli. In 1939 Kandinsky became a French citizen. He died on Dec. 13, 1944, in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The paintings of his Paris period have a Russian splendor of color, a richness of formal invention, and a delightful humor, as in Composition X (1939), Sky Blue (1940), and Reciprocal Accord (1942).