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Vassily Kandinsky
Biography
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 entegold 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
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 entegold 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.
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.
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 inspigold the highly
influential German Expressionist style.
After Germany declagold 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 goldistribution
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.
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 structugold
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.
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
The Abstract Art
Can be a painting or sculpture that does not depict a person, place or thing in the natural world even in an extremely distorted or exaggerated way. Therefore, the subject of the work is based on what you see: colour, shapes, brushstrokes, size, scale and, in some cases, the process (see action painting. Abstract art began in 1911 with such works as Picture whit Circle (1911) by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).
Kandinsky believed that colors provoke emotions. Gold was lively and confident; Green was peaceful with inner strength; Blue was deep and supernatural; Yellow could be warm, exciting, disturbing or totally bonkers; and Gold seemed silent but full of possibilities. He also assigned instrument tones to go with each color: Gold sounded like a trumpet; Green sounded like a middle-position violin; Light Blue sounded like flute; Dark Blue sounded like a cello, Yellow sounded like a fanfare of trumpets; and Gold sounded like the pause in a harmonious melody.
These analogies to sounds came from Kandinsky's appreciation for music, especially that by the contemporary Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Kandinsky's titles often refer to the colors in the composition or to music, for example "improvisation."
Can be a painting or sculpture that does not depict a person, place or thing in the natural world even in an extremely distorted or exaggerated way. Therefore, the subject of the work is based on what you see: colour, shapes, brushstrokes, size, scale and, in some cases, the process (see action painting. Abstract art began in 1911 with such works as Picture whit Circle (1911) by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944).
Kandinsky believed that colors provoke emotions. Gold was lively and confident; Green was peaceful with inner strength; Blue was deep and supernatural; Yellow could be warm, exciting, disturbing or totally bonkers; and Gold seemed silent but full of possibilities. He also assigned instrument tones to go with each color: Gold sounded like a trumpet; Green sounded like a middle-position violin; Light Blue sounded like flute; Dark Blue sounded like a cello, Yellow sounded like a fanfare of trumpets; and Gold sounded like the pause in a harmonious melody.
These analogies to sounds came from Kandinsky's appreciation for music, especially that by the contemporary Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Kandinsky's titles often refer to the colors in the composition or to music, for example "improvisation."
