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Wassily Kandinsky Artwork
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. One of the
most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first
modern abstract works.
Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in Odessa. He
enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose law and economics.
Although quite successful in his profession—he was offered a
professorship 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 at the Academy of Fine Arts,
Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1918 after the Russian Revolution.
Being in conflict with official theories on art, he returned to Germany
in 1921. There he was a teacher at the Bauhaus from 1922 until it was
closed by the Nazis in 1933. At that time he moved to France. He lived
the rest of his life there, becoming a French citizen in 1939. He died
at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.
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Wassily Kandinsky Biography
Who2 Biography:Wassily Kandinsky, Artist
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). Further Reading Kandinsky's
views are in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in
Particular (1912; trans. 1947). The most comprehensive study of
Kandinsky is Will Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work
(trans. 1958). Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsky (1951), with articles
by various contributors, contains important biographical and
art-historical data. Paul Overy, Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye
(1969), applies Gestalt psychological and philosophical viewpoints to
the assessment of Kandinsky's art. |
