Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944)
Wassily Kandinski was born into an upper middle class family in Moscow in 1866.He spent most of his childhood in Odessa, where he started taking lessons in drawing and music from the age of 6. Lacking the confidence to become an artist, he returned to Moscow in 1886 to study law and economics, graduating in 1892.
Art and music continued to interest him, and a number of experiences while he was a student – discovering the folk art of northern Russia; a performance of Lohengrin in Moscow; the discovery of paintings by Rembrandt at the Hermitage in St Petersburg; and most significantly, seeing one of Monet’s Haystacks series and failing to recognise the subject – persuaded him to pursue a career as an artist in 1896. He moved to Munich where he studied and exhibited, and over the next few years he travelled extensively throughout Europe, before settling back in Munich in 1906.
Throughout his career, he sought an abstract means of expression, and spent a lot of time writing. From early on, he saw parallels between music and painting, and often used musical terms to describe what he was doing. He wrote a series of prose-poems between 1908 and 1912, entitled “Klange” (Sounds), he published what he regarded as his most important theoretical work entitled “Uber das Geistige in der Kunst” (On the Spiritual in Art) in 1911, and devised a number of abstract stage productions.
Although a number of other artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were pushing towards abstraction, Kandinsky is generally recognised as the pioneer of abstract painting. He himself regarded Untitled (First abstract watercolour) 1910 as his first truly abstract piece.
He was extremely prolific, making many drawings and paintings. Couple riding 1906 is one of a number of “romantic” pictures painted while he was in Munich, which draw on childhood memories and Russian folklore. They are extremely decorative, and show a wonderful use of colour.
The starting point in his search for abstraction was the landscape often with figures, and he sought to free his work from the conventions of perspective and to use colour unrelated to the object.
In Houses in Munich 1908, there is still perspective, and his wonderful use of colour, which shows a clear influence of the Fauves, is moving away from being representartional.
Murnau with Church 1910 , is clearly still a landscape, but all perspective is gone.
Between 1910 and 1914, Kandinsky produced two series of paintings, “Improvisations” and “Compositions”, in which he continued to push towards complete abstraction They do still contain allusions to the representational world , but he used colour in an entirely unrepresentational way. Kandinsky himself said that he wasn’t able to entirely remove representational references from his work until 1914. Composition IV 1911 and Improvisation 26 1912 are typical of these series.
With the outbreak of WW1, he left Munich and returned to Moscow, where he became a member of the Fine Arts Department of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, and teaching and his work in setting up a number of museums throughout Russia took up the greater part of his time. He remained In Moscow until 1921 when he found himself increasingly at odds with the Communist approach to art, and he moved back to Germany to take up a teaching post at the Bauhaus in Weimar.
While he was in Moscow, he continued painting in an abstract way, as well as impressionistic landscapes and romantic fantasies. I find it interesting that he was able to work in a variety of representational styles alongside his abstract work. During his period in Moscow, his abstract work became more geometric. Red Oval 1920 is typical of this period, and it is interesting to compare this piece with Murnau with Church from 1910 to see to what extent his work had become truly abstract.
The Bauhaus, set up in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, was a progressive art school that was extremely influential on the visual arts in the 20th century. His teaching left little time for his own work, but in 1922 he produced a series of 12 lithographs, woodcuts and etchings, Small Worlds, highly original abstract compositions, which draw on motifs from his earlier works, and the immense wealth of his imagination.
He regarded Composition VIII 1923 as his most important work of the post war years. In her book “Kandinsky”, Ulrike Becks-Malorny says of this work:
“Circles and lines are the dominant forms and combine into a strict geometry. The sense of intellectuality and coolness is heightened by the matt, restrained colours of the pictorial ground. A black circular form in the top left hand corner sounds an authoritative, sombre note and provides a strong accent within the composition. Its red aura, the black wavy line beneath it and the haloes surrounding the yellow and blue circles are the only non-geometric elements in the picture, yet even these are still far from being figurative. Indeed none of the elements in Composition VIII can be traced back to representational origins.”
In “Reflections on Abstract Art” in 1931, Kandinsky said:
“The contact between the acute angle of a triangle and a circle has no less effect than that of God’s finger touching Adam’s in Michelangelo.”
Kandinsky’s major preoccupation at the Bauhaus were the relationships between colour and form, and the systematic study of individual elements., ideas which he had already introduced in “On the Spiritual in Art”. For example, he believed that the effect of yellow as a “sharp” colour, is emphasised when combined with a sharp form, such as a triangle, and the effect of a deeper colour such as blue is reinforced by rounded forms.
Probably his most important painting from the Bauhaus period is Yellow-Red-Blue 1925 , a composition combining the primary colours and complex forms and lines.
The Bauhaus was always under attack from the conservative right, and in 1931, the National Socialists started a concerted attack, which eventually led to its closure in 1932, when Kandinsky moved to Paris. A large number of his and other artists’ works were destroyed when the Nazis branded the work as degenerate.
He found it extremely difficult to become part of the art world in Paris. Abstract art had always found it difficult to gain recognition, but particularly so in Paris in the 1930s, where Cubism and Surrealism dominated. A number of essays by Kandinsky defending abstract art were published.
Sky Blue 1940 is typical of the works from his final years in Paris. Entirely invented shapes float against an atmospheric background. Kandinsky described his work from this period as a “picturesque fairytale”. His colour palate became much softer.
He remained in Paris throughout the war and continued to work until his death in 1944. With art materials becoming increasingly scarce, he painted his last large scale canvas in 1942, and then restricted himself to smaller formats on cardboard.
The artist, let alone the embroiderer, has much to learn from Kandinsky’s work –
- the juxtaposition of shapes and colours
- wonderful use of pure colour, particularly in his earlier work
- the feeling of shapes and movement created by the shapes and colours
- the dedication, single-mindedness and determination to achieve his goals
Bibliography
Kandinsky Ulrike Becks-Malorny ISBN 978-3-8228-3564-7
Kandinsky The Masterworks Ramon Tio Bellido ISBN 1-85170-147-8
Webliography
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