Sketch for Composition IV (Battle). 1910 Improvisation 28 (second version). 1912
Composition 6 Composition 7
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, and received his training at Moscow University in law and political economy. At the age of thirty, he decided to leave his career in law because of his interest in art, and from 1896 to 1900 attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts and until 1909 he traveled throughout Russia and to Italy, France, and Tunisia.
In 1909, the New Artists' Federation, which was founded in Munich, invited Kandinsky to join them. Controversy caused a schism in the Federation which lead to Kandinsky and a fellow artist, Franz Marc, forming The Blue Rider group, Der Blaue Reiter, in 1911. The name came from, according to the Encarta, "Kandinsky's love of blue and Marc's love of horses." It was during this period that his artwork became appreciated, and by 1913 he was working on paintings that now are considered to be the first total abstract art works.
By 1914 his work had matured into two types of paintings. One group was called Compositions, implying that geometrical shapes were consciously planned and arranged. The other group, Improvisations, was painted by allowing the colors to come as his subconscious prompted him. He published his idea of subconscious sensations, his method of applying brilliant colors with as little conscious control as possible, and the philosophical meanings of his style in Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1912, which was the first theoretical treatise on abstraction. It was translated into several languages and became popular throughout Europe. Then, in 1914 it was translated into English under the name The Art of Spiritual Harmony, spreading Kandinsky's influence and popularity even further.
Kandinsky was interested in art that went beyond the figurative from the time he became interested in art. In 1895, when he saw one of Monet's Haystacks, he expressed, "that the object is no longer an inevitable element in the picture" (qtd. in Modern Art 67).
Reflecting his spirituality in his work was important to Kandinsky, as he wanted it to be the art of the soul. Like many of his companions, he was a mystic, and believed that reality was not necessarily the rational physical world, which so often was deceptive, but that it was a deeper reality of oneself. That was the reality he wanted to express. This view harmonized with Freud's conclusion about the subconscious mind and with Rimbaud's claim that the true artist is a visionary. The theory of relativity by Einstein must have had an impact on the way he felt about reality because he wrote in his Reminiscences (1913) that "the disintegration of the atom was to me like the disintegration of the whole world" (qtd, in Lynton, Story 6 5).
Cezanne and his contemporary impressionists influenced Kandinsky, who went a step further then they did in the use of form and color in a purely spiritual meaning by eliminating all resemblance to physical objects. Another group of artists, the Paris Fauves, with their liberating influence, use of bright colors and active brush strokes, helped to inspire him with the techniques needed to put his theory into practice. Another artist, in a different medium, inspired Kandinsky on how to crystallize the concept of pure spiritualization in art in his mind. That was Wagner, who used music and the stage, to express, what seemed to Kandinsky, a seamless work of spiritualization. "Painting," wrote Kandinsky, "can develop the same energies as music" (qtd. in Story, Lynton 83). He sought to produce art that would move the beholder the same way music can move the listener. He wanted his art to live as a spiritual activity, transcending the material world in the same manner that music does. Because of that, he titled many his paintings in the same manner that writers of music titled their music.
Because of World War I, he returned to Russia in 1914, and lived the life of an independent artist, characterizing "the soul of abstraction in exile" (Cheney 474). After the 1917 Revolution, the Commissariat for Education gave him a leadership role in the reorganization of the art academies and museums. They appointed him Director of the Fine Arts Academy in Moscow, and during this time founded the Museum of Pictorial Culture. On top of his other responsibilities, he taught at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts from 1918 to 1921 which involved him in establishing the instruction for Soviet art workshops. During this time he produced few paintings because of his administrative responsibilities.
Norbert Lynton, in The Story of Modern Art, speculates that during this time, because of his need to devise a teachable method for his art style, Kandinsky had to reconsider his methods (85). In 1914 Kandinsky had started work on dictionary and grammar of the language of forms and colors that was based on his responses and the responses of others. During this time he continued work on it and it was published in 1926 under the title Point and Line to Plane.
It was during the time that he was in Russia that his paintings changed from his prewar fluid style to paintings that were more geometric in form, with sharply etched outlines and clear patterns, composed of lines and geometrical forms. According to Lynton, "Kandinsky's paintings lost their appearance of spontaneity. Geometrical forms took the place of freely invented shapes, and a fairly smooth surface replaced the varied marks and textures of the previous decade. His compositions became if anything even richer and more seductive . . . His art was still generated by his subconscious . . . but this became less obvious" (Story 85). Kandinsky continued to refine "this style into a more elegant, complex mode that resulted in beautifully balanced, jewel-like pictures" (Encarta).
When Kandinsky left Moscow, in 1922, for Dessau, Germany he joined the faculty (1922 to 1933) at the Bauhaus, a school of art and architecture, which provided the Western world with its first significant school for non-objective art.
During this time, according to Sheldon Cheney, "Kandinsky continued to seek musical expressiveness along the lines foreshadowed in his pictures and his writings of the Blaue Reiter days. He progressively deleted the softer idioms of his earlier abstract style, straightening and hardening his lines and bringing patches and spots of color clearer, all perhaps in subconscious response to his machine-age environment. It is questionable, however, that he ever did better work than that of the years of the prewar association with Marc at Munich" (542).
I find it interesting how Norbert Lynton and the editors of the Encarta differ in opinion from Sheldon Cheney in comparing the earlier Kandinsky with the work he did toward the end of his career. It shows that the work an artist does, even though he may think his art work is maturing over time, is possibly his own personal tastes changing and that earlier work may be just as mature as later work. The fact that noted art critics appreciate different time periods of Kandinsky's work seems to prove that observation. I personally enjoy the earlier work such as the Improvisation, No. 28 (1912) or the Little Pleasures, No. 179 (1913) then the work he did later on. Most of his later work such as the Dividing Line (1923) and Emphasized Corners (1923) I find "harsher" to look at. His Composition (1937) reminds me of African folk art, and while it is interesting, it doesn't have the soft "mood" of Improvisation, No. 28. The curves and colors of his earlier work are relaxing and soothing. While there are different opinions on the analogy between art and music, I find that his artwork does have a similar effect as listening to classical music. That is why some will like the sharp lines and edges of his later work, while some of us will like the softer lines and the "mood" they represent.
When the Nazis dissolved the Bauhaus in 1933, while most of the faculty moved to the U.S., Kandinsky moved to France where during this time his forms became freer, using irregular, amoeba-like shapes and irregular lines. W. Grohmann, in Modern Art, thought that he could have been influenced by the Surrealists, and was apparently trying to give his paintings a sense of organic life. The paintings moved away from the simple forms and became more complicated with many small shapes. Kandinsky was one of the leaders and founding fathers of what we now call non-objective or non-representational art and its evolution from abstract art. He also was the first to write about it. The Encarta gives him the credit of being "the artist who paved the way for abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II." The latter part of his life was spent in Nueilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, where he lived until he died on December 13, 1944.
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