(A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its tr...)
A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter, Wassily Kandinsky, it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas, that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts.
(In "Point and Line to Plane", one of the most influential...)
In "Point and Line to Plane", one of the most influential books in 20th-century art, Kandinsky presents a detailed exposition of the inner dynamics of non-objective painting. Relying on his own unique terminology, he develops the idea of point as the "proto-element" of painting, the role of point in nature, music and other art, and the combination of point and line, that results in a unique visual language.
Wassily Kandinsky was a notable painter, playwright, poet and art theorist, born in Russian Empire (present-day Russian Federation). He was considered one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. Besides, Kandinsky was known as the founder of the influential Munich group "Der Blaue Reiter" ("The Blue Rider", 1911-1914).
Background
Ethnicity:
Wassily's parents were of mixed ethnic origins. His father was a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border, while his mother was a Muscovite, and his grandmother was from the German-speaking Baltic.
Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 16, 1866 in Moscow, Russian Empire (present-day Moscow, Russian Federation) into a genteel, well-to-do and fond of travel family. He was the son of Lidia Ivanovna Tikheeva and Wassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a successful Moscow tea merchant. One of his great-grandmothers was a Princess Gantimurova, probably explaining the "slight Mongolian trait in his features".
Victor Kandinsky, a notable psychiatrist, was Wassily's second cousin.
Education
As a child, Kandinsky studied art and piano, developing a great love for music, especially opera. His parents, Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, divorced, when he was about five years old, and his father took the children to live in Odessa, a city on the Black Sea. They spent the summers in Moscow, when Kandinsky was a teenager. At the age of eighteen, he moved there to attend the University of Moscow (now known as Moscow State University), which he entered in 1886. Moscow served as a source of inspiration for much of Kandinsky's art from this period. He loved its architecture and often wrote about and attempted to capture on canvas the beauty of Moscow at dusk. Kandinsky also harbored a deep fondness for church icons, religious paintings and statues, as well as Russian folk art.
As Kandinsky enrolled at the University of Moscow, he began studying Law and Economics, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city's vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots of his own art. In 1889, the university sent him on an ethnographic mission to the province of Vologda, in the forested north, and he returned with a lasting interest in the often garish, nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year, he discovered Rembrandt in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. Wassily pursued his academic career and, in 1893, was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.
Between 1897 and 1899, Kandinsky studied art in Munich under Anton Ažbe, attending the Ažbe School of Painting, and then, in 1900, he studied under Franz von Stuck at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, assimilating the principles of late Realism and then Art Nouveau. Ever inquisitive, Kandinsky moved quickly toward a highly experimental palette after exposure to the bright colors and refractive light of North Africa in 1904 and then of the French impressionists in Paris in 1906-1907. These encounters coincided with his discovery and appreciation of indigenous art forms, such as Bavarian glass painting and Russian icons, with their simple forms and hieratic subjects. Seeking a more spontaneous and abstract style, Kandinsky arrived at his so-called Compositions and Improvisations and his first abstract paintings of 1911.
It was in 1896, at the age of 30, that Kandinsky decided to become an artist. Of great 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 and that was the secret of Kandinsky's early work, which was based on folk art, and it remained so even later although more complex.
In 1901, Kandinsky founded the artists' group "Phalanx" and taught at its 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. He spent 1906-1907 in Sèvres near Paris. Wassily 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. The same year, in 1909, he was one of the founders of the New Artists' Association in Munich, of which he became chairman.
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", the first theorization of a nonobjective form of art, ever elaborated by an artist and his most influential treatise.
Also, in 1910, Wassily met Franz Marc and, in 1911, after a trip to Russia, met Paul Klee, Jean Arp and August Macke. Kandinsky and Marc founded "The Blaue Reiter" ("The Blue Rider") group in Munich in 1911 and exhibited with them. The 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 "Sounds" and took part in the first Autumn Exhibition. "The Blaue Reiter" disbanded in 1914.
In Wassily's early abstract works vehement linear strokes are combined with powerful patches of color, as in "Composition V" and "With the Black Arch." When World War I broke out, Kandinsky returned to Russia. During the Russian Revolution, the artist occupied an important post at the Commissariat of Popular Culture and at the Academy in Moscow. He organized twenty two museums and became the director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture. In 1920, he was appointed a Professor at present-day Moscow State University. The following year, Kandinsky founded Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences and became its vice president. When, at the end of that year, the Soviet attitude to art changed, Kandinsky left Russia.
In 1922, Kandinsky became a Professor at the Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture, where he continued to teach until the Nazis closed it in 1933. Also, together with Klee, Alexei von Jawlensky and Lyonel Feininger, he founded the "Blue Four" group in 1924.
In 1926, Wassily published the principles of his teaching in "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". From 1925 to 1927, Kandinsky emphasized circles in his paintings, as can be seen in "Several Circles".
Kandinsky became a German citizen in 1928, and the same year, he designed sets for Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at 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 School of Art and Architecture was closed in 1933, Kandinsky moved to Berlin, and, the following year, he left for Paris. Kandinsky's romantic 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". It led to the last phase of his art, spent in France, which was an intellectual synthesis of his previous strivings. During his last years, Kandinsky lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, and, in 1939, he became a French citizen. 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).
(A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its tr...)
1912
painting
Black Lines
Composition VII
Composition VIII
Composition X
Farbstudie Quadrate
First Abstract Watercolor
On White II
Several Circles
The Blue Rider
Yellow-Red-Blue
Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula
Odessa Port
Akhtyrka
Rotterdam Sun
Murnau, Train & Castle
Landscape with Factory Chimney
Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)
Circles in a Circle
Inner Aliance
Composition IX
Points
Winter Landscape
Moscow. Red Square
Religion
Wassily had a fervent belief in Orthodox Christianity.
Views
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors, that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet, whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings, that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.
Quotations:
"Color 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."
"Everything starts from a dot."
"Color is a power, which directly influences the soul."
"The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects."
"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands, that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential."
"There is no must in art because art is free."
"Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown, but real, which acts on every part of the human body."
"To create a work of art is to create the world."
"The artist must train not only his eye, but also his soul."
"Color transmits and translates emotion."
"That is beautiful, which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Kandinsky allegedly had synesthesia. Synesthesia is defined as "the production of a sense impression, relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body". In essence, he would see colors, when listening to music.
Interests
Music & Bands
composer Richard Wagner
Connections
During his lifetime, Kandinsky had a relationship with three women. Anna Chimiakina, his cousin, was 6 years his senior. The two married in 1892. Most likely, it was loneliness, rather than love, that made them tie the knot.
In 1902, Wassily met a German painter, Gabriele Münter. The following year, the couple got engaged, despite the fact, that it was only in 1911, that Chimiakina gave Kandinsky a divorce. Young Münter, who was 11 years his younger, wanted to become the painter's wife. However, Kandinsky delayed their wedding and often traveled without his partner. In the spring of 1916, he left for Moscow, promising to prepare papers for marriage. He kept his promise - on February 11, 1917, he married, but not Münter; Nina Andreevskaya, whom the painter met in 1916, became his second wife.
At the end of 1917, Nina gave birth to their son, Vsevolod, who was often affectionately nicknamed Lodya. In less than three years, the boy died. From that time, the subject of children became taboo in their family.
Kandinsky: A Retrospective
This work represents a survey of over 100 works, spanning Kandinsky's full career, from his formative period in Munich to his final years in Paris.
2014
Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work
This book traces Kandinsky's life from his early preparation for a career in law and tells its readers in detail about the shaping of this strange and fascinating personality.
Kandinsky: Watercolours and Other Works on Paper
Published to accompany the exhibition of Kandinsky's work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, this book spans the artist's whole career and consists entirely of works on paper - watercolors, prints and drawings.