Wassily Kandinsky
1866-1944
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, printmaker and art theorist. One of famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.
Kandinsky's purely abstract works followed a long period of development based on his personal artistic experiences. Fascination and unusual stimulation by color in his childhood, than his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background; he used later in his paintings and reflected in much his early work.
Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. As a young man he enrolled at the University of Moscow to study law and economics. Successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat. Soon after, he started painting studies at the age of 30. He gave up a promising career to settle in Munich 1896, to enroll and study at the Academy of Fine Arts there. At art school, Kandinsky already began to emerge as an art theorist. He was strongly influenced spiritually and theoretically by the leading exponent of Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky and the perception of a coming New Age. Kandinsky's book "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" and "Point and Line to Plane" echoed these theories.
For the most part, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. There are some exceptions: "Sunday, Old Russia (1904)" and "Riding Couple (1907)". Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was "The Blue Rider (1903)". The type of intentional disjunction applied in this painting, allows viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork would become an increasingly conscious technique used by the artist in subsequent years-culminating in his great "abstract expressionist" works of the 1911-1914. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details.
Kandinsky developed his voice as an art theorist, influential on the history of Western art more than his painting works. He formed a new group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, called The Blue Rider Almanac, and held two exhibits.
Outbreak of WWI in 1914 sent Kandinsky home to Russia. He went back to Moscow after the war started. These years from 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky dealt with the cultural development politics of Russia. He painted little during this period, met his future wife Nina Andreievskaia. In 1921 Kandinsky received the invitation of the architect Walter Gropius to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar. The next year, the Soviets officially forbid all forms of abstract art, judging them as harmful for socialist ideals, so he accepted the invitation and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. The Bauhaus was an innovative architecture and art school. For Kandinsky this period was a period of intense production. He was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), with Klee, Feininger and Von Jawlensky formed in 1923. They lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1924.
After the closing of Bauhaus, Kandinsky left Germany and settled in Paris, where he lived the rest of his life. In Paris the artistic fashions were mainly Impressionism and cubism. Kandinsky lived isolated in a small apartment and created his work. Biomorphic forms with supple and non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings; forms which suggest externally microscopic organisms. He used original color compositions which evoke Slavonic popular.
He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.
|
|
