Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was born in Moscow, and spent his childhood in Odessa, fostered by a relative. In high school he learned to play the piano and cello. Then he enrolled at the Moscow University, studying law and economics, succeeding in teaching law.
Kandinsky’s youthful fun with colour symbolism and psychology continued into adulthood so it wasn’t surprising that he wanted more art studies. In 1889 he was part of a research group that travelled north of Moscow. He wrote that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that on entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting.
By 30 Kandinsky had given up his promising career teaching law ..to enrol in the Munich Academy. He was not accepted, so he began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of Monet paintings and loved the impressionistism of Haystacks 1890.
In 1896 he settled in Munich, studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
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Wassily Kandinsky, Blue Mountain, 1909
107 x 98 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Kandinsky travelled across Europe, settling in Bavaria. The Blue Mountain 1909 showed his move toward abstraction - a mountain of blue flanked by two broad trees, a yellow and a red. A procession, with 3 riders and others, crossed at the bottom. The Fauvist faces, clothing and saddles of the riders were each a single colour, while the walking figures were undetailed. Blue Mountain’s broad use of colour illustrated how colour was presented independently of form, and which each colour was given equal attention.
Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music was itself abstract; it did not try to represent the exterior world, but expressed the soul. Kandinsky could use musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings improvisations and his more elaborate works as compositions. After attending a concert in Jan 1911 in Munich, Kandinsky was sympathetic to Arnold Schoenberg; he was looking to free visual art from formal strictures similar to those that Schoenberg was rebelling against in music. As a result Kandinsky created Impression III Concert.
Art theorist Kandinsky probably influenced the history of Western art more from his theoretical writings than from his paintings. His analyses on forms and colours resulted not from simple associations but from the painter's inner experience. He spent years creating abstract, rich paintings, endlessly observing paintings and noting their effects on his sense of colour.
Kandinsky helped form the Munich New Artists' Association, becoming president in 1909. However the group could not integrate his radical approach with normal artistic concepts, so the New Artists’ Association dissolved in late 1911.
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In Britain Kandinsky participated in the 1910 Allied Artists' Exhibition held at London's Royal Albert Hall; his work was well praised in The Art News. By 1912, his essay On the Spiritual In Art was reviewed by Michael Sadler in the London-based Art News and was soon translated into English. And this publicity led to Kandinsky's first works entering a British art collection. Sadler bought wood-prints and the abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII during a 1913 visit by Sadler to Munich. These works were displayed in Leeds University and in the Leeds Arts Club, from 1913 on.
Der Blaue Reiter held two exhibits and more were planned, but the outbreak of WWI in 1914 intervened and sent Kandinsky back to Moscow. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. In 1916 he met a woman (1899-1980), they married in 1917 and had a son that year. But by then his spiritual outlook was clashing with Soviet society values. He returned to Germany in 1920, just as Walter Gropius, director of Bauhaus, was hiring modernist designers like Marcel Breuer, Klee, Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
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Kandinsky’s movement lasted for a short, but important time. While the art community never embraced his radical expressionist ideas, the ideas of Der Blaue Reiter artists helped lay the groundwork for abstract experimentation.
Kandinsky’s youthful fun with colour symbolism and psychology continued into adulthood so it wasn’t surprising that he wanted more art studies. In 1889 he was part of a research group that travelled north of Moscow. He wrote that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that on entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting.
By 30 Kandinsky had given up his promising career teaching law ..to enrol in the Munich Academy. He was not accepted, so he began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of Monet paintings and loved the impressionistism of Haystacks 1890.
In 1896 he settled in Munich, studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Wassily Kandinsky, Winter Landscape, 1909
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
In 1902, Kandinsky successfully ran a summer painting classes in the Alps near Munich. It was then that he emerged as an art theorist as well as a painter. The number of his paintings increased in the early C20th, especially the landscapes and towns on which he used broad strips of colour. Humans appeared in few of his works eg Sunday, Old Russia 1904. Riding Couple 1907 depicted a man on horseback, tenderly holding a woman as they passed a Russian town with bright walls; the river reflections sparkled with spots. Fauvism and pointillism were apparent in these early works.
Perhaps the most important of his paintings then was The Blue Rider 1903, showing a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse in a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak was medium blue, in the foreground were blue shadows, and trees in the background. This became an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the abstract works of the 1911–4 period.
Perhaps the most important of his paintings then was The Blue Rider 1903, showing a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse in a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak was medium blue, in the foreground were blue shadows, and trees in the background. This became an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the abstract works of the 1911–4 period.
107 x 98 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Kandinsky travelled across Europe, settling in Bavaria. The Blue Mountain 1909 showed his move toward abstraction - a mountain of blue flanked by two broad trees, a yellow and a red. A procession, with 3 riders and others, crossed at the bottom. The Fauvist faces, clothing and saddles of the riders were each a single colour, while the walking figures were undetailed. Blue Mountain’s broad use of colour illustrated how colour was presented independently of form, and which each colour was given equal attention.
Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music was itself abstract; it did not try to represent the exterior world, but expressed the soul. Kandinsky could use musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings improvisations and his more elaborate works as compositions. After attending a concert in Jan 1911 in Munich, Kandinsky was sympathetic to Arnold Schoenberg; he was looking to free visual art from formal strictures similar to those that Schoenberg was rebelling against in music. As a result Kandinsky created Impression III Concert.
Art theorist Kandinsky probably influenced the history of Western art more from his theoretical writings than from his paintings. His analyses on forms and colours resulted not from simple associations but from the painter's inner experience. He spent years creating abstract, rich paintings, endlessly observing paintings and noting their effects on his sense of colour.
Kandinsky helped form the Munich New Artists' Association, becoming president in 1909. However the group could not integrate his radical approach with normal artistic concepts, so the New Artists’ Association dissolved in late 1911.
The Blue Rider Almanac, 1912
1st edition of book with articles and artwork by the Blue Rider Group of Artists.
1st edition of book with articles and artwork by the Blue Rider Group of Artists.
When Kandinsky met Paul Klee, August Macke and Franz Marc in 1911, he had them included in his avant-garde Munich exhibition in 1912. Kandinsky then formed a new group in Munich, Der Blaue Reiter/Blue Rider, with his closest artists eg Macke, Marc, Albert Bloch and Gabriele Münter. Kandinsky and Marc were the main figures in the new Expressionist art group; they influenced the vigorous forms that were the external expressions of their creativity. His books On the Spiritual In Art 1910 and The Blue Rider Almanac 1912 promoted abstract art.
Der Blaue Reiter held two exhibits and more were planned, but the outbreak of WWI in 1914 intervened and sent Kandinsky back to Moscow. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. In 1916 he met a woman (1899-1980), they married in 1917 and had a son that year. But by then his spiritual outlook was clashing with Soviet society values. He returned to Germany in 1920, just as Walter Gropius, director of Bauhaus, was hiring modernist designers like Marcel Breuer, Klee, Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Macke, Tower of Blue Horses, 1913
Kandinsky’s movement lasted for a short, but important time. While the art community never embraced his radical expressionist ideas, the ideas of Der Blaue Reiter artists helped lay the groundwork for abstract experimentation.