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1 Chapter 1 : Wassily Kandinsky: the painter of sound and vision Art and design The Guardian Wassily Kandinsky (The Life and Work of) [Paul Flux] on racedaydvl.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Presents a brief overview of the life and work of this Russian artist, describing and giving examples of his work. His parents were upper middle class, and taught him how to play the cello and piano, being accomplished musicians themselves. He spent most of his childhood in Odessa. Kandinsky enrolled at the University of Moscow at the wish of his father, and chose to study law and economics. After passing his exams six years later, he was offered a professorship at Derpt University in Tartu, Russia, and began teaching. During his professorship, as a religious man, he wrote a book on spirituality called Concerning the Spiritual Art. In, he married his cousin, Anna Chimyakina. In, the year before he turned 30, he attended an impressionist exhibit. He hated the out-of-focus aspect of the piece, and how the haystack hardly seemed there. I was so upset for not recognizing it. I also thought that the painter had no right to paint in such fashion. Kandinsky was dissatisfied by the teachings and left. In, he painted Der Blaue Riter, which is shown in the blurry perspective, similar to Impressionist painting. A rider on his horse can be seen fleeing across a meadow. In a blue cloak, and because of the fuzzy quality, it appears as if there are two riders on the horse. This painting was later to become a big influence in his life. Kandinsky also divorced his wife the same year. He had been having an affair with an art student, Gabrielle Munter since He said he could no longer lie to Anna about it. In, Kandinsky along with artist Franz Marc started Der Blaue Riter, a movement specifically aimed at the promotion of abstract art. It was seen as what art could possibly look like in the future. It ended in, but many great pieces of art came out of that movement. His most famous painting, Composition IV was painted in, it represented the art of the future. From a a persons point of view, the painting looks like random streaks of colors and lines, but they all have a story to tell. On the left is an ensuing war, on the right is peace. His overall goal for this work was to depict an apocalyptic battle that will end in eternal peace. It may be a painting, but it is also a musical composition. Kandinsky had Synaesthete, which is a neurological fluke a person associates certain colors with notes or sounds. Meaning, that Composition IV to Kandinsky only would have had a tune to go with it. In, he broke his engagement with Gabrielle. She moved back to Munich, while he stayed in Russia. He married Nina Andreevskaya, the daughter of a Russian General in Six years later, he and Nina moved to Germany. He did not agree with the art theories circulating in Russia. During his tenure, he painted On White II in, which is a cross in styles between Suprematism and abstract. Everything about it appears very precise. Kandinsky also wrote and published a book, Point and Line to Plane in, it was meant to help explain his theory of art. The school was soon put on the Degenerate Art list by Hitler, and it was shut down, but Kandinsky kept painting. From, he painted oil paintings and water colors, but most of them were lost to the Nazis who confiscated them. They still have not been found. They lived there until they died. The only communication they had was with their friends, one of whom was Joan Miro. In, he became a French citizen. Wassily Kandinsky died on December 13, Page 1

2 Chapter 2 : Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work by Will Grohmann Wassily Kandinsky (LIFE AND WORK OF) [Paul Flux] on racedaydvl.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Presents a brief overview of the life and work of this Russian artist, describing and giving examples of his work. The Pythagoreans were probably the first westerners at it when they declared: The Romantics had their own, similar, thoughts: By the late 19th and early 20th century, however, blurring the edges between music and the other arts had become a widespread obsession. The idea fitted with the spirit of an age when artists and commentators from Russia to America were embracing pseudo-religions, dabbling in pseudo-sciences of dreams and symbols, and gabbling with excitement about the prospects for a new synthetic experience of art where the material distinctions between word, image and sound would melt away into a kind of spiritual - though it often seems more sexual - ecstasy that would shake the body and the world. Poems and paintings became music, and music became paintings and poems. Take his generic titles: Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions. His mighty 10 compositions were created over more than three decades from Composition l in to Composition X in The first three were destroyed in the second world war but enough survives in sketches and photographs to give an impression of what they were about and how they fitted into a sequence of paintings that aspires to be, in musical terms, a cycle of "symphonies". The Improvisations are, on the whole, less monumental, more dramatic. One writer compared them to "concertos". Kandinsky himself called them "suddenly created expressions of processes with an inner character". And as for the Impressions, although this may seem less of an obviously musical title, we know that several of them were specifically written in response to the experience of hearing particular pieces of music. There are also one-off titles by Kandinsky with musical intentions. In Moscow in he published primitive-looking woodcuts that he called Poems Without Words, clearly having in mind the old musical genre of "songs without words". During this same prewar period he wrote several play scripts - more like opera librettos or film scripts - to which he gave titles like The Yellow Sound, The Green Sound and Black and White. Though hardly stageable, these pieces were intriguing experiments in the synthesising of drama, words, colour and music into a single seamless whole. Also at this time Kandinsky wrote his famous theoretical work On the Spiritual in Art. This classic text of early modernism brims with the "spiritual" enthusiasms of the age. But it is also remarkably precise about what Kandinsky considers the practical stuff of his art, and especially about colour, ascribing particular emotional "spiritual" qualities to each shade, grouping them into families of like and unlike, and proposing complex ways in which contrasted colours could be balanced with one another. To support his colour theories, Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another as when someone hears the ring of a doorbell as tasting of chicken or whatever. This touching medical support for the idea that a spiritually superior person will naturally perceive the significance of the kinds of colour connections that he is talking about leads Kandinsky on to a grandiloquent cascade of musical metaphor: Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul. And here it is clear that however arbitrary his scaffolding of theory, he had genuinely arrived at a way of playing on the canvas with the tensions and relationships between pure colours. He quotes a vivid line from Kandinsky describing the experience of painting in this way and once again using a musical metaphor: At this period many artists and adventurers, often of quite different cultures, talked in generally similar terms. It was Vienna that produced for Kandinsky perhaps his most remarkable artistic friendship, with the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who was also a painter and writer, was as deeply involved in the idea of breaking down the barriers between the different arts as Kandinsky. Nowhere is this more vividly seen than in their theatrical experiments of these years. In, Kandinsky wrote the mysterious text of his proposed music-drama The Yellow Sound the composer was supposed to be Thomas de Hartmann, who later worked with the "mystic" Gurdjieff. The fifth scene begins: The giants become visible as do the rocks. The second scene begins: Below, left, close Page 2

3 to the bright brown earth, a circular cut-out five feet in diameter through which glaring, yellow sunlight spreads over the stage. And this before the invention of modern lighting. There was something else about Kandinsky, however, that separated him from many of his German and French contemporaries. He was a Russian. Born in in Moscow and brought up there and in the southern city of Odessa on the Black Sea, he was steeped in the habits and passions that characterised so much Russian art from Dostoevsky to modernism. Take synaesthesia, for example. Dostoevsky touched on this subject when making notes about his experience of migraines. By the lateth century it had become downright fashionable among Russian composers to claim to suffer, or take pleasure and inspiration, from this condition. Always it was the same brand of synaesthesia, the confusion of sound and colour, even though, as Richard Cytowic - the modern authority on synaesthesia - has pointed out, this is in fact an extremely rare variety. Poem of Fire in to include a "colour keyboard" illuminating the concert hall with a flood of colours and transporting the meaning of the music into another dimension. To help us, Scriabin wrote out in schematic form his personal vocabulary of music-colour-emotion. Though almost in the manner of Kandinsky, it is of comical clunkiness: Unsurprisingly, given such preoccupations, Scriabin, along with Schoenberg, was one of several musical contributors to The Blue Rider, the pioneering magazine that Kandinsky and a group of like-minded artists issued in Similar concerns are also found in the work of many of the modernist and experimental writers who flourished in Russia in the very early 20th century. To take one example, between and, the brilliant novelist Andrey Bely wrote four substantial prose-poems that he called "Symphonies". In them, he unfolded dream-like sequences of symbols, echoes of myth and fragments of real life, held together by nothing much more than the sound and rhythm of the language and vague suggestions of formal signposts borrowed from classical music. In other words, in his symphonies Bely was attempting to endow language with the same supposedly abstract qualities of music that Kandinsky was trying to introduce into painting in his Compositions, Improvisations and Impressions. Interestingly, along with several other Russian colleagues, Kandinsky and Bely fell deeply under the influence of Rudolph Steiner at this time, a fact that significantly affected their creative practice. Beyond music, writing and painting, the dominant art in Russia at the dawn of the 20th century was theatre. This, after all, was the age not only of Stanislavsky, but of his great pupil, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold. This was also the age of Diaghilev and his vastly successful Russian Ballet. Though he spent much of his life abroad in Germany and latterly in France, he spoke and wrote constantly about Russia, and especially about his native city of Moscow and how its distinctive beauties had nurtured his peculiar way of seeing the world. Images of Russia, usually of an old Russia, surface constantly in his earlier work - troikas, brightly coloured onion domes and the rest - and even in the great paintings of his abstract period we can detect the fertilising influence of Russian icons with their own strangely abstract language of piercing colours and symbolic shapes. When he visited Moscow in he wrote to his lover back in Germany: And once back in the west he felt, he said, a "never-waning longing for Moscow" and for "the soil from which I derive my strength". Page 3

4 Chapter 3 : Wassily Kandinsky - 94 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy The Life And Work Of Wassily Kandinsky Dr. Christopher With recently gave a talk at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC on the life of Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born abstract modern artist. WhatsApp Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian artist who is most famous for painting some of the earliest known works of pure abstract art. He was also an art theorist whose books exerted a deep and profound influence on twentieth century art. Initially a teacher of law and economics, Kandinsky gave up his promising career to pursue his interests in art. He rose to prominence in the s to become one of the leading figures in modern art. Know about the family, life, career, works and achievements of Wassily Kandinsky through these 10 interesting facts. The Kandinsky family moved to Odessa now in Ukraine in The same year, Vasily and Lidia got divorced. Wassily was less than 5 years old at the time. Elizabeth Ticheeva, elder sister of his mother, took over the responsibility of raising him. He became an amateur performer on the piano and the cello. However, despite his inclination towards arts, after completing secondary education Wassily joined the University of Moscow in to study law and economics. He completed his studies in to become a lawyer and was granted a degree equivalent of a doctorate. He had been offered professorship at the University of Tartu, Estonia but instead decided to move to Munich, Germany to study art. According to Kandinsky, two events influenced his decision by challenging his artistic sensibilities. Haystacks on a Foggy Morning by Claude Monet 4 He emerged as a prominent painter in the first decade of the twentieth century Wassily had learned German from his maternal grandmother when he was a kid. In Munich, he first joined the private art school of renowned Slovene realist painter Anton Azbe. After studying under Azbe from to, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, from where he received a diploma in At the beginning of the twentieth century, Kandinsky emerged as a prominent art theorist and painter. He had his first solo exhibition in Moscow in and it was followed next year by two others in Poland. His most famous painting from the first decade of the century is perhaps The Blue Rider, which gives an indication of his style which would develop into pure abstraction. A untitled work by Kandinsky, now renowned as the First Abstract Watercolour, is considered his first purely abstract work and one of the first ever to completely rid the representational tradition. Music, being abstract by nature, was an intrinsic part of his paintings. The ideas that he presented in his book Concerning the Spiritual In Art had an international impact, particularly in the English-speaking world. The pioneering work defended and promoted abstract art; and talked about the spiritual abilities of art. Another influential work by Kandinsky is Point and Line To Plane, which analyses geometrical elements from the point of view of their inner effect on the observer. Involving some of the leading expressionist artists, it organized exhibitions and also published an almanac. Der Blaue Reiter lasted from to, when it was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. It is regarded as a forerunner and pathfinder for modern art in twentieth century Germany. Here he devoted most of his time to art education and museum reform. In, Kandinsky moved back to Berlin and the following year he accepted a teaching post at Bauhaus, a school of architecture and art in Weimar, Germany. In, the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close and the same year Kandinsky immigrated to Paris, where he remained for his last 11 years. The first three paintings of the Compositions series by Kandinsky were confiscated in the Nazi raid. Anna moved to Munich with him in In, Kandinsky got acquainted with Gabriele Munter, who was his student and later became a well-known German expressionist painter. They became involved in a relationship and after Kandinsky split with his wife in, they started to live together. Their relationship is considered to be tumultuous. Kandinsky got officially divorced with Anna in, and he broke his relationship with Munter in when he left Germany, though they did correspond till In February, Kandinsky, aged 51, married the much younger Nina. They had a son named Vsevolod Kandinsky the same year but he died in Their marriage is considered to be successful and lasted till Wassily Kandinsky died of cerebrovascular disease on 13th December in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, France. Kandinsky had a long lasting and profound influence on twentieth century art and he is considered by many as the Father of Abstract Art. Page 4

5 Chapter 4 : Wassily Kandinsky - Wikipedia Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a pyramidâ the artist has a mission to lead others to the pinnacle with his work. The point of the pyramid is those few, great artists. The point of the pyramid is those few, great artists. His background is of interest. Although most of his ancestors were Russian, he had a Baltic grandmother and a Mongolian great grandmother. His Baltic grandmother was of great significance because he learned from her to speak German. The years he spent in Germany would have been difficult without that early linguistic education. This financial success funded extensive travel by the family when Kandinsky was a child and Kandinsky himself continued to travel most of his life. A trip made to Italy in had a lasting influence on him although he was only two years old. In the Kandinsky family moved to the port city of Odessa on the Black Sea. There Kandinsky completed his secondary education. It was apparently of a high quality because he learned to play the piano and cello well enough to become an amateur performer. He also studied drawing and painting. He may have been subject to a mental condition that imbued colors with special significance because he remarked that each color had a life of its own. Here are some of his remarks concerning colors The first colours which made a strong impression on me were light juicy green, white, crimson red, black and yellow ochre. These memories go back to the third year of my life. I saw these colours on various objects which are not as clear in my mind today as the colours themselves. He spoke of his reaction to colors as an artist, There was a decided emotion I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tube. And, his reaction to taking paint from his palette the brush with unbending will tore pieces from this living colour creation, bringing forth musical notes as it tore away the pieces. The writer Lafcadio Hearn had a condition of this sort that tied diverse entities such as numbers to colors. In at age nineteen Kandinsky went to study law and economics at the University of Moscow. He maintained an interest in art particular the vividly colored religious icons displayed in the churches around Moscow. In he joined a university ethnological expedition to the province of Vologda in northern Russia. There he saw the brightly colored folk costumes, art and house decorations of the peasants. He said he felt like he was walking about in a painting. After the expedition he journeyed to St. Petersburg where he viewed the art of famous European painters such as Rembrandt at the Hermitage. Still later he journeyed to Paris. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Moscow and then stayed on for graduate work, again in law. He married his cousin in and completed the equivalent of a doctorate in Wassily Kandinsky He was apparently a quite successful student academically because selected to teach law at his university. He was a physically impressive teacher; he was tall and dressed impeccably. He looked like and had the demeanor of a diplomat or statesman. In he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat later known as Tartu in Estonia. Despite his success as an academic his heart was not in it and he began to work in a print shop that made color reproductions of paintings. In he had viewed an exhibition of French impressionist paintings in Moscow and was particularly impressed with a painting of Monet. Kandinsky turned down the offered professorship and took a train to Germany to become a painter. In he received his diploma and began a career as an artist in Bavaria. He was searching for his own style. At first his painting style was that of 19th century realism. For example the painting below, entitled The Sluice was painted in While continuing to paint he becomes involved in the art world of Bavaria. In he founds the artist group The Phalanx. Kandinsky travels to Moscow for a display of his painting. In the Phalanx group creates an art school. Students come to study art at this school. The school Phalanx however closed in and the Phalanx group broke up in Back in Germany in from Tunisia Kandinsky was soon painting in a style evocative of the myopic style of Monet, such as in The Blue Rider shown below. But he was soon producing works that were in style and subject matter distinctively his own such as The Russian Beauty painted in Perhaps there may have been some influence of the Art Nouveau movement known in Germany as Jugendstil in this painting and maybe even something of the Pointillists. A better example of the possible influence of Pointillism on Kandinsky is his painting The Night, painted in By Kandinsky was painting improvisations in which the realistic detail has disappeared but the vivid colors remain, as in the one below known as Improvisation 6. This one was perhaps influenced by his year-long stay in Tunisia. Along with exploring Page 5

6 styles of art Kandinsky explored philosophy and the relationships between different art forms such as music and painting. By Kandinsky has discovered pure abstraction. The watercolor below is known as First Abstract Watercolor. Here two example from and Kandinsky meets Paul Klee in In Kandinsky publishes his first book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The Russian Empire and the German Empire went to to war. There had been the arranged marriage with his cousin but it is dissolved after a long period of separation. The Bolshevik regime sought to gain the support of artists and writers and so Kandinsky was given assignments organizing museums. In Kandinsky married Nina Andreevskaya. In he was appointed professor at the University of Moscow. His work was exhibited until the style of Social Realism became the dominant artistic style dictated by the Bolsheviks. In Kandinsky and his wife left Russia and settled in Germany. In he was given a teaching position in the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art in Weimar. In the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau and Kandinsky moved with it. In he became a German citizen. Kandinsky and his wife then moved to Paris and in he became a French citizen. Wassily Kandinsky died in at the age of His was a full, multifaceted and productive life. Page 6

7 Chapter 5 : Wassily Kandinsky Biography () â Life of An Abstract Artist Wassily (Vasily) Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in in Moscow to well educated, upper-class parents of mixed ethnic origins. His father was born close to Mongolia, while his mother was a Muscovite, and his grandmother was from the German-speaking Baltic. His unique perspective on the form and function of art emphasized the synthesis of the visual and the auditory. He heard sounds as color, and this unusual perception was a guiding force in the development of his artistic style. He had studied law, economics and ethnography at the University of Moscow, becoming a professor of law upon graduation. It was during his time at the university that he reprised his childhood interest in art, and in particular, the symbolic nature of color and its spiritual implications. He experienced a sort of epiphany upon viewing a Monet exhibit in Moscow. It sparked a synesthetic experience in which the notes he heard became colors and visual images, a perception that would instruct his theories about art. After only three years of teaching, Kandinsky enrolled in a Munich art school to study with Anton Azbe, a Slovenian Realist whose forte was figure drawing. In, the artist painted his first milestone artwork, "Der Blaue Reiter" or The Blue Rider, an Impressionistic scene of a man in a blue cape astride a white horse. During this first decade of the 20th century, the artist developed a progressively innovative style that reflected the influences of such schools as Fauvism, Pointillism and Expressionism. His figures became less distinct, his compositions increasingly planar. In such pieces as "Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. Ursula" and "Autumn Study Near Oberau," the interplay of color took precedence over conventional form. In, Kandinsky completed an untitled watercolor that art experts consider to be his first truly abstract painting. In it, he explained the method behind what many critics of the time considered to be his madness: In the treatise, Kandinsky seeks to vanquish what he terms the nightmare of materialism in favor of enlightened spiritualism in art, and makes a case for the similarity of music and visual art in terms of expression. The artist used musical terms such as "improvisation" and "composition" in the titles of his pre-war paintings, emphasizing the link between the two art forms. As a result, some of the pieces he produced during the second decade of the 20th century retained a few recognizable objects. For example, Winter Landscape from contains the outline of a house and triangular trees while Sketch A from contains a stylized image of a troika pulled by a trio of horses, which are represented by three lines and three indistinct heads. In, Kandinsky returned to Moscow to wait out the war. He also directed the Moscow Museum for Pictorial Culture. In, he established the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. In his own art, he was drawing ever closer to complete abstraction. By the time he left Moscow in, his paintings, such as "White Line" and "Red Spot," contained no recognizable objects. Bauhaus focused on the unification of the arts for practical applications. When the school moved to Dessau in, Kandinsky followed. He published his second treatise on art theory the following year, entitled "Point to Line to Art. Among his paintings of this period was "Development in Brown," a somber collage of rectangles and circles surrounding a colorful banner of triangles. Historians draw a connection between the painting and the brown-uniformed Nazi soldiers who had been appearing throughout Germany in growing numbers. In Paris, the artist incorporated the sense of order that pervaded the Bauhaus into his work with geometric figures and more noticeable compositional balance. His painting Striped from is a combination of squares and spheres with dissecting lines. Horizontalee from is a black and color checkerboard with distinct geometric or free-form symbols in each square. The exceptional vibrancy of the various symbols communicates a joie de vivre absent from his early works such as Composition VI and Yellow-Red-Blue. Althought like many artists his paintings show an apparent dissimilarity between the early and mature works. His writings laid the groundwork for 20th-century movements like Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps more than any other master of his era, Wassily Kandinsky forever changed the way both artists and the world at large would approach - and appreciate - visual art. Page 7

8 Chapter 6 : Wassily Kandinsky â Colorful Life, Wassily Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky, Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic. Learn more about Kandinsky's life and work, including his notable paintings. December 16, in Moscow, Russia Died: December 13, in Paris, France Famous works: Where did Wassily Kandinsky grow up? Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, Russia on December 16, He grew up in the Russian city of Odessa where he enjoyed music and learned to play the piano and the cello. Kandinsky would remark later that, even as a child, the colors of nature dazzled him. Both music and colors would have a huge impact on his art later in life. Becoming an Artist Kandinsky went to college and then became a law teacher. However, when he was thirty he decided to change careers and become an artist. He attended art school at Munich, Germany. Early on his art was influenced by painters like Claude Monet as well as music composers and philosophers. The most famous of his early works is The Blue Rider which he painted in Over the next several years he would start to paint what would become known as Abstract Art. Kandinsky was one of the founding fathers of Abstract Art. Colors and Shapes Kandinsky felt that he could express feelings and music through colors and shapes in his paintings. For example, he thought that yellow had the crisp sound of a brass trumpet and that certain colors placed together could harmonize like chords on a piano. The shapes he was most interested in were the circle, triangle, and the square. He thought the triangle would cause aggressive feelings, the square calm feelings, and the circle spiritual feelings. Composition VII - Click to see larger version Later Years While refining his art and ideas over the next several years, Kandinsky took on different positions and moved around some. From to he returned to Russia. During this time he married his wife Nina. When his art was rejected in Russia he moved back to Germany to teach at an art school called the Bauhaus. He left Germany in because of the Nazis and moved to Paris where he lived until his death in He planned the painting for six months and wanted it to represent a number of feelings including flood, baptism, destruction, and rebirth. When he finally went to paint he was blocked and could not paint. He finally resorted to repeating the word "flood" over and over again and began to paint. He finished the painting in three days. He described three types of paintings including "impressions", "improvisations", and "compositions". Many of his paintings were named using these titles and a number. Some examples of this include the paintings Composition X and Impression V. His art and essays on art have had influence over many artists during the last century. Interesting Facts about Wassily Kandinsky Many of his paintings used names as if they were songs or musical works like Composition and Improvisation. They had their own exhibitions and wrote an almanac that included essays on art theory. He once said that "Everything starts with a dot". About abstract art he said that "the more frightening the world becomesâ the more art becomes abstract". He named the paintings he considered the most accomplished "Composition". He only named ten of his paintings this way. Page 8

9 Chapter 7 : Biography of Wassily Kandinsky Widewalls Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was born in Moscow on December 4th of into a well-to-do family. His background is of interest. Although most of his ancestors were Russian, he had a Baltic grandmother and a Mongolian great grandmother. By Kat Murrell - Jun 6th, This happened to Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in, with extraordinary consequences: Bewildered, I stopped, staring at it. The painting lacked all subject, depicted no recognizable object and was entirely composed of bright patches of color. Finally, I approached closer, and only then recognized it for what it really was â my own painting standing on its side on the easel. One thing became clear to me â that objectiveness, the depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings and was indeed harmful to them. Kandinsky was right in line with a metaphorical hammer, ready to break down boundaries of received traditions. For him, it was a means of breaking through to the essential nature of art. The exhibition includes early Impressionist and folk art-inspired pictures, explores his transition to nonobjective compositions, the lasting influence of his work with the Blue Rider Der Blau Reiter group and the profoundly influential Bauhaus school, and the subtle structural changes of his artistic approach over time. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IX, He sought for viewers a physical connection with painting. A prolific writer, Kandinsky described the power of visual elements to communicate in a manner like music, which is a perfectly abstract, intangible art form that, despite its invisible nature, is profoundly physical in its effects. Such highly sensitive people are like good, much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibers at every touch of the bow. But how do we get there? Viewers can be very resistant at first to abstract art. After all, what are we looking at? What is it supposed to be? What is the story or meaning? Certainly valid questions, but not necessarily to way to approach Kandinsky. His art is not without overt images or metaphors, as the exhibition shows. Approaching the work more closely, the texture and nuance of color becomes clear. You can feel your eyes adjusting, from looking at the surface itself to the layers of pigment beneath and that process builds a feeling of visual rhythm. Some areas of the composition are soft and voluminous, others are sharper and darker, punctuated with rigid geometric grids and adamant colors over their softer brethren. It takes time to truly see a picture like this. While Kandinsky writes eloquently about the process of seeing and about spiritual revelation, he wanted to be more than a theoretician. He was about 30 when he took up art, leaving his post as an associate professor of law at Moscow University, giving up his doctoral thesis and heading to Munich to study painting. It was both music and painting that helped propel him in this direction. The results are there to be seen at this fascinating exhibition. The Haggerty Museum of Art begins summer by opening two new exhibitions with interesting perplexities. That is pretty open ended, which is part of the delight. Watch for a full review of these exhibitions in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, share your thoughts and impressions in the comments section! Page 9

10 Chapter 8 : Biography: Wassily Kandinsky Art for Kids Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 4,, in Moscow, Russia. His father was a tea merchant. When he was five years old the family moved to Odessa, Russia. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. Because his family was fond of traveling, Kandinsky got to see. Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Russian painter and graphic artist The Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky was one of the great masters of modern art, as well as the outstanding representative of pure abstract painting using only colors and forms that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. His father was a tea merchant. When he was five years old the family moved to Odessa, Russia. The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and the cello. Because his family was fond of traveling, Kandinsky got to see the Italian cities of Venice, Rome, and Florence as a young boy. He was also influenced by the imposing Muscovite from Moscow buildings such as the Kremlin. Between and Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. In he was a member of a team formed to study the life of the people in the Vologda district in northwestern Russia. He was highly impressed by their folk art and the interior decorations of the village houses. The use of forms and colors became an influence in his art. Beginnings as an artist It was not until, when Kandinsky was thirty years old, that he decided to become an artist. His artistic development was shaped greatly by an exhibition of French impressionist painters that was shown in Moscow in The impressionists used values of color and light to show their subjects rather than painting in fine detail. It was as though reality and fairy tale were intermixed. The year was crucial for Kandinsky and for the art world. Kandinsky produced his first abstract watercolor. In that work all elements of representation the actual look of a subject seem to have disappeared. In continuing his early abstract works he used strong straight-line strokes combined with powerful patches of color. In he married Nina Andreewsky. During the Russian Revolution, which overthrew the czar, the ruler of Russia, the artist held an important post at the Commissariat government bureau 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 he was appointed professor at the University of Moscow. The following year he founded the Academy of Arts and Sciences and became its vice president. At the end of that year, the Soviet attitude toward art changed, and Kandinsky left Russia. Years in Germany and France In Kandinsky became a professor at the Bauhaus a school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany. His art from about to has been called his architectural period because the shapes he used were 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, and more subdued softer, quieter. Kandinsky became a German citizen in In he had another exhibition in Paris. In he produced wall decorations for a large architectural exhibition that was held in Berlin, Germany. When the Bauhaus closed in, Kandinsky moved to Berlin. A year after that he moved to Paris. This is called his romantic or concrete period. It led to the last phase of his art, spent in France, which was a synthesis blending of his previous periods. The paintings of his Paris period have splendid color, rich invention, and delightful humor. In Kandinsky became a French citizen. He died on December 13,, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation. Kandinsky is still greatly admired today for his own paintings and for being the originator of abstract art. He invented a language of abstract forms with which he replaced the forms of nature. He wanted to mirror the universe in his own visionary world. He felt that painting possessed the same power as music and that sign, line, and color ought to correspond to the vibrations of the human soul. For More Information Bill, Max. The Language of the Eye. Kandinsky and Old Russia. Yale University Press, Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Page 10

11 Chapter 9 : Wassily Kandinsky Biography & Facts racedaydvl.com Wassily Kandinsky >The Russian painter and graphic artist Wassily Kandinsky () was one >of the great masters of modern art and the outstanding representative of >pure abstract painting that dominated the first half of the 20th century. Majoring in art history, he is an expert on avant-garde modern movements and medieval church fresco decorations. Feel free to contact him via his Linkedin profile: As you will soon come to see, the road was not an easy one and there were many problems to overcome along the way, but Kandinsky emerged as a respected leader of the abstract art movement in the early 20th century and a person without whom art history would not be quite the same. Luckily, Kandinsky found life in Odesa quite beautiful â he learned how to play the piano and cello alongside his aunt, plus he studied drawing with a private teacher. Although he never enjoyed what he was learning, that never stopped him from being one of the most promising students of the generation. Kandinsky graduated with flying colors and was given a fieldwork scholarship that had him sent to Vologda province. There the artist studied traditional criminal jurisprudence and modern confrontations between law and religion. By the time he arrived in Vologda, Kandinsky pretty much tucked away all his aspirations and dreams of becoming an artist, instead focusing on advancement in the law world. However, something happened in the province he was sent to â all the folk art and general spirituality of the Vologda people lighted a long forgotten spark inside Wassily as he suddenly saw all of his artistic tendencies come back stronger than ever. It should be noted that although he was thinking about art constantly, Kandinsky never neglected the responsibilities of a law practitioner and was excellent at his profession although his heart was pulling him in other directions. Kandinsky married his cousin Anna Chimyakina in and took up a position on the Moscow Faculty of Law, all the while creating drawings and prints in his spare time. The artist chose to abandon his law career and move to Munich in order to fully commit himself to full-time study of art. Wassily was accepted into a prestigious private painting school and later prolonged his education at the Munich Academy of Arts â however, he continued to be mostly self-taught, stubbornly holding on to his childhood ideas of independent colors. Such inner confrontations did not stop him from being one of the top students here as well, just as he was the best law pupil although he never liked what he was learning. Before he came to Munich, he did not paint much and was mostly developing theories of how art should behave. The tables turned when he arrived in Germany, as the artist started painting much more than writing and thinking about art. Kandinsky began with conventional themes and art forms, exploring different techniques and styles. The teachers did not approve, but he continued to form theories derived from devoted spiritual study and informed by an intense relationship between music and color. These concepts will prove to be the foundation upon which Kandinsky built his career and establishing his ultimate status as the father of abstract art. In the world of Kandinsky, the color was not used to depict what was observed around us, it was not a simple tool for imitating and re-telling things everybody already knows. It was far from it. Wassily saw color as much more than that, for him it was an expression of emotion rather than a faithful description of nature or subject matter. Soon after graduating â yet again with flying colors and honors â Kandinsky set out in the world and started forming friendships with similar minded individuals who shared his concepts and who wanted to bring radical changes to the art scene. He frequently exhibited, taught art classes and published his ideas on theories of art, quickly becoming a huge name that shook the very basis of academic teachings and traditional techniques. But another group will prove to be far more important than The Association â during the year of, The Blue Rider group came to be. Der Blaue Reiter was an art movement that lasted up until the outbreak of the war in and was fundamental to Expressionism, simultaneously proving to be the key for abstraction painting. The World War I took Kandinsky back to Russia, where his artistic eye was influenced by the constructivist movement, which subsequently saw him turning to hard lines, dots and geometry instead of expressive colors. Making full circles around Europe and returning to Russia was a traumatic experience for Kandinsky, but the real traumas happened when he and his new wife Nina Andreevskaya lost their only son when he was just over three years of age. After that, Wassily was never quite the same as before, which is pretty understandable due to the circumstances of war and losing a son. Most notably, he taught at the Page 11

12 Bauhaus school in Berlin where he was revered as a true legend of modern art. During these mature years, traumatized Kandinsky wrote poems and plays much more than he was painting, but by his own claim, we now know that teaching at the Bauhaus school provided him with the most joy at the time he was not able to find much of it. Unfortunately, during the year of, when the Nazis seized power and complete control over Germany, storm troopers notoriously shut down the Bauhaus school. Subsequently, Wassily Kandinsky was forced to flee and leave Berlin in order to survive. He and Nina had moved to the suburb of Paris in the late s, when Marcel Duchamp had found a little apartment for them to try and outlast the war. It was widely attended and raised one of the last bright german moments prior to the war, but 57 of his works were confiscated by the Nazis and many were lost in the process. It is said that the Second World War was too much for the artist to bear emotionally and he never lived to see the end of the horror that was WWII. Kandinsky died of cerebrovascular disease in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on December 13, It is hard to think of a few more names in art history that have indebted us in a way Wassily Kandinsky managed to do. For Kandinsky, perhaps the most appropriate way to bring the conclusion is to allow Wassily himself to have the final word: The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. Page 12