Wassily Kandinsky
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When you hear the name, Leonardo da Vinci, you immediately visualize “The Last Super” or “Mona Lisa”, or with Michelangelo Buonarroti, you may think about “David” and his work in the Sistine Chapel, in addition to Claude Monets impressionism, and Wylands seascapes that are displayed all over the world on the sides of buildings and walls. These are only a few out of many artists that have brought to life the beauty of landscapes, animals, people, and shapes. What strikes their interest? Where are they from? In addition, what makes their work so interesting to the ordinary eye? There are many stories that could be told, but this one is of a Russian artist, the first to create a fully abstract painting.
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, whose contributions to the world of modern art are innumerable. On an artistic level, Kandinskys maturation process from representational art to abstract art is fascinating. From his earliest work, with an impressionistic flair, to his later work, which was pure abstraction, Kandinsky was an innovator and a genius. He bridged the gap between reality painting of earlier decades and the fantasy escapism of the twentieth century.
Wassily Kandinsky (Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky) was born on December 4, 1866 in Moscow. His father was a successful tea merchant and his mother was a teacher. From early on in his life, Kandinsky acquired a love for travel moving to Florence in 1869 then back to Russia in 1871, this time to the smaller town of Odessa (a.k.a. “The Pearl of the Black Sea”). Shortly after returning to Russia, Kandinsiky moved in with his aunt as his parents got divorced and apparently could not care for him any longer. During the early years of Kandinskys life, he discovered a love for color and shape. Kandinsky cherished the watercolors he received from his aunt, and began painting small pictures as early as age five. He attended high school and took a few art and music classes in addition to the regular curriculum. The cello and piano fascinated Kandinsky, and he became quite an accomplished musician, but like art, he did not see music as a true career. Instead, Kandinsky followed a more practical ambition, and studied law and economics at the University of Moscow beginning in 1886, and after passing his examinations, he took a position to lecture at the Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work.
In 1895, Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monets ÐHaystacks at Giverny. He stated, “Ðit was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture.” For the first time, Kandinsky realizes that art can be a career, and he begins to re-evaluate his own artistic potential. Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, he left Moscow and went to Munich, Germany to study life drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education. Kandinskys intellectual ability to comprehend the aesthetic and philosophical principles of art far exceeded his actual artistic abilities, much to his frustration. This slowly began to change, as Kandinskys work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting, “I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could”, he stated.
The sheer volume of paintings he created at the time is incredible, and the spree lasted until 1906. During this period, his work took a shift from the obviously impressionistic ÐThe Blue Rider to more abstract works. He experimented with pointillism and using bold colors. He traveled extensively to such places as Vienna, Venice, Holland, Paris, and Tunisia, picking up new ideas everywhere he went.
If there is a central theme in his autobiography, it is that of color. It begins with his first and very early experience of color and continues partly as a narration of all the Ðcolor events in his life. He noted: “The first colors 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 colors on various objects which are not as clear in my mind today as the colors themselves. There was the decided emotion that I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tubeÐ…the impression of colors strewn over the palette: of colors Ð- alive, waiting, as yet unseen and hidden in their little tubesÐ…” And as he took his colors from the palette: “the brush with unbending will tore pieces from this living color creation, bringing forth musical notes as it tore away the pieces.” “There was the memory of the Moscow sunset, of a white toy horsed flecked with yellow, of a trip to Venice as a child where a gondola ride is remembered as a long black shape against an ink-blue sea.”
From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky went through a period of depression. Finally, one day, in 1908, when he entered his studio, he discovered the beauty of a picture whose colors were highlighted by the rays of the sun. Afterwards he discovered that the picture was one of his own paintings placed upside down and he then understood that a theme could be eliminated to create pure painting. This seemed to end his depression and in 1909, a renewed Kandinsky returned to Munich. This new Kandinsky began working on his “Improvisations”, clearly more abstract than his previous works. His works during this period were bold, bright, and splashed across the entire canvas. Shapes were rounded and indistinct.
In 1910, Kandinsky produced his first completely non-figurative, abstract painting using the watercolor media, called ÐFirst Abstract Watercolour. He produced it in the year in which he was writing his theoretical justification for abstract art, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, which examined the psychological effects of color and made comparisons between painting and music. Although he was thinking about the new art as early as this (in fact even earlier), actual paintings produced in the same spirit are extremely rare and all are