Wassily Kandinsky

Russian artist

• Born: December 4, 1866
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: December 13, 1944
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Both for the quality and influence of his works and for the influence of his theoretical and pedagogical writings, Kandinsky was the most significant figure in the development of nonrepresentational abstract art in the first half of the twentieth century. He was the pioneer among those artists whose aim was not to reproduce the expressive qualities of objects and events in nature but to exploit the intrinsic expressive attributes of artistic materials, particularly pigments, without reference to natural appearances.

Early Life

In 1871, Wassily Kandinsky (vahs-YEEL-ee kan-DIHN-skee) and his family moved from Moscow to Odessa in the Crimea for the sake of the father’s health; Kandinsky spent his childhood there. His father, born in eastern Siberia, was a successful tea merchant and always encouraged his son’s artistic gifts, sending him, at age seven, to a special drawing teacher. His father generously supported him for many years. Kandinsky’s mother, Lydia Tikheeva, came from Moscow but was half Baltic. One of his great-grandmothers is said to have been a Mongolian princess, and people who knew Kandinsky noticed a certain Asiatic cast to his features.

The young Kandinsky drew, wrote poems, and played the piano and cello. In 1886, he went to the University of Moscow, where he studied law and political economy, and in 1893 he was appointed as a lecturer there in the faculty of law. Yet it was not until 1895, when he visited an exhibition of the French Impressionists in Moscow, that a painting by Claude Monet had a lasting effect on him and revealed to him his true vocation. In Monet’s paintings, the subject matter played a secondary role to color, and reality and fairy tale were intertwined. These qualities were also essential to Kandinsky’s early work, which was based on folk art. Even his later works were influenced by folk art, although on a more intellectualized level.

Kandinsky decided to abandon his legal career in 1897 and went to Munich to devote himself entirely to painting. He studied with Anton Azbé, and he later studied under Franz von Stuck, a teacher at the Munich Academy and a founding member of the Munich Sezession. At this time, the prevailing avant-garde in Munich was Art Nouveau or, as it was called, Jugendstil, and Kandinsky familiarized himself with this style. Kandinsky’s early Impressionist-inspired paintings as well as those of his Jugendstil period are strong in color; color continued to dominate his landscapes of Murnau. In 1901, Kandinsky became one of the founders of the avant-garde exhibiting association Phalanx. His first marriage, to his cousin, Ania Chimiakin, ended in divorce in 1911; in 1912, he took up with Gabriele Munter, who had been his pupil before becoming his companion during his Munich years, until he broke with her in 1916.

After traveling throughout Holland, Tunisia, and Italy, he settled for a year (beginning in June, 1906) at Sèvres, near Paris. In 1909, after returning to Munich, he helped to found, together with Alexei Kubin, the Neue Künstlervereingung (the new artist union). From his meeting with Franz Marc in 1911, the Blaue Reiter (blue rider) movement was born; the two exhibitions of this expressionist group proved to be major events in the development of modern German painting.

Life’s Work

After 1909 emerged Kandinsky’s series of “Improvisations” and “Compositions,” which were alternately figurative and nonfigurative, the latter possessing a remarkable degree of invention. The year 1910, however, was crucial for Kandinsky as well as for world art. It was in 1910 that, with a thoroughly abstract watercolor, Kandinsky emerged as an initiator of nonrealistic art. About that time he also wrote Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei (1912; Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in Particular , 1912), a prophetic treatise on the artist’s inner life. Soon the naturalistic elements disappeared from Kandinsky’s work and were replaced by turbulent lines and vehement colors clashing together in a passionate, romantic disorder. Abandoning himself to lyricism, he subsequently produced some of the most masterly and original compositions in the history of abstract art.

World War I coincided with a break in the development of Kandinsky’s art; the painter of Black Arc (1912) and the great Fugue (1914) accepted the discipline of the objective, rational, and severe style that became the trademark of the Bauhaus. The romantic effusion of his previous style was replaced by a colder, more thoughtful, more calculated conception that produced geometric forms and architectural structures in which it is tempting to see a certain tribute to the constructivism of Kandinsky’s rival, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Kandinsky set about translating his mental schemes into combinations of lines, angles, squares, and circles, and flat applications of color, but with an excitement and animation of rhythm that are absent from Mondrian’s more austere works. The Bauhaus period also accentuated Kandinsky’s didactic tendencies: In his essay Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane , 1947), published in 1926, it is as a theoretician that he constructs a set of limitations to creative freedom.

With the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky was forced to return to Russia. In 1917, he married Nina Andreewsky (to whom he remained married until his death). During the Russian Revolution, the artist occupied a prominent position at the Commissariat of Popular Culture, and in 1921 he founded the Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the end of that year, however, he left the Soviet Union, since he rebelled at the reign of Socialist Realism. He then settled in Germany, first at Weimar and later at Dessau, becoming one of the most prominent teachers at the Bauhaus School from 1922 to 1933. His art from about 1920 to 1924 has been referred to as his “architectural period.” The shapes are more precise than before; there are points, straight or broken lines, single or in groups, and snakelike, radiating segments of circles; and the color is cooler, more subdued, with occasional outbursts of earlier expressionist tonality. This period is exemplified by the work Composition VIII (1923). From 1925 to 1927, Kandinsky accentuated circles in his paintings, as can be seen in Several Circles (1926). When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Kandinsky took refuge in Paris.

Together with his paintings, Kandinsky produced woodcuts and drawings, designed the settings and costumes for Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1928) for the Friedrich Theater at Dessau, and executed frescoes for a music room at the International Exhibition of Architecture in Berlin (1931). In December, 1933, he took up permanent residence at Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. During this time, his style underwent yet another change: His forms abandoned their geometric aspect, became suddenly more concentrated, and evolved again into indecipherable hieroglyphs and ornamental motifs. His works demonstrated an opulent and balanced maturity that often exhibited an extraordinary, almost un-European character of form and color, which some critics have attributed to his Mongolian ancestry. Some of the paintings of the late 1930’s and 1940’s displayed a serene exuberance combined with a vital energy, giving them the quality of genuine masterpieces. The works of this period contain a Russian richness of color, a plenitude of formal invention, and a charming humor. In addition, Kandinsky’s work communicated the presence of a spiritual world, as in Composition X (1939) and Tempered Elan (1944) both in the collection of Nina Kandinsky.

Significance

Kandinsky was one of the first painters to realize more thoroughly than others that the naturalistic traditions in art were exhausted. He staunchly adhered to a belief in the artist’s right to express the imaginings of his or her inner world and, in so doing, created an art as far removed from the pure abstraction of Mondrian as were the poetic images of Paul Klee or the biting sensuality of Robert Delaunay. Because it is simultaneously that of a precursor, an inventor, and a master, Kandinsky’s work is of such richness that its effect on the development of art cannot yet be fully calculated.

From early childhood, Kandinsky was unusually sensitive to the emotional associations of colors and had strongly developed powers of synesthesia. Finding it impossible to reproduce in painting the colors that moved him so profoundly, he reached the conclusion by some inner conviction that art and nature are two separate worlds with different principles and different aims. From this conviction, Kandinsky came to his belief in the autonomy of art the belief that a work of art stands or falls by inherent aesthetic principles, not by any resemblance to the external world.

With the disappearance of geometric perspective along with the abandonment of representation, Kandinsky organized his picture space by a very precise manipulation of the more abstruse sensory properties of colors and shapes. Unless it has abandoned composition altogether, nearly all expressive abstraction subsequently has based itself on Kandinsky’s new picture space. His other most important contribution was in the creation of virtual movement without the representation of moving things. From about 1920 on, he was able to impart virtual movement to his canvases in a manner and to a degree that had not been hitherto realized. Although a forerunner of expressive abstraction, he was a master of composition and did not participate in the more spontaneous, improvisational, formless ideals of abstract expressionism and informal art.

Bibliography

Aronov, Igor. Kandinsky’s Quest: A Study in the Artist’s Personal Symbolism, 1866-1907. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Analyzes the figurative art Kandinsky created before 1908, which formed the basis for his later abstractionism and imagery. Aronov traces Kandinsky’s development as an artist, examining his life and the influence of Russian culture on his art.

Conil-Lacoste, Michele. Kandinsky. Translated by Shirley Jennings. New York: Crown, 1979. In this well-written book, Conil-Lacoste argues that Kandinsky’s work is not altogether free from incomprehension and misunderstanding. She discusses his life and his art, focusing especially on the Munich period. The book is brief and contains many color plates, a chronology of the artist’s life, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works.

Grohmann, Will. Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958. This is still the standard and most comprehensive biography of Kandinsky. The work is lengthy and contains numerous color and black-and-white plates, a catalog of reproductions, a bibliography, a list of exhibitions, and copies of original signatures. The author discusses the artist as a painter and thinker, since relatively little was known about the man, and does not offer a detailed analysis of his painting.

Long, Rose-Carol Washton. Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1980. This informative book is about Kandinsky’s struggle to resolve the battle between the personal desire for abstraction and the public desire for representation in his art. Extensive color and black-and-white plates and notes are included.

Overy, Paul. Kandinsky: The Language of the Eye. New York: Praeger, 1969. Overy believes that most books on Kandinsky have traced his development toward abstraction. This book, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with other, more important aspects of Kandinsky’s work. Part 1 discusses the artist’s visual imagery, reason and intuition, allegory, and language; part 2 discusses the artist’s color theory, figure and ground, time, place, point and line, and the life of forms. Contains a brief bibliography and extensive color and black-and-white plates.

Weiss, Peg. Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Since the author’s conviction is that art history must be viewed from a broad cultural perspective, Kandinsky’s Munich experience is examined in all its cultural manifestations. This excellent book includes a bibliography, an index, black-and-white and color plates, and a chronology of the artist’s life and work.