Wassily Kandinsky
Kandinsky (1866, Moscow - 1944, Paris) was a pioneer of the
abstract. He used mainly oil on canvas, paint on glass, watercolours and
woodcuts to express his art. Even though he was born in Russia he spend most of
his life in Germany, but also lived in Russia and France.
His auntie made him take music and art lessons from a young
age and he studied Law and Economy at university and later painting. His
artistic beginnings were mainly landscapes where he looked closely at nature
and Germanic- Slavic folk art and fairy tales which inspired him to his woodcuts.
Being born in Moscow, many elements of his inspiration still stem from Russia
and are carried into his works.
His road down to the abstract is a slow and consistent one
as Kandinsky starts with studies of how nature looks like but he never seems to
want to actually replicate it, he takes the shapes and colours and forms them
into a painting which resembles nature in some ways, but doesn’t look like it.
Over the run of the years his paintings move further away from the original
scenes and he takes the shapes but puts them together in a completely different
order, adds colour a bit more sparingly and lets the background colour of the
canvas shine through a lot.
When he joins the Bauhaus, which mainly concentrates on
architecture and objects that have multiple uses or at least have their usefulness
maximised, he pushes his style further towards rigid forms with colours
assigned to forms, and they hardly ever mix or go over the lines.
A theme that is presented throughout his life is his desire
to draw music, which he achieves by using wavy and smooth lines for calm music
and rigid straight lines with pointy corners for blasty, loud and sudden parts
of a piece.
In 1911 he founds a group called “Blaue Reiter” with Franz
Marc and he is the first artist to have a one – man exhibition which takes
place in Munich. He is a professor at the Bauhaus (the
higher school of construction and art designing) in Berlin and later
Dessau after it has to move because of the Nazi movement.
Being a theorist as well as professor and artist he writes
the pieces “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1910) and “Point and Lane to Plane”
(Punkt und Linie zu Flaeche, 1926), both originals are written in German.
His late works mostly consist of precise, geometrical
forms inspired by Bauhaus and in 1933 he moves to Paris, where he lives until
his death in 1944.
