Russian Artist Wassily Kandinskys Early Art Was Influenced by

"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you accept a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a truthful poet. This last is essential."

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"Color is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul."

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"Objects damage pictures."

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"The artist must railroad train not only his eye merely also his soul."

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"Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, past touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically."

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"At that place is no must in art because art is free."

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"The true piece of work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, information technology acquires an democratic life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being."

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Summary of Wassily Kandinsky

One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an artful experience that engaged the sight, audio, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature simply interfered with this procedure. Highly inspired to create fine art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the exterior earth, but expressed volumes about the creative person's inner experience. His visual vocabulary adult through three phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his tardily, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. Kandinsky's art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists afterwards World State of war Two.

Accomplishments

Painting was, in a higher place all, securely spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstruse forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Kandinsky viewed not-objective, abstract art equally the ideal visual fashion to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself equally a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the edification of society.
Kandinsky viewed music every bit the well-nigh transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds just with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-costless, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.

Biography of Wassily Kandinsky

Modernist abstraction could not have asked for a more charismatic and visionary theorist than Kandinsky - the highest ethics he pursued through his many travels and friendships.

Important Art past Wassily Kandinsky

Progression of Art

1903

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

This quantum piece of work is a deceptively elementary image - a lone rider racing beyond a landscape - yet it represented a decisive moment in Kandinsky's developing style. In this painting, he demonstrated a clear stylistic link to the piece of work of the Impressionists, like Claude Monet, particularly evident in the contrasts of light and dark on the sun-dappled hillside. The ambiguity of the grade of the figure on horseback rendered in a variety of colors that about blend together foreshadow his involvement in abstraction. The theme of the horse and rider reappeared in many of his later works. For Kandinsky this motif signified his resistance against conventional aesthetic values equally well as the possibilities for a purer, more than spiritual life through art.

Oil on canvass - Private Collection

1908-09

Der Blaue Berg (The Blue Mountain)

In this work, the influence of the Fauves on Kandinsky's color palette is credible as he distorted colors and moved away from the natural world. He presented a bright blue mountain, framed past a red and yellowish tree on either side. In the foreground, riders on horseback charge through the scene. At this stage in Kandinsky'south career, Saint John's Book of Revelation became a major literary source for his art, and the riders signify the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The horsemen, although an indicator of the mass destruction of the apocalypse, also represent the potential for redemption afterward.

Kandinsky'southward vibrant palette and expressive brushwork provide the viewer with a sense of hope rather than despair. Further, the vivid colors and dark outlines think his love of the Russian folk fine art. These influences would remain part of Kandinsky's manner throughout the rest of his career, with bright colors dominating his representational and not-objective canvases. From this figurative and highly symbolic work, Kandinsky progressed farther towards pure abstraction. The forms are already schematized from their appreciable appearance in the surrounding world in this canvas, and his abstraction merely progressed as Kandinsky refined his theories most fine art.

Oil on canvass - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

1911

Composition IV

Hidden within the bright swaths of color and the clear black lines of Composition Four, Kandinsky portrayed several Cossacks with lances, equally well as boats, reclining figures, and a castle on a hilltop. Equally with many paintings from this period, he represented the apocalyptic battle that would lead to eternal peace. The notion of battle is conveyed by the Cossacks, while the calm of the flowing forms and reclining figures on the right alludes to the peace and redemption to follow. In order to facilitate his evolution of a non-objective style of painting, as described in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky reduced objects to pictographic symbols. Through his emptying of nearly references to the outside world, Kandinsky expressed his vision in a more universal manner, distilling the spiritual essence of the subject through these forms into a visual vocabulary. Many of these symbolic figures were repeated and refined in later works, becoming further and further abstracted as Kandinsky developed his mature, purely abstract style.

Oil on canvas - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfallen, Düsseldorf

1913

Composition VII

Usually cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky'due south pre-World War I accomplishment, Composition 7 shows the artist's rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes. The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the sheet exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the mode music called to listen certain colors and forms. Even the title, Limerick 7, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's not-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols screw effectually each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the dissimilar abstracted glyphs in gild to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers.

Preoccupied by the theme of apocalypse and redemption throughout the 1910s, Kandinsky formally tied the whirling composition of the painting to the theme of the cyclical processes of destruction and salvation. Despite the seemingly not-objective nature of the piece of work, Kandinsky maintained several symbolic references in this painting. Amidst the various forms that built Kandinsky'due south visual vocabulary, he painted glyphs of boats with oars, mountains, and figures. However, he did not intend for viewers to read these symbols literally and instead imbued his paintings with multiple references to the Last Judgment, the Deluge, and the Garden of Eden, seemingly all at in one case.

Oil on sail - Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

1916

Moscow I (Red Square)

At offset the move to Moscow in 1914 initiated a flow of depression and Kandinsky inappreciably even painted at all his showtime yr back. When he picked up his paintbrush over again in 1916, he expressed his desire to paint a portrait of Moscow in a letter to his sometime companion, Munter. Although he continued to refine his abstraction, he represented the city's monuments in this painting and captured the spirit of the city. Kandinsky painted the landmarks in a round way as if he had stood in the center of Red Square, turned in a circle, and caught them all swirling nearly him. Although he refers to the outside world in this painting, he maintained his delivery to the synesthesia of color, sound, and spiritual expression in art. Kandinsky wrote that he particularly loved sunset in Moscow because it was "the final chord of a symphony which develop[ed] in every tone a loftier life that forcefulness[d] all of Moscow to resound like the fortissimo of a huge orchestra."

Oil on canvas - The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

1923

Limerick Viii

The rational, geometric order of Limerick 8 is a polar contrary of the operatic composition of Composition Seven (1913). Painted while he taught at the Bauhaus, this work illustrates how Kandinsky synthesized elements from Suprematism, Constructivism, and the school's own ethos. Past combining aspects of all three movements, he arrived at the flat planes of color and the clear, linear quality seen in this work. Form, as opposed to color, structured the painting in a dynamic residual that pulses throughout the canvas. This work is an expression of Kandinsky's clarified ideas about modern, non-objective art, specially the significance of shapes similar triangles, circles, and the checkerboard. Kandinsky relied upon a hard-edged style to communicate the deeper content of his work for the rest of his career.

Oil on canvas - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

1926

Several Circles

Kandinsky painted this work in his sixtieth yr and it demonstrates his lifelong search for the platonic form of spiritual expression in art. Created as role of his experimentation with a linear style of painting, this work shows his interest in the form of the circle. "The circle," claimed Kandinsky, "is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single grade and in equilibrium. Of the 3 primary forms, it points most clearly to the time." He relied upon the varied possibilities of interpretation for the circle to create a sense of spiritual and emotional harmony in this work. The diverse dimensions and bright hues of each circle bubble upwards through the canvass and are balanced through Kandinsky's careful juxtapositions of proportion and color. The dynamic motion of the round forms evokes their universality - from the stars in the cosmos to drops of dew; the circle a shape integral to life.

Oil on sheet - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

1939

Limerick 10

Influenced past the flowing biomorphic forms of Surrealism, Kandinsky later incorporated organic shapes back into his pictorial vocabulary. Executed in French republic, this monumental painting relies upon a blackness background to heighten the visual impact of the brightly colored undulating forms in the foreground. The presence of the black area is significant, as Kandinsky only used the color sparingly; it is evocative of the cosmos as well equally the darkness at the end of life. The undulating planes of color phone call to mind microscopic organisms, but also express the inner emotional and spiritual feelings Kandinsky experienced near the terminate of his life. The uplifting organization of forms in contrast with the harsh edges and black background illustrates the harmony and tension present throughout the universe, likewise equally the rise and autumn of the bike of life. Last in his lifelong series of Compositions, this work is the culmination of Kandinsky'south investigation into the purity of form and expression through nonrepresentational painting.

Oil on canvas - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

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Content compiled and written past Eve Griffin

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Content compiled and written by Eve Griffin
Edited and published past The Art Story Contributors
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