Wassily Kandinsky
Wasily Vasilievich Kandinsky (in Russian, Василий Васильевич Кандинский, Moscow, December 4Jul./ December 16, 1866greg.-Neuilly-sur-Seine, December 13, 1944) was a Russian painter who also theorized about art. He has been mistakenly considered the forerunner of abstract art in painting. It was considered for many years that lyrical abstraction and expressionism begin with him. However, it has been shown that artists such as Hilma af Klint and Georgiana Houghton, among others, already made abstract paintings at the end of the XIX century and early XX.
She spent her childhood in Odessa, where she graduated from the Grékov Odessa School of Art. He enrolled at the Moscow State University, where he studied law and economics, after which he successfully began to practice his profession and was even offered a position as a professor of Roman law at Dorpat University. However, he decided to start studying painting when he was 30 years old.
In 1896, he settled in Munich, Germany, where he trained first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War. After the Russian Revolution, he became well versed in the cultural administration of Anatoli Lunacharsky, the Education Commissar of Russia's new Soviet administration, and helped found the Museum of Painting Culture. However, by then his "spiritual outlook...was alien to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society", and opportunities lured him back to Germany, where he returned in 1920. There he taught at the Bauhaus School of Art and Architecture from 1922 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life and where he acquired French citizenship in 1939. In this country he created some of his best works.
Biography
Kandinsky was born on December 16 (December 4 in the old Russian calendar), 1866, to an upper-middle-class family. Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky's father was a tea merchant from Kiajta, a Siberian town near the Mongolian border, and Vasily's grandmother was a Mongolian aristocrat from the Gantimurov dynasty. Lidia Ivanovna Tikhieva, Vasily's mother, was from Moscow.She spent her childhood and youth between Moscow and Odessa, where her family moved in 1871. After her parents' divorce, she lived with her father.. His aunt Elizaveta Tijéieva also took care of him, his maternal grandmother was German and spoke to him in German. In Odesa he took piano and cello lessons.In 1886 Kandinsky began his studies in law and economics at the University of Moscow. He also studied ethnography.In 1892 he married his cousin Anna Chemyákina, with whom he lived until 1904. In 1893 he was appointed associate professor at the Faculty of Law. In 1896 the University of Tartu offered him a teaching post which he turned down in order to dedicate himself entirely to art. This decision was influenced by the exhibition of the Impressionists in Moscow in 1895, seeing the works of Monet and the performance of Lohengrin by Richard Wagner at the Bolshoi Theatre.
He moved to Munich where he was not initially admitted to the Art Academy. He studied for a time at Anton Ažbe's private academy until 1900, when he was admitted to the Academy. His teacher was Franz von Stuck and, as he considered Kandinsky's palette too bright, he had him paint in a range of grays for a year.
In 1901 he founded the Phalanx group, whose main purpose was to introduce the French avant-garde into the provincial environment of Munich, for which he opened a school where he taught. His paintings from the early years of the century were palette knife landscapes, at first somber, then taking on an almost 'fauve' intensity. He also painted fantastic subjects based on Russian traditions or on the German Middle Ages. This period was marked by technical experimentation, particularly in the use of tempera on a dark paper, to give an impression of a transparent, backlit surface. The tonal consistency of the chiaroscuro emphasizes the scheme, blurring the distinction between the figures and the background, resulting in an almost abstract composition.
In 1902 he exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession and made his first woodcuts. In 1903 and 1904 he traveled through Italy, the Netherlands, Africa and visited Russia. In 1904 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In 1903 he divorced Anna Chemyákina and married the young artist Gabriele Münter. For five years he traveled with his wife around Europe painting and participating in exhibitions. He returned to Bavaria and settled in Murnau am Staffelsee at the foot of the Alps.In 1909 he was elected president of the New Munich Artists Association (NKVM). The group's first exhibition took place at the Thannhauser gallery in Munich that same year. Towards the end of the decade, Kandinsky's paintings denote a great tendency towards plenitude, due to the equivalence in intensity of the areas of color and the shiny surface, which destroys any illusion of depth. The series of paintings of horsemen in combat began in 1909, and in them, the horizon line is gradually eradicated, as are other spatial references. In 1913 he wrote his memoirs and a collection of poetry. In 1913 one of his works was presented at the Armory Show in New York.
At the outbreak of World War I, he left Germany and moved to Switzerland with his wife Gabriele on August 3, 1914. In November 1914 Gabriele returned to Munich and Kandinsky returned to Moscow. In the fall of 1916 he met Nina Andreevskaya, who was the daughter of a Russian general. He married her in February 1917.
Starting with the October Revolution of 1917, Kandinski carried out administrative work for the People's Commissariat, for Education; among the projects of this body was the reform of the educational system of art schools. In 1920 he was one of the founders of the INJUK (Institute for Artistic Culture) in Moscow. Throughout this year, the conflict arose between Kandinsky, Malevich and other idealist painters against productivism/productivists (or constructivists), Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, the latter group found strong support in "the monumental propaganda plan" devised by the political authorities of the Revolution. The tense situation led to the departure of Kandinsky from Russia.
In 1922 he moved to Weimar (Germany), where he taught theoretical classes for the Bauhaus School. In 1926 his book Point and line on the plane was published. Contribution to the analysis of pictorial elements. An organic continuation of his previous work Of the spiritual in art .
Around 1931 the National Socialists launched a large-scale campaign against the Bauhaus that led to its closure in 1933. Kandinsky and his wife emigrated to France and took up residence in the Paris suburb.
Youth and inspiration (1866-1896)
Kandinsky remembers his fascination with color as a child. His fascination with color symbolism and psychology continued as he grew older. In 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group that traveled to Vologda in the northern Moscow region. In Retrospective Look , he recounts that houses and churches were decorated with such bright colors that when he entered them, he felt that he was moving in a painting. This experience, and his study of the region's folk art (particularly the use of bright colors on a dark background), was reflected in much of his early work. A few years later, he first compared painting to composing music in the manner by which he would become pointing, writing, "Colour is the key." The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano. The artist is the hand that, with one key or another, makes the spirit of the human being vibrate".
In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky abandoned a promising teaching career in the world of law and economics to enroll in the art school in Munich. He was not immediately granted admission, and he began to teach himself the art. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibition of Monet's paintings. He was struck by the impressionistic style of the Haystacks series, for its strong sense of color almost independent of the objects themselves.
Kandinsky was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner who, according to him, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism. He was also spiritually influenced by Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the best known exponent of theosophy. The Theosophical Theory postulates that creation is a geometric progression, starting from a single point. The creative aspect of the form that is expressed by a descending series of circles, triangles and squares. Kandinsky's books On the Spiritual in Art (1910) and Point and Line on the Plane (1926) echoed this theosophical doctrine.
Metamorphosis
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Art school is generally considered difficult, but it was easy for Kandinsky. It was during this time that he began to emerge as an art theorist, and as a painter. The number of extant paintings of him increased at the beginning of the XX century, much remains of the landscapes and towns he painted, with wide sectors of color and recognizable shapes. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings do not feature any human figures, one exception being Domingo. (Old Russia) (1904), in which Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and fanciful) view of peasants and nobles in front of a city's walls. Couple on Horseback (1907) depicts a man on horseback with a woman, with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian village with luminous walls across a river. The horse is silent as the leaves on the trees, the city, and the reflections in the river glow with patches of color. This work demonstrates the influence of pointillism in the way depth of field is lost on a flat, luminescent surface. The influence of fauvism is also evident in these early works. Colors are used to express Kandinsky's experience with matter, not to describe objective nature.
Perhaps the most important of his paintings of the early 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure on a swift horse racing across a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is medium blue and the cast shadow is dark blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, the backs of the trees in autumn, in the background. The blue rider in the painting stands out (although not clearly defined) and the horse has an abnormal gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Some art historians believe that a second figure (perhaps a child) is being held by the pilot, although it may be a shadow of the lone rider. This intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the completion of the artwork, became an increasingly self-conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the abstract works of the period 1911-1914. In The Blue Horseman, Kandinsky shows the horseman more as a series of colors than in specific details. This painting is no exception in this respect compared to contemporary painters, but it shows the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.
Between 1906 and 1908 Kandinsky spent a lot of time traveling around Europe (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group from Moscow), until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. The painting Blue Mountain (1908-1909) was painted at this time, demonstrating his tendency towards abstraction. A blue mountain is flanked by two large trees, one yellow and one red. A procession, with three horsemen and several figures, crosses at the bottom. The riders' faces, clothing, and saddles are each a single color and neither they nor the walking figures show any real detail. Planes and contours are also indicative of Fauvist influence. The extensive use of color in Montaña Azul illustrates Kandinsky's penchant for an art in which color is presented independently of form, and in which each color is given equal attention. The composition is flatter, the painting is divided into four sections: the sky, the red tree, the yellow tree and the blue mountain tree with the three horsemen.
Akhtyrka1901, Lenbachhaus, Munich
Sun of Rotterdam, 1906
Murnau, village street, 1908, Collection Werner Merzbacher
Houses in Munich1908
Autumn in BavariaOil on canvas, 1908, Pompidou Centre
Murnau, train and castle1909
The Blue Rider period (1911-1914)
In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and other artists founded in Munich an expressionism/expressionist movement Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider in Spanish/Spanish language) that transformed German expressionism.
Return to Russia (1914-1921)
From 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky worked on Russian cultural policy and assisted in art education and museum reform. He painted little during this period, dedicating his time to teaching art with a program based on the analysis of form and color. He also helped organize the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. In 1916 he met Nina Andreyevskaya, whom he married the following year.Her spiritual and expressionist view of art was ultimately rejected by the radical members of the Institute (Tatlin, Rodchenko) as too individualistic and bourgeois. In 1921, Kandinsky was invited to go to Germany, to attend the Bauhaus in Weimar, by its founder, the architect Walter Gropius.
The Bauhaus (1922-1933)
Kandinsky not only taught the basic design classes for beginners and the advanced theory course at the Bauhaus, but also conducted painting classes and a workshop where he augmented his color theory with the new elements of the psychology of form. The development of his work on the study of forms, particularly points and line forms, led to the publication of his second theoretical book Point and Line on the Plane in 1926. The elements Geometric shapes are becoming increasingly important both in his teaching and in his painting, especially the circle, half circle, angle, straight and curved lines. This period was extremely productive. This freedom is characterized in his works by the rich treatment of colors and shades —as in yellow-red-blue (1925), where Kandinski illustrates his distance from constructivism and suprematism, influential movements of the time—.
The two meter wide yellow-red-blue (1925) is composed of various shapes: a yellow vertical rectangle, a red sloping cross and a large dark blue circle, a multitude of straight (or sinuous) black lines, arcs circular, monochrome circles and scattered colored checkerboards, contributing to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of the shapes and the main masses of the colors present on the canvas are only a first approximation to the internal reality of the work, whose recognition requires a deeper observation, not only of shapes and colors that intervene in the work, but their absolute relationship, the relative positions on the canvas and their harmony.
Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), formed in 1924 with Paul Klee, Feininger, and Alekséi von Jawlensky, who lectured and exhibited in the United States in 1924. Due to hostility from the right and left of the Weimar Bauhaus, they settled in Dessau in 1925. After a Nazi smear campaign the Bauhaus Dessau moved to Berlin in 1932, until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then left Germany and settled in Paris.
The Great Synthesis (1934-1944)
Living in a small apartment in Paris, Kandinsky created his work in a living room studio. With biomorphic, flexible, non-geometric forms, the contours of the forms that appear in his paintings suggest microscopic organisms that only express the artist's inner life. Kandinsky uses original color compositions that evoke Slavic folk art. He also occasionally sands paint to give his works a granular, rustic texture.
This period corresponds to a synthesis of Kandinski's previous works in which he used all the elements, enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his last two main compositions; the type of fabrics made had not been produced for many years. Composition IX has high contrast and powerful diagonals whose main shape gives the impression of an embryo in the womb. Small colored squares and colored bands stand out against the black background of the painting Composition X like fragments of stars (or filaments), while enigmatic hieroglyphics in pastel shades cover a large brown mass that seems to float in the corner upper left of the canvas. In Kandinsky's work, some characteristics are evident, while certain touches are more discreet and veiled, only progressively revealed after deepening the relationship with his work. He intended the forms of him (subtly harmonized and placed) to resonate with the soul of the beholder. In this period many of his works were purchased by Solomon Guggenheim, who was one of his most enthusiastic supporters.
Abstract art
Kandinski's development towards abstraction finds its theoretical justification in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy, which had been published in 1908. He argues that the hierarchy of values in use, based on the laws of Renaissance, it is not valid to consider the art of other cultures; many artists create from reality but with an abstract impulse, which means that the latest trends in art occur in less materialistic societies.
Kandinski, like Piet Mondrian, was also interested in theosophy, understood as the fundamental truth underlying doctrines and rituals in all world religions; the belief in an essential reality hidden behind appearances provides an obvious rationality to abstract art.
In 1912 he published Of the Spiritual in Art, where he criticized traditionalist academic institutions and the idea of art in general. It is the first book that describes the theoretical foundation of the abstract movement and speaks of a new era of great spirituality and the contribution of painting to it. The new art must be based on a language of color and Kandinsky gives guidelines on the emotional properties of each tone and each color, unlike older color theories, he is not interested in the spectrum but only in the soul response.
Between 1926 and 1933 he painted 159 oils and 300 watercolors. Many of them were lost after the Nazis declared his paintings degenerate. In 1939 he became a French national.
Kandinsky's Conception of Art
Artistic and spiritual theory
As in the theories of the essays Der Blaue Reiter, Almanac and the indications of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, Kandinsky also expressed the communion between the artist and the spectator as made available to both the senses and the mind (synesthesia). Listening to tones and chords while painting, Kandinsky states that, for example, yellow is the center color in a brass trumpet, black is the color of closure and the end of things, and that color combinations produce vibrational frequencies, similar to chords played on a piano. Kandinski also developed a theory of geometric figures and their relationships, stating, for example, that the circle is the most peaceful shape and represents the human soul. These theories are explained in Point and line on the plane).
During Kandinsky's studies in preparation for Composition IV, he felt exhausted and went for a walk. While he was away, Gabriele Münter fixed up her study and accidentally turned the canvas over. Upon returning and seeing the canvas (without recognizing it), Kandinski fell to his knees and wept, saying that it was the most beautiful painting he had ever seen. He had been released from attachment to an object. Like the first time he saw Monet's Haystacks, an experience that would change his life.
In another episode with Münter during the Bavarian Abstract Expressionist years, Kandinsky was working on his Composition VI which took almost six months of study and preparation. The work was intended to evoke a flood, baptism, destruction and rebirth at the same time. After describing the work on a mural-sized wood panel, he got stuck and couldn't continue. Münter told him that he was trapped in his mind and could not reach the true subject of the photograph. He suggested that he simply repeat the word uberflut ("deluge" or "inundation") and focus on its sound and not its meaning.. Repeating this word like a mantra, Kandinsky painted and completed the monumental work in a span of three days.
Kandinski's analysis of shapes and colors results not from simple and arbitrary associations with ideas, but from the interior experience of the painter. He spent years creating abstract, sensory-rich paintings, working tirelessly with shapes and colors, observing his paintings and those of other artists, considering their effects on his sense of color. This subjective experience is something that the French philosopher Michel Henry calls "absolute subjectivity" or the "absolute phenomenological life ".
Of the spiritual in art
Published in 1912, Kandinsky's book compares the spiritual in the life of humanity to a pyramid: the artist has the mission of guiding others to the top with his work. The tip of the pyramid are those few great artists. It is a spiritual pyramid, advancing and ascending slowly, even if it sometimes seems immobile. During the decadent periods, the soul sinks to the bottom of the pyramid, humanity only seeks external success, ignoring spiritual forces.
The evolution of Art and the spiritual world occurs in freedom, outside of influences, sometimes it focuses on color and other times it focuses on shapes.
The evolution in painting depends on shapes and colors, on how they are used and combined. A series of identical figures can convey the same message, however, if there is a variation in color and/or shapes in the composition, the message is distorted.
Like colors, shapes will have their spiritual effects, triangles are more related to warm tones (yellow, red) due to the sharpness of their angles, in the case of deep colors they are related to more square shapes and round.
Human spirituality will react according to how the artist uses shapes and colors; With a simple color you can convey different feelings, such as sadness or joy, depending on its hue.
The obvious properties that we can see when we look at a color in isolation and let it act on its own, are on the one hand the warmth or coolness of the color tone and on the other the lightness or darkness of that tone. The heat is a tendency towards yellow, and the coldness a tendency towards blue; yellow and blue, form the first great contrast and dynamics. The yellow has an eccentric movement and the blue a concentric movement; a yellow surface seems to move closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move away. Yellow is a typically terrestrial color, whose violence can be painful and aggressive. Blue is a light blue color, which evokes a deep calm. The combination of the yields of blue and yellow gives a result of immobility and calm, which is green.
Lightness is a tendency toward white, and darkness is a tendency toward black. Black and white form the second great contrast, which is static. White is a deep, absolute silence, full of possibilities. Black is nothingness without possibility, an eternal silence without hope, and it corresponds to death. The mixture of white with black gives grey, which has no active force and whose hue is close to that of green. Gray corresponds to hopeless immobility, but it tends to despair when it gets dark, regaining a little hope when it lights up.
Red is a warm, happy and hectic color, it is forceful, a movement in itself. Mixed with black it becomes brown, a strong color. Mixed with yellow, it gains warmth and turns orange, which imparts a radiant movement to its surroundings. When mixed with red and blue it fades away to become purple, which is a cool red. Red and green form the third great contrast, and orange and purple the fourth.
The human eye can relate all kinds of experiences and feelings through colors and shapes. You don't necessarily have to have an exact representation to identify with it. It is only the correct use of colors and/or shapes that makes a painting transmit a message and even harmonize with the human soul.
Point and line on the plane
the author looks at it objectively, but from the point of view of its effect on the inner observer.
A dot is a small element of color formulated by the artist on the canvas. It is neither a geometric point nor a mathematical abstraction, but it is the extension, shape and color. This shape can be a square, a triangle, a circle, a star, or something more complex. The dot is the most concise form, although depending on its location on the basic plane it will take on a different hue. It can be isolated or resonate with other points or lines.
A line is the product of a force that has been applied in a given direction: the force exerted on the pencil or brush by the artist. Linear shapes produced can be of several types: a straight line, which results from a single force applied in a single direction; an angular line, resulting from the alternation of two forces in different directions, or a curved (or wave-shaped) line, produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be obtained by condensation (from about rotate around the line of one of its ends).
The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: a horizontal line corresponds to the ground on which the man rests and moves, but it has a dark and cold affective tone similar to that of black or blue. A vertical line corresponds to the height, and does not offer any support, but instead has a warm light tone close to white and yellow. A diagonal has a more or less hot or cold hue, according to its inclination towards the horizontal or vertical.
A force that unfolds, without obstacles, like the one produced by a straight line corresponds to lyricism, several forces that confront each other (or bother each other) do form a drama. The angle formed by the angular line also has an inner sonority that is warm and close to yellow for an acute angle (a triangle), cool and blue-like for an obtuse angle (a circle), and red-like for a sharp angle (a circle). straight (a square).
The base plane is, in general, rectangular or square. therefore, it is made up of horizontal and vertical lines that delimit and define it as an autonomous entity that supports the painting, communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of the horizontal and vertical lines: the horizontal ones impart a calm, cool hue to the ground plane, while the vertical ones impart a calm, warm hue. The artist intuits the interior effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which he chooses according to the tonality he wants to give to his work. Kandinski considers the basic plane of a living being, which the artist "fertilizes" and it feels to "breathe".
Each part of the basic plane has an affective coloration, which influences the tonality of the pictorial elements that he will write on it, and contributes to the richness of the composition resulting from the juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the basic plane corresponds with ease and lightness that, while the continuation evokes condensation and heaviness. The painter's job is to listen and learn about these effects in order to produce paintings that are not just the result of a random process, but the fruit of authentic labor and the result of an effort toward inner beauty.
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