Wassily Kandinsky.

 Wassily Kandinsky.

Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born painter, printmaker, designer, teacher and writer. He became a German citizen in 1927 and a French citizen in 1939. He is considered as an important gravestone in the history of Art because he was part of the development in abstract art, both as a theoretician as well as practitioner.

Kandinsky rejected a promising university career teaching law and he traveled a lot and kept very in contact with different art movements in Holand, Belgium, Germany, Rusia and Paris of that time, he was influence by their art and the way they looked at it when creating it. There was a new philosophy of art. This philosophy was that of the artist, the creator comunicating his own ideas through his work.

He was strongly influence by the Fauves for a time, he found his way  to abstraction quite independently of the Cubists. Nature was still his key to his influence, he still looked at nature for his primary source but not untill 1912, he abandoned nature and never returned to it.
Kandinsky advanced rapidly to mature system of design. He proceeded directly  from more and more abstract renditions of Fauvism to pure design, retaining, however, such usefull characteristics of Fauvism as freedom of approach.

He rejected tight and architectural conception of design instead he took care of colour and harmony in his work. His conviction that it was possible and necessary to bring about in this way a communion from mind to mind gave him the courage to exhibt these first attempts at colour music. In fact Kandinsky wrote on his 1913 work 'Improvisation No. 30' :

This entire description is chiefly an analysis of the picture which I have painted rather subconsciously in a state of strong inner tension. So intensively do I feel the necessity of some of the forms, that I remember having given loud-voiced directions to myself, as for instance: ''But the corners must be heavy''(Flanagan,1962, p.239)

In 1910 he began a series of Improvisations of compositions, and of impressions in 1911. In these works he gradually eliminated all representational content to arrive in about 1912 at pure abstract. The choice of names in these paintings, deriving from musical terminology. He was a lover of music in fact he played the cello and the piano.

Kandinsky tried to render his personal and emotional expressions, therefore his paintings can also be considered as expressionist. Wassily Kandinsky disliked the values of progress and of science he wanted a regeneration of the world through a new art of pure 'inwardness' (Gombrich,2010, p.570)
In 1911 he was one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter and in 1914 on the outbreak of the war he returned to Russia where he was highly active as a teacher and administrator in various cultural organization instituted by the new Soviet regime.

In 1922 he accepted an offer to take up a teaching post at the Bauhaus, where he remained until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. His painting of this period became more geometrical, but in addition to circle and triangles he used arrow-like forms and wavy lines in a manner that ran counter to the typical Bauhaus concern with geometrical purity.

An exhibition of his work toured Germany in 1926 to mark Kandinsky's sixtieth birthday. He left Germany for France in 1933 and settled at Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris and in 13 December 1944 he died of cerebrovascular disease.

Bibliography.

Flanagan, G.A.,1962, Understand and Enjoy Moder Art,New York: Thomas Y.Crowell Company.

Gombrich, E.H.,2010, The Story of Art, 16th edition, London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Little,S.,2004, isms understanding art,London:Herbert Press.

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