Wassily Kandinsky

gigatos | May 24, 2022

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Summary

Vasily Kandinsky (Russian: Василий Васильевич Кандинский), born November 22, 1866 (December 4, 1866 in the Gregorian calendar) in Moscow and died December 13, 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, was a Russian painter, naturalized German and then French.

Considered one of the most important painters of the twentieth century, he is often considered the author of the first abstract work of art of the modern era, although art historians suspect that Kandinsky backdated this watercolor, which they believe resembles a sketch of his Composition VII, of 1913. In any case, Kandinsky”s fame is linked to his gradual rejection of all figurative elements in his painting over the course of these few years.

Trained in political economy at the Russian University before devoting himself to painting, Kandinsky wrote two books of reflections on painting, which have been translated and republished several times. He wrote the first one around 1910, while he was leading the group The Blue Rider, a few years before the exhibition of his first non-figurative works; at the same time he published a collection of texts accompanied by figurative woodcuts in color. While a professor at the Bauhaus, he wrote a book on the elementary forms of graphic arts, published in 1926, corresponding to an evolution of his painting at the same time.

Youth and inspirations (1866-1896)

Born into a wealthy family in Moscow on December 4, 1866, Vasily was the eldest son of Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky and Lydia Ivanovna Ticheieva. The child was five years old when his father decided to move to the Black Sea for health reasons. Vasily spent his childhood in Odessa. His parents separated: his mother visited him every day at his father”s home, his maternal aunt Elisabeth Ivanovna directed his education and introduced him to drawing and painting. His mother remarried to a doctor from Odessa. Every year, during his adolescence, he accompanied his father, a rich tea merchant, on a trip to Moscow. In retrospect, he reports that as a child in Moscow he was fascinated and exceptionally stimulated by color.

In August 1885, he enrolled in the Moscow University Faculty of Law. He studied political economy under the direction of Chuprov (ru), then other disciplines. In 1889, he participated in an ethnographic group that traveled to the Vologda oblast, northeast of Moscow, to study peasant law. The population appeared to him as “lively and colourful paintings”; he saw for the first time folk art, which, according to his notebooks, seemed to interest him as much as the object of his mission. In 1891, he married his cousin, Anna Filipovna Chemiakina, one of the few students at Moscow University. They divorced in 1911. The following year he obtained his law degree.

In 1895, the exhibition of the impressionists in Moscow, which knew only Russian naturalism (Repin, Chichkine), and the performance of Wagner”s opera, Lohengrin, which he attended at the Moscow court theater, marked his inner evolution. He wrote that he was completely unable to recognize the subject of Monet”s Les Meules, and in front of this painting he experienced an appreciation of the painting independently of its subject. Lohengrin, by an effect of synesthesia, seems to him to represent Moscow. “I saw all my colors mentally, they stood before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were drawn before me”. The new theories of physics, with the disintegration of the atom, have on him the same staggering effect.

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Artistic development (1896-1911)

Kandinsky experienced a shock when he learned, in 1897, that the physicist Joseph John Thomson had experimentally proven the existence of electrons. This discovery, which contradicted the principle of the indivisibility of the atom (ancient Greek ἄτομος , “unbreakable”), challenged his confidence in science and shook even his conception of reality. For him, this condemns positivism and its counterpart in pictorial art, naturalism.

In 1896, at the age of 30, he refused a professorship at the University of Tartu to begin studying painting: he moved to Munich, where he studied at the Azbé School of Drawing, then in 1900 at the Academy of Fine Arts with Franz von Stuck, who strongly criticized him for his “extravagant colors.

In 1901, Kandinsky began a career as a painter and teacher in the Phalanx group that he founded, only to dissolve it three years later. One of his students, Gabriele Münter, became his companion and remained so until the Great War.

For the most part, Kandinsky”s paintings from this period do not include human faces. One exception is Sunday, Traditional Russia (1904), in which Kandinsky offers a very colorful, and presumably imaginary, painting of peasants and nobles in front of a city wall. His painting Couple on Horseback (1906-1907), shows a rider, tenderly embracing a woman, riding past a Russian town on the opposite bank of a river. The horse, caparisoned in sumptuous cloth, stands in the shadows under the canopy of birch trees, while the foliage and walls of the city are reflected in a multitude of colored spots illuminating the water.

A seminal Kandinsky painting of the 1900s is probably The Blue Rider in 1903, which shows a figure wearing a cape riding swiftly across a meadow. Kandinsky depicts the rider more in a series of colorful strokes than in precise detail. In itself, this painting is not exceptional, when compared to the paintings of other contemporary painters, but it shows the direction that Kandinsky would follow in the following years, and its title announces the group that he would found a few years later.

From 1906 to 1908, Kandinsky spent much of his time traveling throughout Europe, until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau.

During his stay in Paris in 1907, he painted La Vie mélangée, a canvas that closes the large group of paintings of his early work, produced between 1902 and 1907, and which he called “colored drawings”. In contrast to the movement of the Ambulants, who proposed subjects concerning the people and painted in a realistic or naturalist manner, Kandinsky evoked the distant past in these nostalgic canvases, in which figures from old Russia, old Germany, and the Biedermeier period were mixed. In La Vie mélangée, it “seems that by blending the figure and the background, the artist is already practicing almost abstract visions in this kind of scene.

The Blue Mountain (1908-1909), painted at this time, shows more of his tendency towards pure abstraction. A blue mountain appears between two large trees, one yellow and the other red. A group of three horsemen and a few other figures cross the bottom of the canvas. The riders” faces, clothes and saddles are each a solid color, and none of the figures show any realistic detail. The extensive use of color in The Blue Mountain illustrates Kandinsky”s move toward an art in which color itself is applied independently of form.

From 1909 onwards, what Kandinsky called the “chorus of colors” became increasingly vivid, charging it with emotional power and intense cosmic significance. This development has been attributed to Goethe”s Treatise on Colors (Farbenlehre), which influenced his books On the Spiritual in Art and Views of the Past. The following year, he painted the first abstract work based on a deep conviction and with a clearly defined goal: to replace figuration and the imitation of the external “reality” of the material world with a pure creation of a spiritual nature that proceeds only from the artist”s inner necessity. Or, to use the terminology of the philosopher Michel Henry, to substitute to the visible appearance of the external world the pathetic and invisible interior reality of the life. Kandinsky explained that the intuition that led him to abstraction occurred in 1908, when he saw one of his own paintings lying on its side, unrecognizable in the fading light of dusk.

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The Blue Rider (1911-1914)

The paintings of this period contain large, expressive masses of color, evolving independently of the forms and lines that no longer serve to delineate or emphasize them, but combine with them, overlapping and overlapping in a very free manner to form canvases of extraordinary strength.

Music had a great influence on the birth of abstract art; being abstract in nature and not seeking to represent the external world in vain, but simply to express in an immediate way feelings internal to the human soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to designate his works: he called many of his most spontaneous paintings “improvisations”, while he called some of his most elaborate and long-wrought “compositions”, a term that resonated with him like a prayer.

In addition to painting itself, Kandinsky devoted himself to the constitution of a theory of art. He helped found the New Artists Association of Munich, of which he became president in 1909. The group was unable to integrate the most radical approaches, such as those of Kandinsky, due to a more conventional conception of art and the group dissolved at the end of 1911. Kandinsky then founded a new association, Le Cavalier bleu, with artists closer to his vision of art, such as Franz Marc. This association produced an almanac, called L”Almanach du Cavalier bleu, which was published twice. It was on June 19, 1911 that Kandinsky announced in his letter to Marc the idea of making the almanac. More issues were planned, but the declaration of the First World War in 1914 put an end to these projects, and Kandinsky returned home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

His first major theoretical work on art, entitled Du spirituel dans l”art et dans la peinture en particulier, appeared at the end of 1911. In this short treatise, he exposes his personal vision of art, whose true mission is of a spiritual nature, as well as his theory of the psychological effect of colors on the human soul and their inner sonority. The Almanac of the Blue Rider was published shortly afterwards. These writings of Kandinsky serve both as a defense and promotion of abstract art and as a demonstration that any authentic art form is also capable of achieving a certain spiritual depth. He believes that color can be used in painting as an autonomous reality independent of the visual description of an object or other form.

In 1912 he painted With the Black Bow, one of the first abstract works (which represents nothing of reality), and conceived as such, in the history of art. It represents nothing but forms and colors freed from the “figure”, from the “representation” of the world. This freedom of forms tends to provoke emotions, feelings by the play of the composition, colored harmonies, balances, masses and movement organized around the black arc. It is like the conductor of the whole canvas. The improvised gesture of the painter reveals, in spite of everything, a thoughtful staging, where nothing is left to chance, to trigger a “vibration” in the viewer. Kandinsky seeks here to restore the music of Wagner, hence the term “lyrical” abstraction (linked to music). He was also a friend of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote the first atonal score.

Return to Russia (1914-1921)

From 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky was involved in the development of cultural policy in Russia, and collaborated in the fields of art education and museum reform. He also devoted himself to art education with a program based on the analysis of forms and colors, as well as to the organization of the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow. He painted very little during this period. In 1916 he met Nina Andreyevskaya, who became his wife the following year. In 1921, Kandinsky was asked to go to Germany, to the Bauhaus in Weimar, at the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius. The following year, the Soviets officially banned all forms of abstract art as being harmful to socialist ideals.

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The Bauhaus (1922-1933)

The Bauhaus was then a school of architecture and innovative art, which aimed to merge the plastic and applied arts, and whose teaching was based on the theoretical and practical application of the synthesis of the plastic arts. Kandinsky reunited with his former classmates von Stuck, Paul Klee and Josef Albers. He gave classes in the mural painting workshop, which took up his theory of color and integrated new elements on the psychology of form. The development of this work on the study of forms, in particular the point and the various forms of lines, led to the publication of his second book, Point and Line on a Plan, in 1926.

Geometric elements take on an increasing importance in his teaching as well as in his painting, in particular the circle, the semicircle, the angle and the straight or curved lines. This period is for him a period of intense production. By the freedom of each of his works, by the treatment of surfaces rich in color and beautiful gradations, as in his painting Yellow-red-blue (painting of 1925, in which he transposes one of the theorems of the Treaty of colors of Goethe, the birth of red from the meeting and mutual intensification of light, the color yellow, and darkness, the color blue), Kandinsky is clearly different from constructivism or suprematism whose influence was growing at that time.

The main forms that make up this two-meter wide canvas entitled Yellow-Red-Blue are a vertical yellow rectangle, a slightly slanted red cross and a large dark blue circle, while a multitude of straight or sinuous black lines and arcs, as well as a few monochrome circles and colored checkerboards, contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of the forms and the main colored masses present on the canvas corresponds only to a first approach of the inner reality of the work, the right appreciation of which requires a much deeper observation, not only of the forms and the colors used in the painting, but also of their relation, of their absolute position and their relative arrangement on the canvas, of their overall harmony and of their mutual agreement.

Faced with the hostility of the right-wing parties, the Bauhaus left Weimar and moved to Dessau-Roßlau in 1925. Following a relentless smear campaign by the Nazis, the Bauhaus was closed in Dessau in 1932 and Kandinsky moved to Berlin-Südende as the school continued its activities in Berlin until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then left Germany and moved to Paris where he exhibited in October and November 1933 at the Salon des surindépendants.

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The great synthesis (1934-1944)

In Paris, he found himself relatively isolated, especially since abstract art, especially geometric art, was hardly recognized: the artistic trends in fashion were rather cubism or Art Deco. He lived and worked in a small apartment, the living room of which he converted into a studio. Biomorphic forms with soft, non-geometric contours appear in his work, forms that outwardly evoke microscopic organisms, but which always express the inner life of the artist. He uses unusual color compositions that evoke Slavic folk art and resemble precious filigree works. He also uses sand, which he mixes with the colors to give the painting a grainy texture.

This period corresponds in fact to a vast synthesis of his previous work, of which he takes up all the elements while enriching them. In 1936 and 1939, he painted his last two large canvases, particularly elaborate and long matured, which he had stopped producing for many years. Composition IX is a canvas with strong diagonals and strong contrasts, whose central shape evokes a human embryo in the womb. The small squares of color and colored bands seem to stand out from the black background of Composition X like fragments or filaments of stars, while enigmatic pastel hieroglyphs cover the large brown mass that seems to float in the upper left corner of the canvas.

In Kandinsky”s works, a certain number of characteristics jump out immediately, while certain sounds are more discreet and as if veiled, that is to say, they only gradually reveal themselves to those who make the effort to deepen their relationship with the work and to refine their gaze. One should not be satisfied with a first impression or a rough identification of the forms that the artist used and that he subtly harmonized and put in agreement so that they enter effectively in resonance with the soul of the spectator.

He acquired French nationality in 1939. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on December 13, 1944, leaving an abundant body of work, and is buried in the new cemetery of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Posthumous glory

After the death of Vassily Kandinsky, and for about thirty years, Nina Kandinsky did not stop spreading the message and divulging the work of her husband. All the works in his possession were bequeathed to the Centre Georges-Pompidou, in Paris, where the largest collection of his paintings can be seen.

Nina Kandinsky created in 1946 the Kandinsky prize “intended to crown the research of young painters in the field of abstraction”, and awarded for the first time to Jean Dewasne.

Writings on art

Kandinsky”s creation of a purely abstract work did not come about as an abrupt change, but was the result of a long development, a long maturation and an intense reflection based on his personal experience as a painter and on the impulse of his spirit towards inner beauty and that deep spiritual desire which he called “inner necessity”, and which he held as an essential principle of art.

Kandinsky”s analyses of shapes and colors are only the result of the painter”s inner experience, who spent years creating abstract paintings, working with shapes and colors, observing his own paintings and those of other artists for a long time and tirelessly, simply noting their subjective and pathetic effect on his soul as an artist and poet with a great sensitivity to colors.

It is therefore a form of purely subjective experience that anyone can make and repeat, by taking the time to look at his paintings and to let the forms and colors act on his own living sensibility. It is not a question of scientific and objective observations, but of radically subjective and purely phenomenological inner observations, which belong to what the philosopher Michel Henry calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute phenomenological life.

This book was written in 1910, three years before the first exhibition of a non-figurative painting, Composition VII. A watercolor dated 1910 would have preceded it, but some critics believe it is backdated. Its unusual format is too large for its time and, above all, it was entered late in the handwritten register that Kandinsky regularly kept from 1919 onwards. Moreover, the pictorial processes are those that the artist used in 1913, and the artist still writes in Du spirituel “We are not advanced enough in painting to be already deeply impressed by a composition of forms and colors totally emancipated.

Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of mankind to a great triangle similar to a pyramid, which the artist has the task and mission of pulling upwards by the exercise of his talent. The tip of the triangle consists only of a few individuals who bring the sublime bread to mankind. A spiritual triangle that moves forward and upward slowly, even if it remains stationary at times. During periods of decadence, souls fall to the bottom of the triangle and men seek only external success and ignore purely spiritual forces.

When we look at the colors on a painter”s palette, a double effect occurs: a “purely physical” effect of the eye, charmed by the beauty of the colors first of all, which provokes an impression of joy as when we eat a sweet. But this effect can be much deeper and lead to an emotion and a vibration of the soul, or an “inner resonance”, which is a purely spiritual effect by which the color reaches the soul.

The “inner necessity” is for Kandinsky the principle of art and the foundation of the harmony of forms and colors. He defines it as the principle of the effective contact of the form and the colors with the human soul. Any form is the delimitation of a surface by another, it has an interior content which is the effect that it produces on the one who looks at it with attention. This inner necessity is the artist”s right to unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a necessity. The work of art is born from the inner necessity of the artist in a mysterious, enigmatic and mystical way, then it acquires an autonomous life, it becomes an independent subject animated by a spiritual breath.

The first properties that jump out at you when you look at the color in isolation, leaving it alone, are on the one hand the warmth or coldness of the colored tone, and on the other hand the brightness or darkness of this tone.

Warmth is a tendency to yellow, coldness a tendency to blue. Yellow and blue form the first great contrast, which is dynamic. Yellow has an eccentric movement and blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to be moving towards us, while a blue surface seems to be moving away. The “yellow” is the typical earth color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. Blue” is the typically celestial color that evokes a deep calm. The mixture of blue and yellow produces total immobility and calm, the “green”.

Lightness is a tendency towards white and darkness a tendency towards black. White and black form the second great contrast, which is static. White” acts as a deep and absolute silence full of possibilities. Black” is nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal and hopeless silence, it corresponds to death. This is why every other color resonates so strongly in its vicinity. The mixture of white and black leads to grey, which has no active force and whose emotional tone is close to that of green. The “gray” corresponds to the immobility without hope, it tends towards the despair when it becomes dark and finds a little hope by clearing up.

Red” is a warm color, very lively, vivid and agitated, it has an immense force, it is a movement in itself. Mixed with black, it leads to “brown” which is a hard color. Mixed with yellow, it gains in warmth and gives “orange”, which has a radiating movement on the surroundings. Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give “violet”, which is a cooled red. The red and the green form the third great contrast, the orange and the violet the fourth.

This second work was published in 1926 (Albert Langen publisher, Munich, series: Bauhausbücher IX), when Kandinsky was a professor at the Bauhaus.

The artist analyzes the geometric elements that make up any painting, namely the “point” and the “line”, as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he calls the “original plane” or “P.O.” He does not analyze them from an objective and external point of view, but from the point of view of their inner effect on the living subjectivity of the spectator who looks at them and lets them act on his sensitivity.

The “point” is in practice a small spot of color deposited by the artist on the canvas. The point that the painter uses is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it has a certain extension, a shape and a color. This shape can be square, triangular, round, star-shaped or even more complex. The point is the most concise form but, depending on its location on the original plane, it will take on a different tone. It can be alone and isolated or it can be put in resonance with other points or with lines.

The “line” is the product of a force, it is a point on which a living force has been exerted in a certain direction, the force exerted on the pencil or on the brush by the artist”s hand. The linear forms produced may be of several types: a “straight” line resulting from a single force exerted in one direction, a “broken” line resulting from the alternation of two forces possessing different directions, or a “curved” or “wavy” line, produced by the effect of two forces acting simultaneously. A “surface” can be obtained by densification, from a line that is rotated around one of its ends.

The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: the “horizontal” line corresponds to the ground on which man rests and moves, to the flat, it has a dark and cold affective tone, similar to black or blue, while the “vertical” line corresponds to the height and offers no point of support, it has on the contrary a luminous and warm tone, close to white or yellow. A “diagonal” therefore has a tone more or less warm or cold, depending on its inclination to the vertical or horizontal.

A force that unfolds without obstacle, such as the one that produces a straight line, corresponds to “lyricism”, while several forces that oppose each other form a “drama”. The “angle” formed by a broken line also has an inner tone that is warm and yellow-like for an acute angle (triangle), cold and blue-like for an obtuse angle (circle) and red-like for a right angle (square).

The “original plane” is generally rectangular or square, it is thus composed of horizontal and vertical lines, which delimit it and define it as an autonomous being, which will serve as a support to the painting by communicating its affective tonality. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of these horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontals giving a calm and cold tone to the original plane, while the verticals communicate a calm and warm tone. The artist has the intuition of this inner effect of the format of the canvas and its dimensions, which he will choose according to the tonality he wishes to give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the original plane as a living being that the artist “fertilizes” and whose “breath” he feels.

Each “part” of the original plan has its own affective coloration that will influence the tone of the pictorial elements that will be drawn on it, which contributes to the richness of the composition that results from their juxtaposition on the canvas. The “top” of the original plane corresponds to suppleness and lightness, while the “bottom” evokes density and heaviness. It is up to the painter to learn to know these effects in order to produce paintings that are not the effect of chance, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort towards inner beauty.

Point and Line on a Plane contains a multitude of photographic examples and drawings, taken from Kandinsky”s works, which demonstrate his theoretical observations, and which allow the reader to reproduce in himself the inner evidence, provided that he takes the time to look carefully at each of these images, that he lets them act on his own sensitivity and that he lets the sensitive chords of his soul and his mind vibrate. Kandinsky nevertheless warns his reader against contemplating too long, which would lead the imagination to take over the immediate inner experience:

“For this kind of experience, it is better to trust the first impression, because the sensibility quickly gets tired and gives way to the imagination.”

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Poetry: Klänge (Resonances)

A rather exceptional case for Kandinsky”s work: the collection of his prose poems Klänge (Sounds, Sonorities or Resonances, “reaches the peak of a period that critics call ”genius” and the artist ”lyrical”. This book contains 38 texts written between 1909 and 1912, accompanied by 56 xylographs in color and black and white. Kandinsky explains his poems in the magazine XXe siècle (No. 3), in 1938:

“It is for many years that I have been writing from time to time “prose poems” and sometimes even “verse”. What is for me a “change of instrument” – the palette aside and in its place the typewriter is a small example of synthetic work.”

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The scenic compositions

Kandinsky wrote several small plays or scenic compositions in which he tried to illustrate and put into practice the synthesis of the arts to which he aspired, by combining the color of painting, the sound of music and the movement of dance. His main stage compositions are Sonorité jaune (1909), Sonorité verte (1909), Blanc et noir (1909) and Violet (1911).

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Texts, essays, articles, graphic publications

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French translations, posthumous compilations

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Exhibition catalogs

Sources