Wassily Kandinsky was not born an artist; he came to painting quite late - at the age of 30. However, over the remaining half century, he managed to become famous not only for his paintings, but also for his theoretical treatises, the most famous of which is “On the Spiritual in Art.” Largely thanks to this work, Kandinsky is known throughout the world as the founder of abstract art.
Childhood and youth
Vasily Vasilyevich Kandinsky was born on December 4 (16), 1866 in Moscow into a noble family. The father, the famous businessman Vasily Silvestrovich, came from the ancient Kyakhta family of the Kandinskys, who were considered descendants of the kings of the Mansi Kondinsky principality. Great-grandmother is a princess from the Tunguska family of the Gantimurovs.
The family spent most of their fortune on travel. During the first 5 years after Vasily's birth, they traveled around Russia and Europe, settling in Odessa in 1871. Here the future artist received a classical education, while simultaneously developing creatively. A private teacher taught him to play the piano and cello and draw. IN at a young age the boy skillfully handled the brush and combined what seemed to be incongruously bright colors. Later, this feature formed the basis of the painting style he developed - abstractionism.
The parents did not consider their son's talent. By their will, in 1885, Wassily Kandinsky entered Moscow University at the Faculty of Law, Department of Political Economy and Statistics. Having missed two years due to illness, he successfully completed his studies in 1893.
Since 1895, he worked at the Moscow printing house “Partnership of I. N. Kushnever and Co.” as artistic director. In 1896, an invitation was received to take the place of professor of jurisprudence at the University of Dorpat, but Vasily Vasilyevich refused in favor of realizing himself as an artist.
Painting and creativity
As Wassily Kandinsky wrote in his diaries, two events influenced the decision to become an artist: an exhibition French impressionists 1895, where, among other things, Haystack and the opera Lohengrin were shown Bolshoi Theater. At the moment when the future great artist and art theorist understood his true purpose, he was 30 years old.
In 1896 Kandinsky entered the private school Anton Azhbe in Munich. There he received his first tips on building a composition, working with shape and color. The unusual nature of his work became the subject of ridicule from his fellow painters. Realist Igor Grabar recalled:
“He painted small landscape sketches, using not a brush, but a palette knife and applying bright colors separate planks. The resulting sketches were motley and in no way coordinated. We all treated them with restraint and joked among ourselves about these exercises in “purity of colors.” Kandinsky also did not do very well with Azhbe and did not shine with his talents at all.”
The riot of colors was not to the taste of the German painter Franz von Stuck, with whom Vasily Vasilyevich studied at the Munich Academy of Arts. Because of this, Kandinsky painted black and white works throughout 1900, focusing on graphics. A year later, the future abstract artist opened the Münchner Malschule Phalanx school, where he met Gabrielle Münter, a young promising artist. She became Kandinsky's muse and lover.
At that time, from under the brush of Vasily Vasilyevich came rich in colors landscapes: " Old city", "Blue Mountain", "Street in Murnau with Women", "Autumn Landscape", etc. There was also a place for portraits, for example, "Two on a Horse".
In 1911, Kandinsky wrote his first book, “On the Spiritual in Art.” In fact, the treatise became the first theoretical justification for the emergence of such a genre as abstract art. Vasily Vasilyevich talked about the means of embodiment of creativity: color, shape, thickness of lines. In 1914, the abstractionist began working on his second theoretical work, which was called “Point and Line on a Plane.” It was published in 1926.
The war of 1914 forced Kandinsky to return to his homeland, Moscow. He taught at the Free Workshops, then at the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops. In classes, he promoted a free style of writing, which is why he often came into conflict with fellow realists. Vasily Vasilyevich objected:
“If an artist uses abstract means of expression, this does not mean that he abstract artist. That doesn't even mean he's an artist. There are just as many dead triangles (be they white or green) as there are dead chickens, dead horses and dead guitars. You can become a “realistic academic” just as easily as you can become an “abstract academic.”
After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, Kandinsky immigrated to Paris. In France, abstractionism as a genre was absent in principle, so the public did not accept the artist’s innovative creations. Trying to adapt, Vasily Vasilyevich relied on form and composition, softening the bright, catchy colors. He created the paintings “Sky Blue” and “Complex and Simple”, playing on contrasts.
Personal life
There were three women in Wassily Kandinsky's personal life.
Anna Filippovna Chemyakina was the artist’s cousin and was 6 years older. The wedding took place in 1892, more out of loneliness than out of love.
In 1902, Kandinsky met the German artist Gabriele Münter. A year later, the couple got engaged, despite the fact that Chemyakin gave a divorce only in 1911.
Young Munter, who was 11 years younger, wanted to become Vasily Vasilyevich’s wife. But the artist delayed this moment, often traveling without a companion. In the spring of 1916 he left for Moscow, promising to prepare papers for marriage. And he kept his promise - he got married in the winter of 1917. True, not Munter, but Nina Nikolaevna Andreevskaya, whom I met by phone in 1916.
Then Nina was 17 years old, and Kandinsky was almost 50, and on joint photos they looked more like a daughter and her father. But their love seemed pure and sincere.
“I was surprised by his stunning blue eyes...” Nina wrote about their first meeting.
At the end of 1917, their son Vsevolod was born, who was affectionately named Lodya. Less than three years had passed since the boy died. Since then, the topic of children has become taboo in the Kandinsky family.
Death
Wassily Kandinsky lived long life- death overtook him at the 78th year of his life in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
The tragedy happened on December 13, 1944. The body rests in the New Cemetery of Neuilly, in the communes of Puteaux.
No. 1. In 1926, David Paladin, a future soldier-cartographer, was born in Chinley, Arizona. During the war years he was captured, and the young man ended up in a concentration camp. He endured all possible bullying until one day the prisoners were released. Since Paladin showed no signs of life, he was taken along with hundreds of others to be buried. On the way, the soldier began to stir. He was urgently taken to the hospital.
The young man spent two and a half years in a coma, and when he regained consciousness, he introduced himself as Wassily Kandinsky in pure Russian. To prove the honesty of the words spoken, the now former soldier painted a picture that art critics considered to be suitable for the style of the great abstractionist.
After leaving the hospital, David, nicknamed the New Kandinsky, continued to paint, got a job as a teacher at the Arizona College of Art, and then opened his own school. He painted more than 130 canvases under Kandinsky's signature.
It is said that Paladin was once hypnotized. He talked about “his” biography: he was born in Moscow in the family of a businessman, studied in Odessa, had three wives. And all this - in the voice of Kandinsky. At the end of the session the young man said:
“But why is there no peace for my soul even after death? Why did she possess this man? Maybe in order to complete the unfinished cycle of paintings...”
No. 2. Wassily Kandinsky's cousin, Victor, is a renowned psychiatrist whose only patient was himself. At the age of 30, Victor had his first attack of the disease, which later became known as schizophrenia. The psychiatrist was tormented by auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions, and “open thoughts” syndrome. He, realizing that he was not healthy, began research. On their basis, Victor Kandinsky wrote treatises “On Pseudohallucinations” and “On the Question of Insanity,” which proved that schizophrenia is treatable.
True, in practice the patient’s biography had a sad ending - during another attack The psychiatrist wrote this:
“I swallowed so many grams of opium. I’m reading Tolstoy’s “Cossacks.” It becomes difficult to read. I can't write anymore, I can't see clearly anymore. Sveta! Sveta!".
Victor died at 40 years old.
No. 3. Wassily Kandinsky wrote prose poetry. In 1913, the collection “Sounds” was published, which included seven works.
Works
- 1901 – “Summer”
- 1903 – “The Blue Rider”
- 1905 – “Gabriel Munter”
- 1908-1909 – “Blue Mountain”
- 1911 – “All Saints”
- 1914 – “Fugue”
- 1923 – “In the Black Square”
- 1924 – “Black accompaniment”
- 1927 – “Peaks on the Arc”
- 1932 – “Right to Left”
- 1936 – “Dominant Curve”
- 1939 – “Complicated and Simple”
- 1941 – “Various Incidents”
- 1944 – “Ribbon with squares”
Kandinsky is, perhaps, first of all a thinker and then an artist. He recognized only the direction in which a rich configuration could move and relentlessly pursued it, setting an example for other avant-garde creators. The essence of Kandinsky's abstraction is the search for a universal synthesis of music and painting, seen as parallels with philosophy and science.
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. WITH early childhood he was amazed by the variety of colors in nature, and he was constantly interested in art. Despite his success in studying economics and law, he abandoned a promising career in the social sciences to pursue a creative vocation.
The exhibition of Claude Monet, which the young artist visited, became a decisive impetus that inspired him to devote himself to the study of fine art. When he entered art school in Munich, Kandinsky was already 30 years old. Even without being accepted the first time, he continued his independent studies.
Vasily Vasilyevich spent two years in art school, followed by a period of wandering. The artist visited the Netherlands, France, Italy and Tunisia. At that time, he created paintings heavily influenced by Post-Impressionism, reliving his childhood in Russia in creative landscapes that had an idealistic meaning for the artist. He settled in the town of Murnau, near Munich, and continued to explore landscapes, giving them energetic lines and bold, hard colors.
Kandinsky thought about music, trying to convey its abstract features in other forms of art. In 1911, a group of like-minded artists led by Kandinsky was formed in Munich. They called themselves " The Blue Rider - Der Blaue Reiter" Among the participants were such famous German expressionists, like August Macke and Franz Marc. The group published an almanac with own views on modern art and held two exhibitions before disbanding at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
The transition to the use of basic pictorial elements marked the beginning of a dramatic period in Kandinsky's work and became a harbinger of the emergence of abstract art. He planned a new style, currently known as lyrical abstraction. The artist, through drawing and sketching, imitated the flow and depth of a musical work, the coloring reflected the theme of deep contemplation. In 1912 he wrote and published the seminal study " About the spiritual in art».
In 1914, Kandinsky had to return to Russia, but he did not stop experimenting. He even participated in the restructuring of Russian art institutions after the revolution. But the true significance of his ingenious innovation became apparent only in 1923 after he returned to Germany and joined the teaching corps. Bauhaus", where he became friends with another creative avant-garde artist, Paul Klee.
Kandinsky worked on a new pictorial formula consisting of lines, dots and combined geometric shapes, representing its visual and intellectual research. Lyrical abstraction shifted towards a more structured, scientific composition.
After ten years of fruitful work, the Bauhaus school was closed by the Nazi authorities in 1933. Kandinsky was forced to move to France, where he spent the rest of his life.
The Russian genius has devoted the last eleven years to the constant pursuit of a great synthesis of his abstract ideas and visual discoveries. He returned to intense color and lyricism, once again confirming his original views on the true nature of painting. great artist took French citizenship and created a number of famous works of art in his new homeland. He died in 1944 in Neuilly at the age of 77.
The new Nazi authorities in 1937 declared the works of Wassily Kandinsky, like those of his contemporaries Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Franz Marc and Piet Mondrian, to be “degenerate art”, and two years later more than a thousand paintings and thousands of sketches were publicly burned in the atrium of a fire station in Berlin. However, the persuasive power of iconic artwork Wassily Kandinsky did not fade under historical hardships and emerged victorious on the stage of art history.
Painting by Wassily Kandinsky:
1. "Sequence", 1935
This is practically a musical work, marking the late period in Kandinsky's work. Closed fields with scattered elements of the composition flowing into certain forms. The artist returned to his abstract roots.
2. “The Blue Rider”, 1903
This painting inspired the creation of one of the most influential bands in history. contemporary art- Der Blaue Reiter. This early work written on the verge of abstraction.
3. Beach Baskets in Holland, 1904
Landscape borrowed from a trip to the Netherlands. The scene is supposedly influenced by Impressionism.
4. “Autumn in Murnau”, 1908
The gradual transition to abstraction is marked by expressionism in landscape.
5. “Akhtyrka. Red Church", 1908
Russian landscape, in which the artist resurrected his homesickness.
6. “Mountain”, 1909
An almost entirely abstract landscape with small outlines suggesting a hill and human figures.
7. “First abstract watercolor”, 1910
This work has historical value as Kandinsky's first completely abstract watercolor.
8. “Improvisation 10”, 1910
Improvisation in drawing and color gives clues, but does not fully reveal or specify the images. Early abstraction.
9. “Lyrical”, 1911
In his painting, the artist often relied on musical ideas, so the lyrical nature of his strokes came naturally. This is one of his "poems of art".
10. “Composition IV”, 1911
There is a story that Kandinsky thought he had completed the painting, but as soon as his assistant accidentally turned it the other way, the perspective and overall impression of the painting changed, making it beautiful.
11. “Improvisation 26 (Rowing)”, 1912
Kandinsky often named his paintings in the manner musical works- improvisation and composition.
12. “Improvisation 31 (Battleship)”, 1913
A typical example of lyrical abstraction with strong color and emotional content.
13. “Squares with concentric circles”, 1913
Already a real deep abstraction. Thus, Kandinsky conducted research in the field of color and geometry.
14. “Composition VI”, 1913
After extensive preparation for this painting, Kandinsky completed it within three days, repeating it like a mantra for inspiration. german word"uberflut" meaning flood.
15. “Moscow”, 1916
During his stay in Moscow during the war years, Kandinsky was struck by the turmoil big city. This is more of a portrait of the capital than a landscape, reflecting all its power and turbulence.
The great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow. Kandinsky is known all over the world as one of the founders of abstract art. As a child, the painter traveled a lot with his parents around Russia and European countries. In 1871 the family moved to permanent place residence in Odessa, here Vasily received an art and musical education.
Wassily Kandinsky studied at the university to become a lawyer, but was forced to temporarily interrupt his studies due to deteriorating health. Kandinsky decided to take up painting relatively late - at that time the aspiring artist was already 30 years old. In 1896, Kandinsky moved to Munich, and until 1914 Germany became his second home. Today, tourists booking tours to Munich have a rare chance to visit the places where they once lived and worked. Great master abstractions.
Works of Wassily Kandinsky
Born into a wealthy family with rich people cultural traditions, Kandinsky received an excellent education - his parents saw their heir as a brilliant lawyer. But at the age of 30, he felt that he had to look for himself in painting and went to Germany, famous for its art schools.
While studying composition and the features of painting and graphics, Kandinsky more than once encountered misunderstandings from teachers who found his color schemes too bright and the layout of the painting too free.
Mountain landscape with the church Railway The Last Judgment
Active creative activity and organizing principles have always made Kandinsky the center of attraction for everything intellectual, restless, and searching that was in the art world of that time. So, already in 1901, he founded the Phalanx art association in Munich and organized a school with it, where he himself taught. Over the course of four years, Kandinsky organized twelve exhibitions of painters who were members of the Phalanx. In 1909, he, together with Jawlensky, Kanoldt, Kubin, Münter and others, founded the “New Association of Artists, Munich” and took over the chairmanship. The credo of the society: “Each of the participants not only knows how to say, but also knows what to say.” Since 1900, Kandinsky has participated in exhibitions of the Moscow Association of Artists, and in 1910 and 1912 in exhibitions artistic association"Jack of Diamonds". He also published art-critical “Letters from Munich” in the magazines “World of Art” and “Apollo” (1902, 1909). In 1911, Kandinsky, together with his friend, artist Franz Marc, organized the Blue Rider group. According to the artist himself, “the emphasis was on identifying the associative properties of color, line and composition, and in this case such diverse sources as the romantic color theory of Goethe and Philipp Runge, Jugendstil and the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner were involved.”
“At no other time did Kandinsky’s painting develop as rapidly as in the Munich years,” wrote M.K. Lacoste.
- Sometimes it is not easy to understand why the founder of abstract painting initially chose subjects typical of Biedermeier - fans, crinolines, horsemen. Style it early works can not be called either conventional or mannered, but nothing in them yet foreshadowed a radical renewal of painting.
However, as we know, only a few artists are given the ability to simultaneously show originality in form and content. At first it was important for Kandinsky to test his own possibilities of expression. Although “Evening” (1904-1905) cannot be denied its originality, it is difficult to imagine that it was created by the same artist who, five or six years later, would produce the first abstract work in the history of art (1910). What a great creative force must have been at work in Kandinsky! What a rapid evolution from 1908 to 1914 - from landscape paintings, although daring in color and form, but still faithful to observations of nature, like “Houses in Murnau on the Obermarkt” (1908), to the chaotic study called “The Gorge” (1914) and the restless compositions in the series of panels “The Seasons” at the Guggenheim Museum (“Autumn”). It would be difficult to guess the hand of the same artist in the still quite objective “Crusaders” (1903) and in such an abstract work as “Composition VII”, 1913, despite their common dynamics. Here there is a constrained impulse, there there is a liberated movement.”
"The Blue Rider", written by him in 1903, reflects borderline state artist. The painting represents a transition from realism to a new direction in painting and, one might say, opens a cycle of abstract works by Kandinsky. The artist did not paint, but “thought” on canvas: his canvases are a reflection of thoughts. Bright, as is the case with all extraordinary personalities, and seemingly chaotic, as is typical for the work of geniuses.
Painting by Kandinsky recent years Bauhaus art is permeated with lightness and strange humor, which will reappear in his later Parisian works. These, for example, include the painting “Bizarre”, 1930, evoking cosmic-Egyptian associations and filled with fabulous symbolic images in the spirit of Paul Klee, an artist with whom Kandinsky was friends during these years. Around 1931, a large-scale National Socialist campaign against the Bauhaus unfolds, leading to its closure in 1932. Kandinsky and his wife emigrate to France, where they settle in a new house in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Between 1926 and 1933, Kandinsky painted 159 oil paintings and 300 watercolors. Many of them were unfortunately lost after the Nazis declared the paintings of Kandinsky and many other artists to be “degenerate.”
The Parisian artistic environment reacts with restraint to the appearance of Kandinsky. The reasons for this are its isolation from foreign colleagues and the lack of recognition of abstract painting as such. As a result, the artist lives and works in solitude, limiting his communication only to old friends. At this time, the last transformation of his pictorial system took place. Now Kandinsky does not use combinations of primary colors, but works with soft, refined, subtle color nuances. At the same time, it complements and complicates the repertoire of forms: new, biomorphic elements come to the fore, which feel at ease in the space of the picture, as if floating across the entire surface of the canvas. Kandinsky’s paintings of this period are far from the feeling of “cold romance”; life boils and seethes in them. The artist himself called this period of creativity “a truly picturesque fairy tale.” In the subsequent war years, due to a lack of materials, the formats of the paintings became smaller and smaller, to the point where the artist was forced to be content with working in gouache on small-sized cardboard. And again he faces rejection by the public and colleagues of his art. And again he develops and improves his theory base:
“Abstract art creates next to the “real” new world, seemingly having nothing in common with “reality.”
Inside, it obeys the general laws of the “cosmic world.” Thus, next to the “world of nature” a new “world of art” appears - a very real, concrete world. That's why I prefer the so-called " abstract art"call it concrete art." Kandinsky did not doubt his “ inner world", the world of images, where abstraction was not an end in itself, and the language of forms was “stillborn”; they arose from the will to content and vitality.
British scientists have finally found an explanation for why the paintings of the founder of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky, do not impress all viewers. Neurophysiologists are convinced: Kandinsky wrote his paintings with those in mind for whom contemplation also generates sound associations. Synaesthetes, that is, people who are able to “see sounds” and “hear paintings,” there are today, according to researchers, no more than 250 million people. However, scientists have found that in the first months of life we are all synesthetes.
“We are sure that Kandinsky appealed to auditory perception, although we do not know whether he himself was a synesthete,” Dr. Jamie Ward said at a recent conference of British neuroscientists.
According to him, only 1-2% of us can consider ourselves synesthetes, but every person subconsciously tends to connect music and painting and perceive them together, rather than separately. According to Gazeta.Ru, to test his theory, Dr. Ward conducted a series of experiments in which six synaesthetes were asked to describe their vision of music performed by the New London Orchestra.
Another control group consisted of six normal people. Animator Sam Moore created dynamic images for them associated with the music being played. These films - like Walt Disney's famous Fantasia - combined music and cartoon images. After the experiment with control groups, the films were shown to visitors at the Science Museum in London, asking them to select from among all the images those that best matched the music. The overwhelming majority chose exactly those images to which the synesthetes turned their favorable gaze.
Bibliography
Albums, catalogues, monographs, collections of articles
- Sarabyanov Dmitry, Avtonomova Natalia. Wassily Kandinsky. - M.: Galart, 1994. - 238 p. - 5000 copies. - ISBN 5-269-00880-7.
- Althaus Karin, Hoberg Annegret, Avtonomova Natalia. Kandinsky and The Blue Rider. - M.: Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Publishing House State Museum fine arts named after A. S. Pushkin, ScanRus, 2013. - 160 p. - ISBN 978-5-4350-0011-5.
Articles
- Reinhardt L. Abstractionism, in the book: Modernism. Analysis and criticism of the main directions, M., 1969, p. 101-11.
- Grohmann W. Wassily Kandinsky. Life and work, N.Y., 1958.
- Baedecker. Deutschland. Verlag Karl Baedeker. 2002. - ISBN 3-8297-1004-6
- Schulz,Paul Otto.Ostbauern.Köln:DuMont, 1998 - ISBN 3-7701-4159-8
- Azizyan I.A. Moscow V. V. Kandinsky // Architecture in the history of Russian culture. Vol. 2: Capital city. M.: URSS, 1998. - ISBN 5-88417-145-9 pp. 66-71.
- Azizyan I.A. The concept of interaction of arts and the genesis of dialogism of the 20th century (Vyacheslav Ivanov and Wassily Kandinsky) // Avant-garde of the 1910s - 1920s. Interaction of arts. - M., 1998.
- Rappaport A. Kandinsky in London // Rossica. - 2002.- Issue 7/8: Revelations in Color: Dionisy & Kandinsky. Or: Kandinsky in London // Idem.
- Valery Turchin. Kandinsky in Russia. M.: Artist and Book, 2005. - 448 p. - ISBN 5-9900349-1-1
- Azizyan I.A. The theoretical legacy of V. V. Kandinsky in the artistic consciousness of the 20th century // Questions of the theory of architecture: Architectural and theoretical thought of New and Contemporary times / Collection scientific works ed. I. A. Azizyan. - M.: KomKniga, 2006. P. 189-249.
- Kozhev, A. Concrete (objective) painting by Kandinsky (1936) // “Atheism” and other works. - M.: Praxis, 2007. - P. 258-294.
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An artist of new art, an abstractionist who survived wars and revolutions. The Bolsheviks called his painting “degenerate.” In his work “On the Spiritual in Art”, Kandinsky reveals the psychological effect of pure color on a person and finds a connection between painting and music. Kandinsky is a master of “compositions”, “improvisations” and “impressions”.
Wealthy, prosperous family with early years supported Wassily Kandinsky's aspirations for art. However, in the future he was supposed to become a lawyer. The young man brilliantly graduated from Moscow University, after which he taught.
The fate of Wassily Kandinsky again returned him to art, when in 1895 an exhibition of French impressionists took place. Wassily Kandinsky was amazed by Monet’s work “Haystacks”. Leaving the University, he went to Munich to study painting. At that time, Munich was considered the center European art, in 1892, a modernist association of artists was organized - Secession.
The Russian artist studied for two years with the Yugoslav painter Anton Ashbe, becoming more and more interested in creativity rather than technique. The first impressionist works were particularly distinguished color scheme, Kandinsky gave great importance not the form, the color of the picture. Later, when Kandinsky took lessons from the famous Franz Von Stuck (Secession artist), he had to leave his bright palette and paint in black and white, studying form. These requirements were set by the teacher, who considered Kandinsky a good student, but who did not have the ability to create bright colors.
Kandinsky spent four years in Munich, but no works from that time remain. It remains a mystery what their fate was, whether they were destroyed by the artist or lost.
Having completed his studies at the age of 35, Wassily Kandinsky created his own movement of abstract artists called “Phalanx”, which made him the leader of the Munich brotherhood of artists. In 1901, the first exhibition of the association took place in Berlin, at which the works of the Impressionists and the revelations of the German Jugendstil were presented. At this time, the artist met the young artist Gabriela Munter and divorced his wife. For 5 years he traveled with Gabriela throughout Europe, painting and participating in exhibitions.
In 1908, Kandinsky and Gabriela returned to Munich; it so happened that they settled near the studio of the artist Paul Klee. Ten years later they worked together at the Bauhaus, becoming like-minded people. Gabriela bought a house and they lived in it for 6 years. The house was located in Marnau, near the foot of the Bavarian Alps. This period became the most productive in the artist’s life. The artist increasingly moved from concrete images to abstraction.
In 1911, together with his friend the artist Franz Marc, Kandinsky organized the Blue Rider group. The artists were able to organize only two exhibitions.
In 1912, the first personal exhibition took place. The viewer did not accept Kandinsky's paintings, which plunged him into deep despondency.
Started World War and Kandinsky moved from Germany to Switzerland. Here he began work on the book “The Point and the Line.” By November 1914, he broke up with Gabriela and went to Moscow; the artist did not paint for almost two years.
In 1916, Kandinsky met Nina Andreevskaya, the daughter of a Russian general, and a year later he married her. Having received an inheritance after the death of his father, the artist immediately lost his means of subsistence; the Bolsheviks confiscated all his property. Finding himself below the poverty line, Kandinsky fell into despair. His wife's enthusiasm saved Kandinsky. He begins work at the People's Commissariat of Education, becoming the head of the cinema and theater section. Then he was invited to Moscow University to the position of professor, organizing at the same time the Institute artistic culture. Thanks to Kandinsky, about 22 art galleries were opened in Russia. But, unfortunately, all Kandinsky’s efforts to find himself in his country were not crowned with success, abstractionism was declared “decadent”, and Kandinsky was called a “minion of the bourgeoisie.” And in 1921, having received an offer for a teaching position at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Kandinsky left the country.
The fate of the Bauhaus was difficult. In 1924, for political reasons, the school came under attack and had to be moved to Dessau, where it existed until 1932. Under pressure from local Nazis, the school was moved to Berlin. In April 1833 it was finally closed. Kandinsky and his wife leave Germany for safety reasons; they settle in the suburbs of Paris.
Wassily Kandinsky heard a lot of criticism addressed to him; galleries did not take the artist’s works. But, despite everything, the artist worked until the end of his life, remaining devoted to creativity.
Famous works of Wassily Vasilyevich Kandinsky
The painting “Improvisation 21A” was painted by a Russian artist in 1911 and is located in State Gallery Lenbachhaus, in Munich. The painting was painted during the period when Kandinsky became an abstractionist. Essentially, this is the artist’s reaction to the world around him, based on impressions and intuition.
At first glance, it seems that the picture is completely abstracted from real objects, but if you look closely, images begin to emerge. For example, a mountain is visible in the center. Bright color spots are outlined with a black outline - characteristic Kandinsky's paintings throughout his subsequent work. Another specific image is a stylized human figure in an unnatural position.
The painting “In Gray” was made in 1919 and is located in National Museum contemporary art, at the Center. J. Pompidou, in Paris. It can be counted among the paintings of the “Russian period” (1915-21). This painting marked the end of Kandinsky's period of study of the interaction of forms. The artist conceived a “composition” consisting of images - mountains, figures of people, boats. Upon completion of the work, the painting turned into an abstraction with a softer color compared to previous works.
In the painting, strict geometric figures are replaced by biomorphic forms, typical of the artist’s painting in Paris years. The color sounds in muted gray, brown and blue shades. The composition gives way to chaos.
The painting “Vibration” was completed in 1925 and is located in the Tate Gallery, London. The painting depicts geometric figures, which the artist writes about in “Point and Line.”
Contact between sharp triangle and all around produces no less an effect than the finger of God extended to Adam in Michelangelo’s painting.
V. Kandinsky
The brightest object is a chessboard. The complex structure is achieved by the unity of shape and color. The picture itself is made in muted colors. Tension is conveyed through the juxtaposition of shapes and colors. Circles dominate as inexhaustible hidden possibilities (Kandinsky).
The painting “Up” was painted in 1929, from the collection of Peggy Guggenheim, in Venice. During the Bauhaus period, the artist mainly painted paintings consisting of geometric figures. “Up” is an image of a person made up of geometric shapes. The influence of Paul Klee's painting is visible here. The theory of “Points and lines on a plane” is traced. When Kandinsky painted backgrounds, he sought to break out of the tight framework into which he had driven himself at the Bauhaus. What he succeeded in later in Paris.
Masterpiece of Kandinsky V.V. – painting “Detail for Composition IV”
The painting was executed in 1910 and is located in the Tate Gallery, London. The second name is “Cossacks”. The artist himself said that he took the plot of this painting from the events of the 1905 revolution, when Cossacks galloped through the streets of Moscow. In front of the viewer are two fighting Cossacks, below them is a rainbow, forming a road leading to a palace on a blue hill. On the right are three more Cossacks. Two of them have spades. The elements of the picture are difficult to recognize, which forces the viewer to stare at the images for a long time, gradually becoming immersed in the plot. Abstraction involves abstraction from real forms and creative expression in geometric elements.
