Modern Age
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
Russian Early Abstraction painter.
Wassily Kandinsky came to art late and theorized it more deeply than almost anyone. Born in Moscow, he was a successful law lecturer until, at thirty, two experiences turned him to painting: a Monet 'Haystack' he could not at first decipher, and a performance of Wagner. He moved to Munich, trained there, and by the years around 1910 was pushing painting toward pure abstraction, convinced that color and form could speak directly to the soul as music does — without needing to depict anything.
In 1911 he published 'On the Spiritual in Art', the founding manifesto of abstraction, and with Franz Marc launched Der Blaue Reiter, a Munich circle and almanac devoted to art as spiritual communication. His great pre-war 'Compositions' and 'Improvisations' dissolve riders, mountains, and apocalypse into surging fields of color barely tethered to their subjects. The First World War scattered the group — Marc was killed, Kandinsky returned to Russia.
After the war he taught at the Bauhaus, where his abstraction cooled and hardened into a precise vocabulary of points, lines, circles, and grids — the language of 'Composition VIII'. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and condemned his work as 'degenerate', he settled outside Paris, where his late paintings turned to floating biomorphic signs. He died there in 1944, having done as much as anyone to make non-representational art thinkable.
The words the record keeps using: spiritual, musical, expressive, resonant, visionary, orchestral.
At a glance
- Lived 1866–1944
- Origin Russian
- Worked in Moscow, Paris, Munich
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction, Der Blaue Reiter
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Color-form abstraction
Works in the archive
- Impression III (Concert), 1911 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich)
Painted days after Kandinsky attended a concert of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music in Munich in January 1911, this is a picture of listening. A great slab of yellow — the sound of the hall — pours from a black wedge… - Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)
The 'Improvisations' were, in Kandinsky's own scheme, largely unconscious expressions of inner feeling. In No. 28 apocalyptic motifs he used repeatedly — a boat and waves, a cannon, embracing figures, towers — are… - Composition VII, 1913 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
The 'Compositions' were Kandinsky's most deliberate and ambitious works, built up through dozens of studies. No. VII, made over just a few days in 1913 after long preparation, is often called the summit of his pre-war… - Composition VIII, 1923 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)
Painted at the Bauhaus, this is the cool, constructed counterpart to the pre-war storm. The apocalyptic surge is gone; in its place a precise, floating vocabulary of circles, triangles, grids, and ruled lines is…
What was said
Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
In his memoir Kandinsky recalled returning to his studio at dusk and being stopped by an indescribably beautiful, glowing picture of pure form and color — only to realize it was one of his own paintings standing on its side; the shock convinced him that recognizable objects were harming his work.
Kandinsky argued that a work of art arises from an 'inner necessity' of the artist's soul, and that form and color are justified not by resemblance to the world but by this inner spiritual need.
Lineage
Learned from Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Vrubel, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marianne von Werefkin, Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse
What would Wassily make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Wassily Kandinsky", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Wassily · Keep a life moment the way Wassily would · Pictures made after Wassily