Kandinsky's Abstractions example essay topic

Case Study 5 By Ashley Blacker The Evaluation of Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian painter, whose exploration of the possibilities of abstraction makes him one of the most important innovators in modern art. Both as an artist and as a theorist he played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art. Born in Moscow, December 4, 1866, Wassily Kandinsky spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be overstated, down to the names of his paintings Improvisations, Impressions, and Compositions. Kandinsky studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, from 1896 to 1900.

His early paintings were executed in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after a trip to Paris during which he was highly impressed by the works of the Faves and post impressionists, his paintings became more highly coloured and loosely organised. Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to objects of the physical world and derived their inspiration and titles from music. In 1911, along with Franz Marc and other German expressionists, Kandinsky formed Der Blue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group (so called for Kandinsky's love of blue and Marc's love of horses). He produced both abstract and figurative works during this period, all of which were characterised by brilliant colours and complex patterns. By this time he was already "abstracting' from the image, using it as a creative springboard for his pioneering art.

Seeing a painting of his own, lying on its side on the easel one evening, he had been struck by its beauty, a beauty beyond what he saw when he set it upright. It was the liberated colour, the formal independence that so entranced him. He was a brilliant and persuasive man. Then, when already in his thirties, he decided to go to Munich in 1897 to study art.

Kandinsky's influence on the course of 20th - century art was further increased by his activities as a theorist and teacher. In 1912 he published 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art', the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, which spread his ideas through Europe. He also taught at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts from 1918 to 1921 and at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, from 1922 to 1933. After World War I (1914-1918), Kandinsky's abstractions became increasingly geometric in form, as he abandoned his earlier fluid style in favour of sharply etched outlines and clear patterns. Composition V No. 260, for instance, is composed solely of lines, circles, arcs, and other simple geometric forms.

In very late works such as Circle and Square, he refines this style into a more elegant, complex mode that resulted in beautifully balanced, jewel-like pictures. It was Kandinsky who found the "interior necessity', which alone could inspire true art, and was forcing him to leave behind the representational images. Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of painting - "I applied streaks and blobs of colour onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could... ". Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries.

An active participant in several of the most influential and controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee, Lionel Feininger (1871-1956), and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the United States through numerous exhibitions and his work was introduced to Solomon Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters. Wassily Kandinsky was one of the most original and influential artists of the twentieth - century. His "inner necessity" to express his emotional perceptions led to the development of an abstract style of painting that was based on the non - representational properties of colour and form.

Kandinsky's compositions were the culmination of his efforts to create a "pure painting" that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition. Kandinsky viewed the compositions as major statements of his artistic ideas. They share several characteristics that express this monumentality: the impressively large format, the conscious, deliberate planning of the composition, and the transcendence of representation by increasingly abstract imagery. Just as symphonies define milestones in the career of a composer, Kandinsky's compositions represented the culmination of his artistic vision at a given moment in his career. Kandinsky continued painting almost until his death in June, 1944. His unrelenting quest for new forms, which carried him to the very extremes of geometric abstraction, has provided us with an unparalleled collection of abstract art.

Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul". The concept that colour and musical harmony are linked has a long history. Kandinsky used colour in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound.

He even claimed that when he saw colour he heard music! He was one of the most influential artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of non - representational or "pure" abstraction, Kandinsky can be considered an artist who paved the way for abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II (1939-1945). Kandinsky died in Neu illy - sur - Seine, a suburb of Paris, on December 13, 1944.

My paintings explore the many ways you can set up your drum kit through a variety of geometrical proportions involving the utilisation of the circle and square of the New Jerusalem and the unicursal hexagram to generate a pattern of movement in space relating to Fuller's vector equilibrium model. Kandinsky's style and theme of relating music to painting have heavily influenced my artworks. I paint as if I am composing a piece of music, which is not dissimilar from what Kandinsky aimed to do. This style of painting seems to let you 'pour emotion' into your artwork and make it a more meaningful piece.