Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944

By Patrick Heath

Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), Composition 8, 1923, Oil on canvas, 140.3 x 200.7 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (4th December 1866 [O.S.]- 13th December 1944) was both a principal innovator of the abstract movement and an accomplished art theorist. His fascination with the perceptual phenomenon of synaesthesia coupled with his determination to portray the ‘inner life’ of the artist, resulted in a catalogue filled with a calculated, methodical use of colour and shape. Kandinsky’s working life was concerned primarily with the exploration of the nonfigurative and lyrical style; however, his contribution to the pedagogy of Bauhaus cemented his interest in a number of artistic disciplines.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, he was the only son of a multicultural bourgeois family. His father, Wasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, was a Siberian tea merchant and his mother, Lidia Ticheeva, the descendant of Mongolian aristocracy. Kandinsky’s parents would divorce when he was just five years old, so he subsequently moved to Odessa to live with his aunt. He would be enrolled at the Grekov Odessa Art school, at which he learned the piano and cello alongside poetry and drawing. Kandinsky reflected on his childhood in Odessa with great reverence, suggesting that it was in his youth that he cultivated a great passion for dissecting the meaning of colour. Kandinsky finished school as an amateur musical performer and painted; he accepted a place at the University of Moscow in 1886 where he would pursue economics and law. Until 1896, Kandinsky sought a career in academia, he was awarded a doctorate in 1893 and taught at Moscow for a number of years. He frequently travelled during his tenure as an academic, being subtly influenced by Russian folk-art and Rembrandt, whom he discovered during an excursion to St Petersburg in 1889. However, it was an encounter with Monet’s work in 1896 that was the pivotal moment in Kandinsky’s transition to art; after perceiving the impressionistic style of The Haystacks, he remarked that ‘Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour’.

In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts under Franz von Stuck.  Kandinsky emerged from the academy with a diploma in 1900 and, during the next few years, achieved some success as a professional artist exploring fin-de-siècle trends. Starting from a base in 19th-century realism, he was influenced by Impressionism, German Jugendstil, Neo-Impressionist Pointillism, and by the strong, unrealistic colour of central European Expressionism and French Fauvism. Perhaps the most important and epitomic work in this early period is The Blue Rider (1903), depicting a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. Kandinsky shows the rider more as a collection of colours than in any specific detail. This painting is not exceptional when compared with contemporary painters, but it demonstrates aspects of the form that Kandinsky would come to develop in the following years. Kandinsky’s commitment to the non-figurative became more apparent as the century advanced; his involvement with the Neue Künstlervereinigung München and later Der Blaue Reiter alongside Franz Marc was simultaneous with works such as Blue Mountain (1908) which show the evolution toward nonrepresentation; the schematic forms and the non-naturalistic colours combine to create a dream landscape.

As war broke out across Europe in 1914, Kandinsky began his return to Russia; he passed through Switzerland and the Balkans before arriving and settling in Moscow. It was in Moscow that Kandinsky would marry the young woman, Nina Andreevskaya and become a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the arts section of the People’s Commissariat for Public Instruction. The Soviet regime in its formative years showed great support for Kandinsky’s and other innovative artists; this pushed him entirely away from the lyrical paintings seen in Munich and saw Kandinsky, in works such as White Line (1920) and Blue Segment (1921), fully embrace deliberate, rational, and constructional abstractionism. During this period in Russia, Kandinsky painted little and instead devoted his time to the teaching of art and the reformation of the artistic outlook under the new regime in Moscow. Kandinsky extolled to his students a curriculum of colour analysis, spirituality, and expressionism; helping the government to create 22 new museums across Russia. However, as the decade wore on, the Soviets began to favour Social Realism over Kandinsky’s own work, so he decided to move with his wife to Germany in 1921 following the offer of Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus of Weimar.

In Weimar, Kandinsky thrived in his role as a teacher, he was able to transfer his skills learned teaching jurisprudence as a young academic to lecture on the elements of form, colour, murals. In 1923, he was part of the new Die Blaue Vier with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky, which lectured and exhibited in the United States in 1924. In 1925, following his return to Germany, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau due to pressure from right-wing politicians and during this time Kandinsky was granted a class in “free,” nonapplied painting. He created some of his most recognisable works in Dessau; the venerable two-metre-wide Yellow – red – blue (1925) is constructed of a yellow rectangle, an inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle; a smattering of sinuous black lines, arcs, monochromatic circles and scattered checkerboards. The harmonious collection of decisive forms and coloured masses are emblematic of Kandinsky’s work during this period, placing unprecedented emphasis on the relationship between shape and colour, elevating their absolute and relative positions on the canvas. The Bauhaus was disbanded by the Nazi party in 1933 leaving Kandinsky to relocate to a small apartment in Paris for his remaining years. In Paris, he reflected on the entirety of his artistic output, producing works such as Violet Dominant (1934), Dominant Curve (1936), Fifteen, Moderation (1940), and Tempered Élan (1944). In paintings from this final period, Kandinsky achieves a synthesis between the romantic organicism seen in Munich and the more rigid geometric shapes seen in Germany; but the common thread is the meticulous use of colour as the window into the ‘inner life’. The paintings in Paris accompany a collection of essays in concerning the failure of modern scientific positivism and the need to perceive what he termed “the symbolic character of physical substances.”. Kandinsky died of cerebrovascular disease in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on December 13, 1944

Bibliography

Christies. Wassily Kandinsky: The road to abstraction. (10 October 2017) https://www.christies.com/features/Wassily-Kandinsky-10-things-to-know-8600-1.aspx [Accessed November 29, 2020]

Lindsay, Kenneth C. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. (G.K. Hall & Co, 1982)

Lindsay, Kenneth and Peter Vergo. "Introduction". Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994)

McMullen, Roy Donald. Wassily Kandinsky: Encyclopædia Britannica. (December 12, 2019) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wassily-Kandinsky [Accessed November 29, 2020]