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Wassily Kandinsky (Russian:
Василий
Кандинс&
#1082;ий, first name sometimes spelled
as "Vasily," "Vassily" or "Vasilii") (December 4,
1866 – December 13, 1944) was a Russian-born
painter and art theorist. One of the most
important 20th-century artists, alongside Picasso
and Matisse, he is credited with painting the
first abstract art|abstract works in the history
of modern art.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent his
childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University
of Moscow and chose law and economics. Although
quite successful in his profession, he started
painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and
anatomy) at the age of 30. 


In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied at the
Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to
Moscow in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. Being
in conflict with official theories on art, he
returned to Germany in 1921. There he was a
teacher at the Bauhaus from 1922 until it was
closed by the Nazis in 1933. At that time he moved
to France.  He lived the rest of his life there,
becoming a French citizen in 1939.  He died at
Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.




== Artistic periods == 



The creation by Kandinsky of purely abstract work
did not arrive as an abrupt change, but rather as
the fruit of a long development and maturation of
intense theoretical thought based on his personal
experience of painting. He called this devotion to
inner beauty, fervor of the spirit and deep
spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a
central aspect of his art.

Artistic scholar Hajo Duechting has divided
Kandinsky's artistic development into six periods:
* Beginnings (Moscow 1866–1896)
* Metamorphosis (Munich 1896–1911)
* Breakthrough to the Abstract (Der Blaue
Reiter|The Blue Rider 1911–1914)
* Russian Intermezzo (1914–1921)
* Point and Line to Plane (Bauhaus|The Bauhaus
1922–1933)
* Biomorphic Abstraction (Paris 1934–1944)

Kandinsky biographer Messer divides his art into
three periods:
* Early Period: approximately 1900 to 1914
* Middle Period: from the early 1920s until the
early 1930s
* Late Period: from the 1930s until 1944. 

=== Youth and inspirations (1866-1896) === 

Kandinsky's youth and life in Moscow brought
inspiration from a variety of sources. As a child
he would later recall being fascinated and
unusually stimulated with color. This is probably
due to his synaesthesia which allowed him to quite
literally hear as well as see color. The
fascination with color continued as he grew up in
Moscow, although he seems to have made no attempt
to study art. In 1889 he was part of an
ethnographic group that traveled to the Vologda
region north of Moscow. He tells in Looks on the
past that he had the impression to move into a
painting when he entered in the houses or the
churches decorated with the most shimming colors.
His study of the folk art in the region, in
particular the use of bright colors on a dark
background was reflected in his early work.
Kandinsky would write a few years later that
'Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers,
the soul is the piano with the strings'.

It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky
gave up a promising career teaching law and
economics to enroll in art school in Munich. Also
in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an
exhibit of Monet and was particularly taken with a
depiction of a haystack which, to him, had a
powerful sense of color almost independent of the
object itself.

=== Artistic metamorphosis (1896-1911) ===

Kandinsky's time at art school was helped by the
fact that he was older and more settled than the
other students and he began to emerge as a true
art theorist in addition to being a painter.
Unfortunately very little exists of his work from
this period, though presumably it was extensive.
This changes at the  beginning of the 20th Century
and much remains of the many landscapes and towns
that he painted, using broad swathes of color but
recognizable forms. For the most part, however,
Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human
figures. An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904)
where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and
no doubt fanciful) view of peasants and nobles
before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907)
depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with
tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian
town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the
horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the
town, and the reflections in the river glisten
with spots of color and brightness. 

Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's
paintings from the decade of the 1900s was The
Blue Rider (1903) which shows a small cloaked
figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky
meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium view, and
the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the
foreground are more amorphous blue shadows,
presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in
the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is
prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse
has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have
known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure,
a child perhaps, is being held by the rider though
this could just as easily be another shadow from a
solitary rider. Kandinsky shows the rider more as
a series of colors than of specific details. In
and of itself The Blue Rider is not exceptional in
that regard when compared to contemporary
painters, but it does show the direction that
Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of
time travelling across Europe, until he came to
live in the small Bavarian town of Murnau am
Staffelsee|Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908 –
1909) painted at this time shows more of  his
trend towards pure abstraction. A mountain of blue
is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow, and one
red. A procession of some sort with three riders
and several others crosses at the bottom. The
face, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each
of a single color, and neither they or the walking
figures display any real detail. The broad use of
color in The Blue Mountain, illustrate Kandinsky's
move towards art in which the color itself is
presented independently of form.



=== The Blue Rider (1911-1914) ===

:See also Der Blaue Reiter 

The paintings of this period are composed of large
and very expressive colored masses evaluate
independently from forms and lines which serve no
longer to delimitate them or to bring them out but
which combine between them, are superimposed and
overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an
extraordinary force.

The influence of music has been very important on
the birth of abstract art, as it is abstract by
nature and as it doesn’t try to represent vainly
the exterior world but simply to express in an
immediate way the inner feelings of the human
soul. Kandinsky used sometimes musical terms to
designate his works : he called many of his most
spontaneous paintings "improvisations", while he
entitled "compositions" some others much more
elaborated and worked at length, a term which
resonated in him like a prayer.

In addition to painting Kandinsky developed his
voice as an art theorist. He helped to found the
Munich
New Artists' Association in and became its
president in 1909. The group was unable to
integrate the more radical approach of those like
Kandinsky with more conventional ideas of art and
the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then
moved to form a new group The Blue Rider (Der
Blaue Reiter) with like minded artists such as
Franz Marc. The group released an almanac, also
called The Blue Rider and held two exhibits. More
of each were planned, but the outbreak of World
War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky
home to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

Kandinsky's writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and
the treatise On the Spiritual In Art, which was
released at almost the same time, served as both a
defense and promotion of abstract art, as well as
an appraisal that all forms of art were equally
capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He
believed that color could be used in a painting as
something autonomous and apart from a visual
description of an object or other form.

=== Return to Russia (1914-1921) ===

During the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky deals
with the cultural development politic of Russia,
he collaborates in the domains of art pedagogy and
museum reforms. He devoted his time to artistic
teaching with a program based on forms and colors
analysis, as well as the organization of the
artistic culture Institute at Moscow. He made
little painting during this period. He meets in
1916 Nina Andreievskaia who will became his wife
the next year. Kandinsky received in 1921 the
mission to go in Germany at the Bauhaus of Weimar,
on the invitation of its founder, the architect
Walter Gropius. The next year, the Soviets have
officially forbidden all form of abstract art
because judged as harmful for socialist ideals.

=== The Bauhaus (1922-1933) ===

The Bauhaus was an architecture and innovative art
school which had as objective to merge plastic
arts with applied arts, and whose teaching was
built on the theoretical and practical application
of the plastic arts synthesis. Kandinsky taught
the basic design class for beginners and courses
on advanced theory and conducted painting classes
and workshop, where he completed his colors theory
with new elements of form psychology. The
development of his works on forms study,
particularly on point and different forms of
lines, will lead to the publication of its second
major theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in
1926.

Geometrical elements have taken an increasing
importance in his teaching as well as in his
painting, particularly circle, half-circle, the
angle, straight lines and curves. This period has
been for him a period of intense production. The
freedom of which testifies each of his work, by
the treatment of planes rich in colors and in
magnificent gradations as in the painting Yellow
– red – blue (1925), Kandinsky shows his
distance from constructivism and suprematism
movements  whose influence was increasing at this
time.

The main forms which constitute this large
painting of two meters of width entitled Yellow
– red – blue are a yellow vertical rectangle,
a slightly inclined red cross and a large dark
blue circle, while a multitude of black straight
or sinuous lines and of arcs of circles, as well
as some monochromatic circles and some colored
checkerboards contribute to its delicate
complexity. This simple visual identification of
forms and of the main colored masses present on
the canvas only correspond to a first approach of
the inner reality of the work whose right
appreciation necessitates a much deeper
observation, not only of forms and colors involved
in the painting, but also of their relation, their
absolute position and their relative disposition
on the canvas, of their whole and reciprocal
harmony.

In front of the hostility of the right political
parties, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in
Dessau from 1925. Following a fierce slander
campaign from the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been
close at Dessau in 1932. The school pursued its
activities in Berlin until its dissolution in July
1933. Kandinsky leaves then Germany and settles in
Paris.



=== The great synthesis (1934-1944) ===

In Paris, he is quite isolated, as abstract
painting, particularly geometric, is not
recognized : the artistic tendency into the
fashion were impressionism and cubism. He lives
and realizes his work in a small apartment where a
studio has been fit up in the living room.
Biomorphic forms with supple and non geometric
outlines appear in his paintings, forms which
evoke externally microscopic organisms but which
always express the artist inner life. He uses
original colors compositions which evoke the
Slavonic popular art and which look like precious
watermark works. He uses also sand mixed to the
colors to give a granular texture to his painting.

This period corresponds in fact to a vast
synthesis of his previous work, of which he uses
the all the elements, even enriching them. He
paints in 1936 and 1939 the two last major
compositions, these canvas particularly elaborated
and slowly ripped that he had stopped to produce
since many years. Composition IX is a painting
with highly contrasted powerful diagonals and
whose central form evokes a human embryo in the
womb of his mother. The small squares of colors
and the colored bands seem to stand out against
the black background of Composition X as stars
fragments or filaments, while enigmatic
hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover the large
maroon mass which seems to float in the upper left
corner of the canvas.

In Kandinsky’s works, some characteristics are
really obvious while certain sonorities are more
discrete and like veiled, that’s to say they
reveal only progressively to those who make the
effort to deepen their connection with the work
and to refine their sight. We must not content
with a first and very superficial impression or a
coarse identification of the forms that the artist
has used and which he has subtly harmonized and
put in pitch in order to enter efficiently in
resonance with the soul of the observer.

===Assessment===

From the death of Wassily Kandinsky and during
thirty years, Nina Kandinsky has never stopped to
diffuse the message and to divulge the work of her
husband. All the works in her possession have been
legated to the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris,
where we can see the largest collection of his
paintings.

Along with Piet Mondriaan and Kazimir Malevich,
Kandinsky is considered a pioneer in abstract art,
undoubtedly the most famous. He was a
synaesthesia|synaesthete who could, quite
literally, hear colors. This effect of color was a
major influence on his art, and he even named some
of his paintings "improvisations" and
"compositions" as if they were works of music and
not painting. Works by Kandinsky have been
recently sold for as much as US$25 million.

== Theoretical writings on Art ==

The analysis made by Kandinsky on forms and on
colors don’t result from simple arbitrary ideas
associations, but from the inner experience of the
painter who has passed years creating abstract
paintings of an incredible sensorial richness,
working on forms and with colors, observing for a
long time and tirelessly his own paintings and
those of other artists, noting simply their
subjective and pathetic effect on the very high
sensibility to colors of his artist and poet soul.

So it is a purely subjective form of experience
that everyone can do and repeat taking the time to
look at his paintings and letting acting the forms
and the colors on his own living sensibility.
These are not scientific and objective
observations, but inner observations radically
subjective and purely phenomenological which is a
matter of what the French philosopher Michel Henry
calls the absolute subjectivity or the absolute
phenomenological life.

=== On the Spiritual In Art ===

Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of the
humanity to a large Triangle similar to a pyramid
and that the artist has the task and the mission
of leading to the top by the exercise of his
talent. The point of the Triangle is constituted
only by some individuals who bring the sublime
bread to men. A spiritual Triangle which moves
forward and rises slowly, even if it sometimes
remains immobile. During decadence periods, souls
fall to the bottom of the Triangle and men only
search for the external success and ignore purely
spiritual forces.

When we look at colors on the painter palette, a
double effect happens : a purely physical effect
on the eye charmed by the beauty of colors
firstly, which provokes a joy impression as when
we eat a delicacy. But this effect can be much
deeper and causing an emotion and a vibration of
the soul, or an inner resonance which is a purely
spiritual effect by which the color touches the
soul. 

The inner necessity is for Kandinsky the principle
of the art and the foundation of forms and colors
harmony. He defines it as the principle of the
efficient contact entry of the form with the human
soul. Every form is the delimitation of a surface
by an other one, it possesses an inner content
which is the effect it produces on the one who
looks at it attentively. This inner necessity is
the right of the artist to an unlimited freedom,
but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not
founded on such a necessity. The art piece is born
from the inner necessity of the artist in a
mysterious, enigmatic and mystic way, and then it
acquires an autonomous life, it becomes an
independent subject animated by a spiritual
breath.

The first obvious properties we can see when we
look at isolated color and let it acting alone,
that’s on one side the warmth or the coldness on
the colored tone, and on the other side the
clarity or the obscurity of the tone.

The warmth is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a
tendency to blue. The yellow and the blue form the
first big contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow
possesses an eccentric movement and the blue a
concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to get
closer to us, while a blue surface seems to move
away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial
color whose violence can be painful and
aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial
color which evokes a deep calm. The mixing of blue
with yellow gives the total immobility and the
calm, the green.

The clarity is a tendency to the white and the
obscurity a tendency to the black. The white and
the black form the second big contrast, which is
static. The white acts like a deep and absolute
silence full of possibilities. The black is a
nothingness without possibility, it is an eternal
silence without hope, it corresponds to death.
That’s why any other color resonates so strongly
on its neighborhood. The mixing of white with
black leads to gray, which possesses none active
force and whose affective tonality is near that of
green. The gray corresponds to the immobility
without hope, it tends to despair when it becomes
dark and regains little hope when it lightens.

The red is a warmth color very living, lively and
agitated, it possesses an immense force, it is a
movement in oneself. Mixed with black, it leads to
brown which is an hard color. Mixed with yellow,
it gains in warmth and gives the orange which
possesses an irradiation movement on the surround.
Mixed with blue, it moves away from man to give
the purple, which is cooled red. The red and the
green form the third big contrast, the orange and
the purple the fourth one.

=== Point and Line to Plane ===

Kandinsky analyses in this writing the geometrical
elements which compose every 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
basic plane or BP. He doesn’t analyze them on an
objective and exterior point of view, but on the
point of view of their inner effect on the living
subjectivity of the observer who looks them and
let them acting on his sensibility.

The point is in the practice a small stain of
color put by the artist on the canvas. So the
point used by the painter is not a geometric
point, it is not a mathematical  abstraction, it
possesses a certain extension, a form and a color.
This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle,
like a star or even more complex. The point is the
most concise form, but according to its placement
on the basic plane it will take a different
tonality. It can be alone and isolated or on the
opposite 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 applied in a
given direction, the force applied on the pencil
or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist.
The produced linear forms can be of several types
: a straight line which results from an unique
force applied in a single direction, an angular
line which results from the alternation of two
forces with a different direction, or a curved or
wave-like line produced by the effect of two
forces acting simultaneously. A plane can be
obtained by condensation, from a line 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 flatness, it possesses a dark and cold
affective tonality similar with black or blue,
while the vertical line corresponds to height
which offers no support, it possesses on the
opposite a luminous and warm tonality close from
white and yellow. A diagonal possesses by
consequence a more or less warm or cold tonality
according to its inclination according to the
horizontal and to the vertical.

A force which deploys itself without obstacle as
the one which produces a straight line corresponds
to lyricism, while several forces which confront
or annoy each other form a drama. The angle formed
by the angular line possesses as well an inner
sonority which is warm and close to yellow for an
acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue
for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to red
for a right angle (square).

The basic plane is in general rectangular or
square, thus it is composed of horizontals and
verticals lines which delimitate it and define it
as an autonomous being which will serve as support
to the painting communicating it its affective
tonality. This tonality is determined by the
relative importance of theses horizontals and
verticals lines, the horizontals giving a calm and
cold tonality to the basic plane, while the
verticals give it a calm and warm tonality. The
artist possesses the intuition of this inner
effect of the canvas format and dimensions, which
he chooses according to the tonality he wants to
give to his work. Kandinsky even considers the
basic plane as a living being that the artist
"fertilizes" and of which he feels the
"breathing".

Every part of the basic plane possesses an proper
affective coloration which will influence on the
tonality of the pictorial elements that will be
drawn on it, which contributes to the richness of
the composition which results from their
juxtaposition on the canvas. The above of the
basic plane corresponds to the looseness and to
lightness, while the below evokes the condensation
and heaviness. This is the work of the painter to
listen to know these effects in order to produce
paintings which are not just the effect of a
random process, but the fruit of an authentic work
and the result of an effort toward the inner
beauty.

This book contains many photographic examples and
drawing from Kandinsky’s works which offer the
demonstration of his theoretical observations, and
which allow the reader to reproduce in him the
inner obviousness provided that he takes the time
to look at those pictures with care, that he let
them acting on his own sensibility and that he let
vibrating the sensible and spiritual strings of
his soul.

== Quotes from Kandinsky ==

* "But, as well as the body, the spirit fortifies
itself and develops itself by the exercise. As a
neglected body which becomes weak and finally
impotent, the spirit becomes weaker. The innate
feeling of the artist is like the talent of the
Gospel which must not be buried. The artist which
lets its gifts unemployed is the lazy servant."
(On the Spiritual In Art)

* "Painting is an art, and the art in its whole is
not a vain objets creation which get lost in the
void, but a power which has a goal and must serve
to the evolution and to the refinement of the
human soul, to the moving of the Triangle. It is
the language which speaks to the soul, in its
proper form, of things which are the daily bread
of the soul and which it can receive only under
this form." (On the Spiritual In Art)

* "Is beautiful what proceeds from an inner
necessity of the soul. Is beautiful what is
inwardly beautiful." (On the Spiritual In Art)

* "Every phenomenon can be experienced in two
ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are
bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of
its nature and characteristics : Externally – or
– inwardly." (Point and line to plane)

* "The geometric point is an invisible thing.
Therefore, it must be defined as an incorporeal
thing. Considered in terms of substance, it equals
zero. … Thus we look upon the geometric point as
the ultimate and most singular union of silence
and speech. The geometric point has, therefore,
been given its material form, in the first
instance, in writing. It belongs to language and
signifies silence." (Point and line to plane)

* "The geometric line is an invisible thing. It is
the track made by the moving point; that is, its
product. It is created by movement –
specifically through the destruction of the
intense self-contained repose of the point. Here,
the leap out of the static to the dynamic occurs.
… The forces coming from without which transform
the point into a line, can be very diverse. The
variation in lines depends upon the number of
these forces and upon their combinations." (Point
and line to plane)

* "In this painting, I was in fact in quest for a
certain hour, which was and which remains always
the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The
sun is already low and has reached its highest
force, which it has searched all the day, to which
it has aspired all the day. … The sun dissolves
all Moscow in a spot which, as a frenzied tuba,
makes entered into vibration all the inner being,
the whole soul. … Rendering this hour seemed the
biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for
an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny
day. They brought me a joy which shattered me
until the bottom of the soul, and which reached
until ecstasy." (Looks on the past)

* "The world is full of resonances. It constitutes
a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action.
The dead matter is a living spirit." (article
entitled On the question of the form)

== Quotations on Kandinsky ==

* "Kandinsky has not only produced a work whose
sensorial magnificence and invention richness
eclipses those of its most remarkable
contemporaries ; he has given moreover an explicit
theory of abstract painting, exposing its
principles with the highest precision and the
highest clarity. In this way the painted work is
coupled with an ensemble of texts that enlighten
it and that make at the same time of Kandinsky one
of the major theorists of the art." (Michel Henry,
Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky)

* "Kandinsky has been fascinated by the expression
power of linear forms. The pathos of a force
entering in action and whose victorious effort is
annoyed by no obstacle, that’s lyricism.
That’s because the straight line proceeds from
the action of a unique force with no opposition
that its domain is lyricism. When on the opposite
two forces are in presence and enter in conflict,
as this is the case with the curve or with the
angular line, we are in the drama." (Michel Henry,
Seeing the invisible, on Kandinsky)

* "Kandinsky calls abstract the content that
painting must express, that’s to say this
invisible life that we are. In such a way that the
Kandinskian equation, to which we have alluded to,
can be written in reality as follows : Interior =
interiority = invisible = life = pathos =
abstract." (Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible, on
Kandinsky) 

Commons|Wassily Kandinsky

== See also ==
*Russian avant garde

== References ==
*Duechting, Hajo and O'Neill. The Avant-Garde in
Russia.
*Thomas M. Messer. Vasily Kandinsky. Publ. Harry N
Abrams Inc. 1997. (Illustrated). Dimensions:12.5"H
x 9.5"W x 0.75"D; 2.55 lbs. ISBN 0-81091-228-7.
*Wassily Kandinsky, M. T. Sadler (Translator)
Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover Publ.
(Paperback). 80 pp. ISBN 0-48623-411-8. or:
Lightning Source Inc Publ. (Paperback). ISBN
1-41911-377-1 
*John E Bowlt, Rose-Carol Washton Long. The Life
of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian art : a study of
"On the spiritual in art" by Wassily Kandinsky.
Pub l. Newtonville, Mass. USA. 1980. ISBN
0-89250-131-6  ISBN 0-89250-132-4

== External links ==
* gutenberg author|name=Wassily
Kandinsky|id=Wassily_Kandinsky
* License to practice Kandinsky`s sound or
"form-follows-function":
http://www.transordinator.de/make%20material/mater
ial.html Materialize it
*http://www.abcgallery.com/K/kandinsky/kandinsky.h
tml Wassily Kandinsky at Olga's Gallery