artist details

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 - 1944)

Russian-born French Expressionist Painter

Russian born Wassily Kandinsky is considered as the inventor and theorist of abstract painting in the 20th century. In 1910 Wassily Kandisnky had seen an Islamic art exhibition in Munich - a highly decorative art style that does not allow to show images of human beings. The same year Kandinsky created his first abstract painting.
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian born French expressionist painter and art theorist. One of the most famous 20th-century artists, he is credited with painting the first modern abstract works.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow on the 16th of December (4th December on the Julian calender) c.1866, but spent his childhood in Odessa learning the piano and cello. Music becoming a strong influence in his work, later he wrote about the comparisons between music and painting. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose law and economics. Although quite successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—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 where he lived the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Kandinsky's creations of purely abstract work did not arrive suddenly, but rather were produced after long development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and deep spiritual desire inner necessity, which was a central aspect of his art.

Kandinsky drew inspiration from a variety of sources during his youth and life in Moscow. Later in his life, he would recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated by color as a child. The fascination with color continued as he grew, although he seems to have made no attempt to study art. In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic research group that travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colors that, upon entering them, he had the impression that he was moving into a painting.

The experience and his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background, was reflected in much his early work. A few years later, he first related the act of painting to creating music in the manner for which he would later become noted and wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, 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 enrol in art school in Munich. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet and was particularly taken with the famous impressionistic haystacks which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the objects themselves. Later he would write about this experience:

“That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognization was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor.”

He was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's Lohengrin (opera) which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.

Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H. P. Blavatsky (1831-91), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series of circles, triangles, and squares. Kandinsky's book Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) echoed this basic Theosophical tenet.