Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky’s creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. One of his great-grandmothers a Mongolian princess, and his father a native of Kyakhta, a Siberian town near the Chinese border; the boy thus grew up with a cultural heritage that was partly European and partly Asian. His family was genteel, well-to-do, and fond of travel; while still a child, he became familiar with Venice, Rome, Florence, the Caucasus, and the Crimean Peninsula.

Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources while in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, including law and economics. Later in life, he would recall being fascinated and stimulated by colour as a child. His fascination with colour symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1886 he began to study law and economics at the University of Moscow, but he continued to have unusual feelings about colour as he contemplated the city’s vivid architecture and its collections of icons; in the latter, he once said, could be found the roots of his own art. In 1889, he was part of an ethnographic research group which travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. He returned with a lasting interest in the nonrealistic styles of Russian folk painting. During that same year he discovered the Rembrandts in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, and he furthered his visual education with a trip to Paris. He pursued his academic career and in 1893 was granted the degree equivalent of a doctorate.

In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting. This experience, and his study of the region’s folk art (particularly the use of bright colours on a dark background), was reflected in much of his early work.

In 1896, at the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy where his teachers would eventually include Franz von Stuck. He was not immediately granted admission, and began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet. He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of Haystacks; this, to him, had a powerful sense of colour 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 recognise it. This non-recognition 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 splendour.”
-Wassily Kandinsky

Starting from a base in 19th-century realism, he was influenced by Impressionism, by the whiplash lines and decorative effects of Art Nouveau (called Jugendstil in Germany), by the dot technique of Neo-Impressionism (or Pointillism), and by the strong, unrealistic colour of central European Expressionism and French Fauvism. He exhibited with the vanguard groups and in the big nonacademic shows that had sprung up all over Europe—with the Munich Phalanx group (of which he became president in 1902), with the Berlin Sezession group, in the Paris Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants, and with the Dresden group that called itself Die Brücke (“The Bridge”).

In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky invited Gabriele Münter to join him at his summer painting classes just south of Munich in the Alps. She accepted, and their relationship became more personal than professional. Art school, usually considered difficult, was easy for Kandinsky. It was during this time that he began to emerge as an art theorist as well as a painter. The number of his existing paintings increased at the beginning of the 20th century; much remains of the landscapes and towns he painted, using broad swaths of colour and recognisable forms.

Perhaps the most important of his paintings from the first 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 medium blue, which casts a darker-blue shadow. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, 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). In The Blue Rider, Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colours than in specific detail. This painting is not exceptional in that regard when compared with contemporary painters, but it shows the direction Kandinsky would take only a few years later.

From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow), in 1908 he bought a copy of Thought-Forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater. In 1909 he joined the Theosophical Society and acquired a house in the small town of Murnau, in southern Bavaria. Working part of the time in Murnau and part of the time in Munich, he began the process that led to the emergence of his first strikingly personal style and finally to the historic breakthrough into purely abstract painting. Gradually, the many influences he had undergone coalesced. His impulse to eliminate subject matter altogether was not, it should be noted, due merely or even primarily to strictly aesthetic considerations. No one could have been less of an aesthete, less of an “art for art’s sake” addict, than Kandinsky. The Blue Mountain (1908–1909) was painted at this time, demonstrating his trend toward abstraction, the forms are schematic, the colours nonnaturalistic, and the general effect that of a dream landscape.

In Landscape with Tower (1909) similar tendencies are evident, together with the beginning of what might be called an explosion in the composition. By 1910 Improvisation XIV is already, as its somewhat musical title suggests, practically abstract; with the 1911 Encircled, there has definitely developed a kind of painting that, though not just decoration, has no discernible point of departure in the depiction of recognizable objects. After that come such major works as With the Black Arch (1912), Autumn II (1912), and Black Lines (1913); in such pictures, done in a slashing, splashing, dramatic style that anticipates the New York Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s, most art historians see the peak of the artist’s achievement.

In addition to painting, Kandinsky was an art theorist; his influence on the history of Western art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his paintings. He helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists’ Association), becoming its president in 1909. However, the group could not integrate the radical approach of Kandinsky (and others) with conventional artistic concepts and the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then formed a new group, the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter. The group released an almanac (The Blue Rider Almanac) and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Kandinsky broke off his relationship with Gabriele Münter and returned to Russia by way of Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans.

An early marriage to a cousin had been dissolved in 1910 after a long period of separation, and in 1917 he married a Moscow woman, Nina Andreevskaya, whom he had met the previous year. Although he was past 50 and his bride was many years younger, the marriage turned out to be extremely successful, and he settled down in Moscow with the intention of reintegrating himself into Russian life. His intention was encouraged by the new Soviet government, which at first showed itself eager to win the favour and services of avant-garde artists. In 1918 he became a professor at the Moscow Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the arts section of the People’s Commissariat for Public Instruction.

From 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky was involved in the cultural politics of Russia and collaborated in art education and museum reform. He painted little during this period, but devoted his time to artistic teaching, with a program based on form and colour analysis; he also helped organize the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow of which he was the first director. His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected by the radical members of the Institute as too individualistic and bourgeois. In 1921, Kandinsky was invited to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar by its founder, architect Walter Gropius.

By this time Kandinsky had an international reputation as a painter. He had always, however, been interested in teaching, first as a lecturer in law and economics just after getting his university degree, then as the master of a painting school he had organized in Munich, and more recently as a professor at the University of Moscow. He seems not to have hesitated, therefore, when early in 1922 he was offered a teaching post at Weimar in the already famous Bauhaus school of architecture and applied art.

Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and the course on advanced theory at the Bauhaus; he also conducted painting classes and a workshop in which he augmented his colour theory with new elements of form psychology. The development of his works on forms study, particularly on points and line forms, led to the publication of his second theoretical book (Point and Line to Plane) in 1926. The two-metre-wide (6 ft 7 in) Yellow – red – blue (1925) of several main forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, an inclined red cross and a large dark blue circle; a multitude of straight (or sinuous) black lines, circular arcs, monochromatic circles and scattered, coloured checker-boards contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of forms and the main coloured masses present on the canvas is only a first approach to the inner reality of the work, whose appreciation necessitates deeper observation—not only of forms and colours involved in the painting but their relationship, their absolute and relative positions on the canvas and their harmony.

In spite of the somewhat routine nature of his work, however, he appears to have found life at the Bauhaus rewarding and pleasant. The climate was one of research and craftsmanship combined with a certain amount of aesthetic puritanism; it was classical, to use the term rather loosely, by comparison with the warm romanticism of his pre-1914 days in Munich. Kandinsky was one of Die Blaue Vier (Blue Four), formed in 1923 with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky, which lectured and exhibited in the United States in 1924. Due to right-wing hostility, the Bauhaus left Weimar and settled in Dessau in 1925. Following a Nazi smear campaign the Bauhaus left Dessau in 1932 for Berlin, until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then left Germany, settling in Paris.

Living in an apartment in Paris, Kandinsky created his work in a living-room studio. Biomorphic forms with supple, non-geometric outlines appear in his paintings—forms which suggest microscopic organisms but express the artist’s inner life. Kandinsky used original colour compositions, evoking Slavic popular art. He also occasionally mixed sand with paint to give a granular, rustic texture to his paintings.

This period corresponds to a synthesis of Kandinsky’s previous work in which he used all elements, enriching them. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his final two major compositions, the type of elaborate canvases he had not produced for many years. Composition IX has highly contrasted, powerful diagonals whose central form gives the impression of an embryo in the womb. Small squares of colours and coloured bands stand out against the black background of Composition X as star fragments (or filaments), while enigmatic hieroglyphs with pastel tones cover a large maroon mass which seems to float in the upper-left corner of the canvas. In Kandinsky’s work some characteristics are obvious, while certain touches are more discreet and veiled; they reveal themselves only progressively to those who deepen their connection with his work. He intended his forms (which he subtly harmonised and placed) to resonate with the observer’s soul.

Kandinsky was keenly interested in theory during these years is evident from his second publication in 1926 of his important treatise, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”), Über das Geistige in der Kunst being his first, published in Munich in 1911.

In his first treatise, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had emphasized in particular the supposed expressiveness of colours, comparing yellow, for example, to the aggressive, allegedly earthly sound of a trumpet and comparing blue to the allegedly heavenly sound of the pipe organ. He defines three types of painting; impressions, improvisations and compositions. While impressions are based on an external reality that serves as a starting point, improvisations and compositions depict images emergent from the unconscious, though composition is developed from a more formal point of view. Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity to a pyramid—the artist has a mission to lead others to the pinnacle with his work. The point of the pyramid is those few, great artists. It is a spiritual pyramid, advancing and ascending slowly even if it sometimes appears immobile. During decadent periods, the soul sinks to the bottom of the pyramid; humanity searches only for external success, ignoring spiritual forces.

Now, in the same spirit, in Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (“Point and Line to Plane”), he analyzed the supposed effects of the abstract elements of drawing, interpreting a horizontal line, for example, as cold and a vertical line as hot. This book contains many photographic examples and drawing from Kandinsky’s works which offer the demonstration of its 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 its own sensibility and that he let vibrating the sensible and spiritual strings of his soul.

When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school in 1933, Kandinsky was forced to leave his adopted home in Germany and moved to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. He and his wife Nina settled in a small apartment in a suburb of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and were granted French citizenship in 1939. The Nazis confiscated 57 of his canvases during their purge of “degenerate art” in 1937, but despite the Fascist proscription against his art, American patrons – notably Solomon R. Guggenheim – avidly collected his abstract work. His works became key to shaping the mission of the museum Guggenheim planned on opening dedicated to modern, avant-garde art. With over 150 works in the museum’s collection, Kandinsky became known as the “patron saint of the Guggenheim.”

Kandinsky died on December 13, 1944 of cerebrovascular disease, in relative, but serene, isolation.

In 2012, Christie’s auctioned Kandinsky’s Studie für Improvisation 8 (Study for Improvisation 8), a 1909 view of a man wielding a broadsword in a rainbow-hued village, for $23 million. Before this sale, the artist’s last record was set in 1990 when Sotheby’s sold his Fugue (1914) for $20.9 million. On 16 November 2016 Christie’s auctioned Kandinsky’s Rigide et courbé (rigid and bent), a large 1935 abstract painting, for $23.3 million, a new record for Kandinsky.