The Life and Art of Wassily Kandinsky Art History Explained

Vasily Kandinsky was born on December 4th 1866 in Moscow, a city of gilded domes and ancient icons. This is the story of an artist who walked away from a flourishing legal career with no guarantee of success in pursuit of life as an artist. He was 30 years old before he made his first serious painting and his breakthrough works were still 15 years away. When he eventually stripped painting down to expressions of pure colour and form, his peers thought he had gone too far. Yet today Kandinsky stands as one of the founding fathers of modern art, a lawyer who became a pioneering painter. How did he get there? Kandinsky was the son of a prosperous tea merchant and he grew up in comfortable circumstances. From the very beginning his world was one steeped in resonant textures of Russian orthodox faith and Slavic folk tradition. When Kandinsky was five years old his parents divorced and the family relocated to Odessa on the Black Sea coast. He was raised largely by his aunt, a woman of considerable education and cultivation. The young Vasily enjoyed being read fairy tales and folk stories. Later in life he would credit his aunt with awakening something essential in him, that art and life were not separate things. From the age of 10 he began drawing lessons and piano classes. He would later describe how certain sounds produce colours in his mind. This experience, the crossing of the senses, would come to define his entire artistic life. In 1886 Kandinsky enrolled at the University of Moscow to study law and economics. Three years later he was commissioned by the Society for Natural Science, Ethnography and Anthropology to undertake a research expedition to the Vologda region of northern Russia, a remote heavily forested area far to the northeast of Moscow. The folk tradition of northern Russia was like nothing he had encountered before. The peasants decorated everything with vivid flat non-naturalistic patterns. Kandinsky wrote of walking into a peasant hut and feeling that he had stepped inside a painting. He never forgot it. Then came a second revelation. In 1896 while visiting a touring exhibition in Saint Petersburg he stood before one of Claude Monet's haystack paintings and to his astonishment could not at first identify the subject, thanks to Monet's radical impressionistic technique. The experience moved Kandinsky profoundly. Suddenly for the first time, he wrote, I saw a picture. What was totally clear to me was the unsuspecting power of the palette, a power which had earlier been hidden from me but which surpassed all my dreams. Within months he had made his decision. He turned down a prestigious offer from the University of Tartu. At the age of 30 he left Moscow and moved to Munich, Germany and began at last to learn to paint. Munich at the turn of the century was one of the great centers of European modernism. The city hummed with ideas, philosophical, spiritual, scientific. Visual culture at the time was dominated by Jugendstil, the German and Austrian expression of Art Nouveau, characterized by sinuous organic forms, floral motifs and a desire to unite fine art with everyday design. At first Kandinsky, wishing to deepen his painterly skills, enrolled at the private art school of Anton Asbay and later at the Academy of Fine Arts under the renowned Franz von Stuck. He was not, by his own admission, a naturally gifted draftsman but what he possessed instead was a deep clarity of purpose, to let his heart reveal the fervid contents of his imagination. The influence of fauvist artists like Henri Matisse and André Duran arrived in Munich at around this time too, carrying with it a liberating charge. The fauves, working in Paris between roughly 1904 and 1908, had refashioned the conventional relationship between reality and color. It's possible to see a direct link between a work like Harmony in Red by Matisse and Kandinsky's Dining Room, painted a year later. His other works from these years display a willingness to use paint to its textural extremes and to employ color with unrestrained experimentation. It was, perhaps thanks to his relative maturity, that Kandinsky felt able to pursue his artistic vision with uncommon dedication. Kandinsky made new friends, all of whom embraced the expressionistic aspects of the new art coming from France. Franz Marc, August Macker and Paul Klee, artists who shared Kandinsky's belief that painting could be more than description, more than the faithful recording of the visible world. By around 1908 and 1909, Kandinsky had begun spending long summers in the Bavarian village of Murnau, near the Alps, with his companion, the painter Gabriele Munter. He painted the landscapes in broad, vivid strokes, intense blues and burning yellows, the dark green of the alpine forests. The forms of houses, hills and churches became increasingly simplified as he searched for a new form of language that would suit the form of expression he was chasing. And then, one evening, something happened that Kandinsky later described as one of the most decisive moments of his artistic life. He returned to his studio at dusk and saw, propped up against the wall, a painting of extraordinary beauty. He moved closer and recognized it as one of his own canvases lying on its side. In the half-light, he had not been able to make out the subject, and yet the painting had been magnificent. The subject, he realized, had been an obstacle. I knew with From that moment on, he began the long, deliberate process of moving beyond the visible world towards abstraction. In Munich, new ideas about the nature of the universe were changing the way Kandinsky thought about material reality. Not only did he take a keen interest in scientific advancements, notably the discovery of atoms being composed of energy rather than hard matter, he also attended lectures on theosophy, a movement that posited a hidden spiritual dimension underlying all of visible reality. For Kandinsky, these ideas were not theoretical, they were descriptions of what he had been experiencing his entire life. Kandinsky experienced what we now call synesthesia, the phenomenon by which one sense triggers another. For him, colours produce sounds, and sounds produce colours. He described sitting in the Moscow Royal Theatre one evening, watching a performance of Wagner's Lohegrin. I saw all the colours in my mind's eye, he wrote. Wild lines verging on the insane formed drawings before my very eyes. For Kandinsky, such experiences were not curiosities, they were evidence of the hidden unity underlying all the senses, all the arts, all the forms of human perception. In December 1911, after Kandinsky had resigned from a previous artist's society, after disputes arose over the radicalism of his paintings, coming to a head when his Composition V was rejected from the group's third exhibition, he and Franz Mark co-founded an artistic group they called Du Blau Reiter, The Blue Rider. Both Kandinsky and Mark loved the colour blue. Mark associated it with the spiritual, Kandinsky with depth, inwardness, and the infinite. The group held their first exhibition in Munich in December 1911 at the Galerie Thunhauser in Munich, and a second exhibition in 1912. The works on display were unlike almost anything the German public had seen before. Kandinsky's large compositions that had finally loosened the bonds of representation altogether after many small steps, were met with bewilderment, hostility, and among younger artists, a mounting excitement. When, also in 1911, Kandinsky published his great theoretical treaties concerning the spiritual in art, one of the most remarkable documents in the history of modern painting, he set out his theory of what colour was and what it could do. For Kandinsky, colour was not a property of objects, but rather a force, a vibration. He wrote, connecting art to music, colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings, the artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposefully to cause vibrations in the soul. Music had long been considered the most purely spiritual of the arts, precisely because it operated without reference to the visible world. A symphony did not depict anything, it was pure expression of inner states. Kandinsky wanted painting to achieve the same freedom. He titled his early abstract canvases atomusical forms, impressions, improvisations, compositions. He was deliberately announcing that his paintings were not pictures of things, but a kind of concert in colour. The First World War shattered the world Kandinsky had created. In August 1914, as a Russian citizen living in Germany, he was forced to leave Munich immediately, abandoning his studio and most of his possessions. He travelled through Switzerland and the Balkans and eventually made his way back to Russia, a country he had not lived in for nearly 20 years. Franz Mark, his closest friend and collaborator, was killed at the Battle of Verdun in March 1916. Kandinsky's grief never entirely left him. Russia, meanwhile, was in revolution. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 was followed by years of turbulent cultural politics. For a brief, dizzying period, the new Soviet state appeared to embrace the avant-garde, and Kandinsky was appointed professor at the Moscow State Higher Art and Technical Studios. But the revolution's view of modernist art soured quickly. By the early 1920s, the utilitarian demands of Soviet ideology, in short, art in service of the state and its propaganda, were pressing hard against Kandinsky's conviction that art should be fundamentally free and aimed at spiritual release. He found himself increasingly marginalised and, in 1921, he left Russia for the last time, never to return. Back in Germany, which entered a short-lived golden age in the 1920s, Kandinsky joined the faculty of the Bauhaus, the revolutionary school of art and design founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. The Bauhaus was one of the most extraordinary educational experiments in the history of art, a school that sought to unite fine art, craft, architecture and design in a single, coherent vision, abolishing the old hierarchies between the decorative and the high arts. For Kandinsky, it was the perfect environment, and he entered one of the most productive periods of his life. His paintings changed direction too. Instead of the turbulent quality of his pre-war canvases, his work became more geometric and architectural. Circles, triangles and precise arcs appeared alongside the sweeping curves of his earlier work. In a monumental painting from 1925, Yellow, Red, Blue, he examined the three primary colours directly, setting them in dynamic tension across a large canvas, using the colour triad as an organising formula that allowed him to probe the deepest harmonies and dissonances of colour relationships. It was one of the great paintings of his whole career. But if Kandinsky, now entering his 60s, was hoping for a settled life, it wasn't to be. As he painted more resolutely than ever, the Bauhaus school moved twice, from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and then from Dessau to Berlin in 1932, under mounting pressure from right-wing politicians, who viewed its progressive ideas with deep suspicion. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Bauhaus was closed. Kandinsky, who was now 66 years old, left Germany for Paris. He spent the last decade of his life in a quiet suburb to the west of Paris, in an apartment filled with light and the accumulated objects of a lifetime. He and his wife Nina had met in Moscow in 1916, and married the following year. She was 30 years younger than him, sharp, devoted, and fiercely protective of his work. In Paris, his work entered its final, most lyrical phase. Influenced perhaps by the biomorphic forms of Juan Moreau and John Arp, his paintings blossomed with strange, delicate shapes, things that seemed to float and divide, suggestive of the micro-organic world of cells, amoeba, and the deep sea. Meanwhile, he maintained a vast correspondence with artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers around the world. The Nazi occupation reached Paris in 1940, and Kandinsky lived the final years of his life isolated from the international art world, and cut off from collectors and critics. He painted on regardless. On December the 13th, 1944, Kandinsky died at his home at the age of 77. He had been painting almost to the end. In the weeks and months that followed his death, the art world was slow to absorb what had been lost. Europe was still at war. The great machinery of international culture, galleries, the museums, the critical apparatus, had been badly damaged. Serious reassessment took time. The American abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 50s, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner, found in Kandinsky's work a crucial permission. If he could abandon the object and trust the mark, so could they. Rothko's great fields of luminous color, in particular, are inconceivable without Kandinsky. Kandinsky's pursuit of pure expression left its mark on graphic design, architecture, film, and music, but it was in painting that his influence ran deepest. He had demonstrated something that the century would continue to absorb, that color, line, and form, freed from the need to represent the world, could speak directly to the mind and soul of the viewer.