WASSILY KANDINSKYWASSILY KANDINSKY

“Every work of art is a child of its age.”-1911, Concerning the

spiritual in art

WASSILY KANDINSKY

“Here I seek only to point the way, to establish certain analytical

methods.”-1923 Point and line to plane

Kandinsky, 1866-1896

• Wassily Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866.

(On this slide is the entirety of Kandinsky’s work during this

period.)

Fun Wassily facts:• He didn’t paint outside of his

spare time.

• He was a prominent academic who was offered a professorship at a University.

Pre-War

Flowing, abstract formsWild color and gesture

Post-War

Straight lines, clean forms

Systematic composition

On the spiritual in art

• Published in 1911, Kandinskys spiritual philosophy about art,

And his ideas about color:• “Green is the most restful color that

exists”• “Blue is the typical heavenly color”• “Gray = immobility and rest”

Some of which were crazy:

• “Yellow… violent raving lunacy”

Because he had….

Synesthesia

• Synesthesia is a medical condition where the senses become linked.

• Kandinsky’s sense of sight and color were linked: he saw painting as music, and heard music as painting.

His color associations:• “Keen yellow looks sour.”• “Light warm red… sound of

trumpets, strong, harsh, ringing.”• “Violet… deep notes of wood

instruments, (e.g. the basson).”• “Orange is like a man convinced of

his own powers, or an old violin”.

Point and Line to Plane

• Point and line to plane (1926) is Kandinsky’s defense of his work, a rigidly systematic explanation of his ideas.

• While it included color, it focused on the compositional in his work. Points, lines, and planes.

• It exemplified the rigid Bauhaus style, with right angles and clean shapes.

• Shows his postwar work.

Weimar modernism

• Philosophical movement in the Weimar republic. 1919-1933

• “One has value only as a function, and legitimizes ones existence through the semblance of sobriety.”

• It was a “Rigourous style of proving oneself”

Ernst Bloch, a leader of the movement

Georg Lukacs, another modernist thinker

Kandinsky’s Art as Modernism

• Modernist said of Weimar man: “his existence resembles not a line but a series of points”

• They talked about the “uneasy angst typical of german expressionism” turning into “a more stabilized culture of impersonality.”

• Kandinsky’s art becomes more impersonal after the war.

• He kept his abstraction, but left color and spirituality behind.

From this…

…to this.