Wassily Kandinsky

(Russian, 1866-1944)

“Colour is a means of exerting direct influence on the soul.”
— Wassily Kandinsky

Russian painter and theorist Wassily Kandinsky laid the foundation for twentieth century movements like Abstract Expressionism. His artwork revolved around spirituality and primitivism, which can be seen in his preference for a highly simplified drawing style. He combined comforting and familiar folk painting elements with universal themes from mythology and religion. His objects are recognizable but extremely schematic, almost childlike, as he abstracted the imagery so that the psychological recognition of the objects he described became secondary content or even subconscious, with the primary content coming from the color, line, and compositional rhythms. Kandinsky believed that the artist could help channel the spiritual realm and ultimately contribute to guiding society, acting as a sort of shaman. Maybe more than any other master of his era, Kandinsky changed the way both artists and the world at large would approach and appreciate visual art forever.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. His parents were educated and upper class. They divorced when he was five, and then he lived with an aunt in Odessa for the majority of his upbringing. His father enrolled him in private drawing, piano, and cello lessons after learning that he had interest and talent. Despite enjoying the arts, as he became a young man, he followed his family’s encouragement, studying law and economics at the University of Moscow, and marrying his cousin, Anna, in 1892.

Kandinsky did not truly begin painting until he was 30. He abandoned his career teaching law in Munich in 1896, and went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under the famous Franz von Stuck. There he met people who introduced him to the artistic avant-garde in Munich, and he developed theories on chromatic symbolism. Kandinsky painted his breakthrough work, Der Blaue Reiter (1903) during this transitional period. This early work showed his interest in both disjointed figure-ground relationships and color used to express emotions rather than appearances - two characteristics that would dominate his mature style. With the three other artists, Kandinsky co-founded an association called Phalanx, with which they challenged the conservative views of traditional art institutions, organizing twelve exhibitions between 1901 and 1904. Phalanx expanded to include the Phalanx School of Painting, where Kandinsky was the director and taught.

It was there that he deeply connected with one of his students; he and Gabriele Münter would spend the next 15 years as intimate companions. It was 1902, she was 25 years old, and he was 36, and he was married, but they still fell in love. They traveled through Europe and Africa from 1904-1908, buying a house and living openly together in Bavaria in 1909. Kandinsky was attracted to the budding ideas of Expressionism and his own style began to blossom. For example, Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a German expressionist group formed in 1905 in Dresden, and led by Kirchner. Franz Marc, Alexei Jawlensky, and others echoed Kandinsky’s Fauve-inspired color theories. Marc first met Kandinsky and Jawlensky when he joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM, or New Artists’ Association of Munich) in 1909, a group seeking to accommodate the avant-garde artists whose practices were too radical for the traditional organizations and academies of the time. In 1911, Kandinsky officially divorced from Anna. In the same year, as the annual NKVM exhibition had rejected one of Kandinsky’s paintings, in response he and Franz Marc co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and organized a rival exhibition. Der Blaue Reiter was a group formed as an abstract counterpart to Die Brücke's distorted figurative style. While both Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke confronted feelings of alienation within an increasingly modernizing world, where Die Brücke frequently employed dissonant color patterns and angular stylizations to emphasize the intensity of their paintings, Der Blaue Reiter sought to transcend the mundane by pursuing a spiritual experience of art through symbolic associations of sound and color. Der Blaue Reiter was a loose association of nine Expressionist artists, including Paul Klee, August Macke, Münter, and Jawlensky, and other members of the German avant-garde. The premier exhibition of this group took place that December at the Moderne Galerie. Two months later, they invited Die Brücke to participate in the second Der Blaue Reiter exhibition. Once World War I began in 1914, The Blue Rider dissolved, however the group had already had a large impact on German Expressionist style.

Germany declared war on Russia; being Russian, Kandinsky had to leave the country. He traveled with Münter to Switzerland and Sweden for another two years. However, Kandinsky returned to Moscow in early 1916 without her, ending their relationship rather clumsily. In Moscow, he courted Nina Andreevskaia, the young daughter of a Czarist colonel, marrying her in February of 1917. While in Russia, he became familiar with the art of the Constructivists and Suprematists. With the October Revolution in 1917, Kandinsky's plans to build a private school and studio were stopped by the Communist restructuring of private wealth, so he instead worked with the new government to develop schools and art organizations, feeling increasingly removed from the avant-garde. His search for spirituality in art did not mix well with the demanded utilitarian aesthetic. In 1921, Kandinsky was invited to teach at the innovative school in Germany, Weimar Bauhaus. He accepted and moved to Berlin with his wife, gaining German citizenship in 1928. During this part of his life, he gravitated towards cleanly expressed geometric elements - circles, half-circles, straight lines, angles, squares, checkerboards, and triangles. He published a second theoretical work in 1926, Point and Line to Plane, about a "science of painting," and his work and theory shifted from focusing on intuitive expression, as in his pre-war canvases, to emphasizing structure and organization.

Nazis closed the Bauhaus school in 1933, forcing Kandinsky to leave. He moved to France, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He and his wife settled in a small apartment in a suburb of Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine, and received French citizenship in 1939. There, his style again shifted and he moved into biomorphic forms, more organic than the harsh geometric shapes of his Bauhaus paintings. Kandinsky's output slowed during WWII, and as Cubism and Surrealism came to dominate the Parisian avant-garde, his art fell out of favor. He continued to paint till his last year, and his late style combined the expressive palette of his earliest works, the more structured elements he investigated while at the Bauhaus, and biomorphic forms also embraced by the Surrealists. The Nazis seized 57 of his canvases in 1937, as "degenerate art" that should be cleansed from society, but American patrons eagerly collected his work. Solomon R. Guggenheim was a particularly avid collector, and Kandinsky’s work became key in shaping the mission of the Guggenheim Museum, which is 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 in December of 1944. His artistic and theoretical work helped provide the philosophic foundation for future modern movements, Abstract Expressionism in particular and its offshoots like Color Field Painting. His biomorphic work had a large influence on key player Arshile Gorky's development, which helped to shape the aesthetic of the New York School, his sensory investigation of color influenced the Color Field painters, like Mark Rothko, and the 1980s Neo-Expressionist painters used his ideas about the artist's inner expression to their postmodern work, among many others. Kandinsky set the stage for much of the expressive modern art produced in the twentieth century.

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