Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1903 he divorced his wife, Anna five years he with Gabriela travelled in painting and participating in to Bavaria, they settled down in a bottom of the Alps. It was the
intensive and fruitful search. The works of those years were basically landscapes, based on color discords. The play of color spots and lines was gradually superseding images of reality (Akhtyrka. Autumn. A sketch, 1901; Sluice, 1901; Old Town, 1902; Blue Rider, 1903; The Gulf Coast in Holland, 1904; Murnau. The Bailey, 1908). At that very time he turned to Russian fairy epic olden time, creating captivating images (Russian Rider, 1902; Russian Beauty on the Landscape Background, 1904), making mysterious legends about slavic wooden cities visible (Russian Village on the River with the Shallops, around 1902; To the City, around 1903).
theoretical foundation of abstractionism. Having come to an idea, that "the purposes (and therefore, means) of nature and arts are essentially, organically and according to the laws of the Universe are various - and equally great... and equally strong", the artist proclaimed creative process of "self-expression and selfdevelopment of spirit". Besides, Kandinsky wrote memoirs Looking Back (1913); in Russian translation Stairs), the collection of verses Sounds (1913) with 55 black-and-white and color lithographs.
Bauhaus. 1922-1933
After returning to Germany, Kandinsky accepts an invitation of Walter Gropius, the founder of the well-known Bauhaus (the Higher school of construction and art designing) and he and Nina moved to Weimar where Kandinsky headed a fresco workshop. He again taught and developed the ideas. They dealt, first of all, with the deep analytical studying of separate elements of a picture, which resulted
into "Point and Line to Plane" in 1926. Kandinsky also worked much and experimented with color, applying his analytical foundation and the conclusions in his teaching. Kandinsky's works again underwent changes: individual geometrical elements increasingly entered the foreground, his palette was sated with cold color harmonies which, at times, are perceived as a dissonance, the circle is used differently, as a sensual symbol of perfect form. "Composition VIII", 1923 is the main work of the Weimar period. Alongside with conceptual works, at this time he created Small Worlds rich in fantasy for Propilei Publishing House and some chamber, "intimate" pictures, such as "Small Dream in Red", 1925. Also Kandinsky lectured and exhibited in the USA, having established together with with Feininger, Javlenskii, and Klee "Blue Four". In 1925, due to the right wing parties' attacks Bauhaus in Weimar was closed. The second period of Bauhaus in Dessau began in quite favorable conditions: Kandinsky and other artists conducted some free classes of painting where they, besides teaching, could paint freely. "Yellow-Red-Blue", 1925, is one of the significant works describing a stage of "cold romanticism" in Kandinsky's painting. "A circle, which I use recently so often, could not be called otherwise but romantic. And the present day romanticism is essentially deeper, more beautiful, more substantial and more salutary - it is a piece of ice, in which fire is burning. And if people feel only cold and do not feel fire - so much the worse for them..." In Dessau Kandinsky with a new force was carried away with romantic ideas of "Gesamtkunstwerk" (an idea of synthesis of arts in one work). These ideas were embodied in Yellow Sound and in graphic support of Mussorgskii's Pictures to the Exhibition. Kandinsky's painting of the last years in Bauhaus was penetrated with ease and strange humour, which again would be shown in his late Parisian works, For example, his picture "Capricious", 1930, can be possibly referred to them, it evokes some cosmically Egyptian associations and is filled with fantastic symbolical images in the spirit of Paul Glue, the artist with whom Kandinsky made friends at that time. About 1931 national socialists started a large scale campaign against Bauhaus, which led to its closing in 1932. Kandinsky with his wife emigrated to France where they took up their residence in a new house in the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. Between 1926 and 1933 Kandinsky painted 159 oils and 300 water colors. Many of them, unfortunately, have been lost after Nazis declared Kandinsky's and many other artists' paintings to be "degenerate" (one of them - Marc Chagall).
gouache painting on cardboards of a small format. And again he confronted with aversion of the public and colleagues. And again he developed and improved the basics of his theory: "Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with "reality," next to the "real" world. Deeper down, it is subject to the common laws of the "cosmic world." And so a "new world of art" is juxtaposed to the "world of nature." This "world of art" is just as real, just as concrete. For this reason I prefer to call so-called "abstract art" "concrete art.". Kandinsky up to the very end had not doubted his "inner world", the world of images where the abstraction was not an end in itself, and the language of forms was not "deadborn"; they arose from will to pithiness and vitality. Oleg Ku, April 2008, for http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/ Copying this article partially or fully permitted only if there is a direct link to wassilykandinsky.net