What kind of artist was kandinsky

Many of these symbolic figures were repeated and refined in later works, becoming further and further abstracted as Kandinsky developed his mature, purely abstract style. Commonly cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky's pre-World War I achievement, Composition VII shows the artist's rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes. The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms.

Even the title, Composition VII , aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers. Preoccupied by the theme of apocalypse and redemption throughout the s, Kandinsky formally tied the whirling composition of the painting to the theme of the cyclical processes of destruction and salvation.

Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Kandinsky maintained several symbolic references in this painting. Among the various forms that built Kandinsky's visual vocabulary, he painted glyphs of boats with oars, mountains, and figures.

However, he did not intend for viewers to read these symbols literally and instead imbued his paintings with multiple references to the Last Judgment, the Deluge, and the Garden of Eden, seemingly all at once. At first the move to Moscow in initiated a period of depression and Kandinsky hardly even painted at all his first year back. When he picked up his paintbrush again in , he expressed his desire to paint a portrait of Moscow in a letter to his former companion, Munter.

Although he continued to refine his abstraction, he represented the city's monuments in this painting and captured the spirit of the city. Kandinsky painted the landmarks in a circular fashion as if he had stood in the center of Red Square, turned in a circle, and caught them all swirling about him. Although he refers to the outside world in this painting, he maintained his commitment to the synesthesia of color, sound, and spiritual expression in art.

Kandinsky wrote that he particularly loved sunset in Moscow because it was "the final chord of a symphony which develop[ed] in every tone a high life that force[d] all of Moscow to resound like the fortissimo of a huge orchestra.

Painted while he taught at the Bauhaus, this work illustrates how Kandinsky synthesized elements from Suprematism, Constructivism, and the school's own ethos. By combining aspects of all three movements, he arrived at the flat planes of color and the clear, linear quality seen in this work. Form, as opposed to color, structured the painting in a dynamic balance that pulses throughout the canvas.

This work is an expression of Kandinsky's clarified ideas about modern, non-objective art, particularly the significance of shapes like triangles, circles, and the checkerboard. Kandinsky relied upon a hard-edged style to communicate the deeper content of his work for the rest of his career.

Kandinsky painted this work in his sixtieth year and it demonstrates his lifelong search for the ideal form of spiritual expression in art.

Created as part of his experimentation with a linear style of painting, this work shows his interest in the form of the circle.

It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension. The diverse dimensions and bright hues of each circle bubble up through the canvas and are balanced through Kandinsky's careful juxtapositions of proportion and color.

The dynamic movement of the round forms evokes their universality - from the stars in the cosmos to drops of dew; the circle a shape integral to life. Influenced by the flowing biomorphic forms of Surrealism, Kandinsky later incorporated organic shapes back into his pictorial vocabulary.

Executed in France, this monumental painting relies upon a black background to heighten the visual impact of the brightly colored undulating forms in the foreground. The presence of the black expanse is significant, as Kandinsky only used the color sparingly; it is evocative of the cosmos as well as the darkness at the end of life. The undulating planes of color call to mind microscopic organisms, but also express the inner emotional and spiritual feelings Kandinsky experienced near the end of his life.

The uplifting organization of forms in contrast with the harsh edges and black background illustrates the harmony and tension present throughout the universe, as well as the rise and fall of the cycle of life. Last in his lifelong series of Compositions , this work is the culmination of Kandinsky's investigation into the purity of form and expression through nonrepresentational painting.

Content compiled and written by Eve Griffin. Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors. The Art Story. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet.

Wassily Kandinsky took up the study of art in earnest at age 30, moving to Munich to study drawing and painting. An obsession with Monet led him to explore his own creative concepts of color on canvas, which were sometimes controversial among his contemporaries and critics, but Kandinsky emerged as a respected leader of the abstract art movement in the early 20th century. When Kandinsky was about 5 years old, his parents divorced, and he moved to Odessa to live with an aunt, where he learned to play the piano and cello in grammar school, as well as study drawing with a coach.

Even as a boy he had an intimate experience with art; the works of his childhood reveal rather specific color combinations, infused by his perception that "each color lives by its mysterious life. He graduated with honors, but his ethnographic earned him a fieldwork scholarship that entailed a visit to the Vologda province to study their traditional criminal jurisprudence and religion.

The folk art there and the spiritual study seemed to stir latent longings. Still, Kandinsky married his cousin, Anna Chimyakina, in and took up a position on the Moscow Faculty of Law, managing an art-printing works on the side.

But two events effected his abrupt change of career in seeing an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow the previous year, especially Claude Monet's Haystacks at Giverny , which was his first experience of nonrepresentational art; and then hearing Wagner's Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre.

Kandinsky chose to abandon his law career and move to Munich he had learned German from his maternal grandmother as a child to devote himself full-time to the study of art. In Munich, Kandinsky was accepted into a prestigious private painting school, moving on to the Munich Academy of Arts. But much of his study was self-directed. He began with conventional themes and art forms, but all the while he was forming theories derived from devoted spiritual study and informed by an intense relationship between music and color.

These theories coalesced through the first decade of the 20th century, leading him toward his ultimate status as the father of abstract art. One of the greatest Russian artists of the 20th century, and a leading exponent of Expressionism , Wassily Kandinsky was both painter and art theorist. Together with a number of other Munich based artists, he founded the Der Blaue Reiter art movement, one of the most influential groups of German Expressionism.

Renowned as an outstanding 20th century colourist, he had a strong physical sensitivity to certain colours which he was able to 'hear' as well as 'see': a condition called synaesthesia. He is also credited with creating some of the first abstract art of the 20th century. He is regarded as one of the leading expressionist painters and arguably the greatest of the early abstract painters.

Many of Kandinsky's paintings are now available online as prints in the form of poster art. Harmony Squares With Concentric Rings An example of his pioneering non-objective art , a form of geometric abstraction also known as concrete art. Ilya Repin Greatest Russian genre-painter. Vasily Surikov Russia's greatest history painter. Mikhail Vrubel Symbolist painter. Isaac Levitan Landscape painter. Valentin Serov Russia's greatest Impressionist. Kasimir Malevich Founder of Suprematism.

Marc Chagall Painter, decorative artist. Born in Moscow, the son of a rich tea merchant, Kandinsky spent most of his childhood in Odessa. He learned to play several instruments as a child; music in fact had a huge influence on his paintings, even down to their names like 'compositions' and 'improvisations'.

In he enrolled in the University of Moscow to study law and economics. After successfully passing his exams, he was offered a Professorship in Law, which he accepted. In he was sent on a government mission to Vologda, where, as his diary reveals, he became as interested in the art, architecture and folklore of the peasants as in studying local laws, which was the official reason for his journey.

During that trip his first entrance into an isba a peasant house remained fixed in his memory: on seeing the popular images with their vivid, primitive colours decorating the walls, he had the feeling he was "walking into a painting".

In he attended an exhibition of Impressionism held in Moscow, and quite soon thereafter decided to quit his job and move to Munich to study drawing. He was 30 at the time. He was always fascinated by colour, even as a child. He once said that his childhood memories of Moscow were of sun melting "into a single patch of colour: pistachio-green, flame-red house, churches - each colour a song in it's own right".

We see these 'patches' appearing time and again in his work. Having arrived in Munich towards the end of , Kandinsky enrolled in the Azbe art school, run by Anton Azbe Here, he met Alexei von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin He found, however, that the school's drawing lessons did not interest him, and for a time he worked alone, notably on studies of landscapes.

Kandinsky's father provided his son with a generous monthly allowance, and he settled - along with his wife - in Schwabing, the bohemian suburb of Munich. In he co-founded the exhibiting society Phalanx ; for its first exhibition he designed a poster in a style similar to Art Nouveau , then the dominant style in Munich. The following year he taught at the art school run by the group. Gabriele Munter , one of his pupils, became his partner until they separated during the Great War.

Travel With Gabriele Munter. Meantime, in , disillusioned by the unshakeable conservatism of Munich artistic circles, Kandinsky left Munich with Gabriele, travelling to Venice, then Odessa and Moscow , Tunis , Dresden, Odessa once more, then Italy , before settling for a year at Sevres, near Paris. During this period Kandinsky was experimenting with various methods and techniques. His native city of Moscow often served as his inspiration, both in paintings done from memory and those from studies or sketches from life.

The latter, executed in the old Schwabing area of Munich - where the intensity of light reminded Kandinsky of the colours of Moscow disappointed him nonetheless, because he seemed to be engaged in a 'fruitless attempt to capture the power of nature'. He was also influenced by Russian folk art and the Symbolism movement. In style, they are both medieval and Russian, influences that can be seen again in his woodcuts and engravings between and Like his Poems without Words twelve woodcuts, , Moscow and his Xylographies five woodcuts, , Paris , these are similar to his paintings as regards 'subject' but reveal a greater interest in colour for its own sake.