Wassily Kandinsky (in Russian ВасилийВасильевичКандинский - transliterated Vasiliï Vassil' evitch Kandinskiï ) is a Russian painter and a theorist of the art born with Moscow the December 4th 1866 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine the December 13rd 1944.

Regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century at the sides in particular of Picasso and Matisse, he is the founder of the Abstract art: he is generally regarded as being the author of the first works nonfigurative of the history of the Modern art, a watercolour of 1910 which will be known as " abstraite". Certain art historians or critics suspected Kandinsky of having antedated this watercolour to make sure paternity of the abstraction under pretext which it resembles a draft of its Composition VII of 1913. Kandinsky was born in Moscow but it passes its childhood to Odessa. It is registered at the University of Moscow and chooses the right and the economy. It decides to begin studies of painting (drawing according to model, sketch and anatomy) at the 30 years age.

In 1896 it settles with Munich where it studies with the Academy of the Art schools. It goes back to Moscow in 1918 after the Russian revolution. In conflict with the official theories of art, it turns over to Germany in 1921. It teaches there with the Bauhaus as from 1922 until its closing by the Nazis in 1933. He emigrates then in France and saw the remainder of his life there, acquiring French nationality in 1939. He dies out in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944, leaving behind him an abundant work.

Artistic periods

Creation by Kandinsky of a purely abstract work did not intervene like an abrupt change, it is the fruit of a long development, a long maturation and an intense theoretical reflection founded on its personal experience of painter and the dash of its spirit towards the interior beauty and this deep spiritual desire which he called the interior required and which he held like an essential principle of Article.

Youth and inspirations (1866-1896)

The youth and the life of Kandinsky to Moscow bring to him a multitude of sources of inspiration. It remembers later that being child it was fascinated and exceptionally stimulated by the color. It is probably related to its Synesthésie, which literally enabled him to hear the colors that he saw like musical sounds. Its fascination for the colors continues to increase during its childhood in Moscow, although it does not have never seems he tried to make artistic studies.

In 1889 it takes part in an ethnographic group which travelled until the area of Vologda to the North-East of Moscow to study the habits relating to the country right. He tells in Regards on the past that he with the impression to be driven in a table when he returns in the houses or the churches of this area decorated with the colors more chatoyantes. Its study of the folklore of this area, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark bottom flashed back on its primitive work. Kandinsky writes a few years later that “the color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers and the heart is the piano with the cords. ” It is this same year, before leaving Moscow, which he sees an exposure of Monet and which he is impressed by the representation of a haystack which shows him the power of the color used almost independently of the object itself.

Artistic blooming (1896-1911)

Time that Kandinsky passed to the school of the Art schools is facilitated by the fact that it older and is tested more than the other students. It begins a career of painter while becoming a true theorist of art because of intensity of its reflections on its own work. Unfortunately, very few of its works of this period remained at time, although its production was probably important. This situation changes starting from the beginning of the 20th century. A great number of tables of landscapes and cities, using broad keys of color but quite identifiable forms, were preserved.

Essentially, paintings of Kandinsky of this time do not comprise human faces. An exception is Sunday, Russia traditional (1904) where Kandinsky proposes a very coloured painting to us and undoubtedly imaginary of peasants and the noble ones in front of the walls of a city. Its painting entitled Couple with horse (1906-1907) depicts a man on a horse, bearing with tenderness a woman, and who overlaps in front of a Russian city with the luminous walls beyond of a river. The horse which is covered with a sumptuous fabric holds in the shade, while the sheets of the trees, the city and the reflections in the river shine like spots of color and light.

A fundamental painting of Kandinsky of these years 1900 is probably the blue rider (DER blau reiter, 1903) which shows a character carrying a cape overlapping quickly through a rocky meadow. Kandinsky more shows the rider like a series of keys coloured that by precise details. In itself, this painting is not exceptional, when one compares it with the tables other painters contemporary, but it shows the direction that Kandinsky will follow in the following years, and its title announces the association which it will found a few years later.

1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spends most of its time to travel through Europe, until it settles in the Bavarian small town of Murnau. the blue mountain (1908-1909) painted at that time watch more its tendency towards the pure abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked of two large trees, one yellow and the other red. A group of three riders and some other characters crosses the bottom of the fabric. The face, the clothes and the saddle of the riders are each one of a linked color, and none the characters shows realistic detail. The broad use of the color in the blue mountain illustrates the evolution of Kandinsky towards an art in which the color itself is applied independently of the form.

As from 1909, which Kandinsky calls the “chorus of the colors” becomes increasingly bright, it takes care of an emotive capacity and an intense cosmic significance. This evolution was allotted to a work Goethe, the Traité colors ( Farbenlehre ), which influenced its books the Spiritual one in Art and Regards on the past . The following year, it paints the first abstract work carried out starting from a deep conviction and with a clearly definite aim: to substitute for the figuration and the imitation of “reality” external of the material world a pure creation of spiritual nature which proceeds only of the only interior need for the artist. Or to take again the terminology of the philosopher Michel Henry, to substitute for the visible appearance of the outside world the pathetic and invisible interior reality of the life.

The blue rider (1911-1914)

Paintings of this period comprise great very expressive coloured masses evolve/move independently of the forms and of the lines which are not used any more to delimit them or to emphasize them but which combines with them, superimpose themselves and overlap in a very free way to form fabrics of an extraordinary force.

The music had a great influence on the birth of the abstract art, being abstracted by nature and not seeking to represent the outside world vainly but simply to express in an immediate way of the interior feelings to the human heart. Kandinsky uses sometimes musical terms to indicate its works: it calls many of its most spontaneous paintings of the " improvisations" , while it nomme" compositions" some among the most worked out and at greater length worked, a term which resounds in him like a prayer.

In addition to painting itself, Kandinsky is devoted to the constitution of a theory of Article It contributed to found the association of the Nouveaux Artists of Munich from which he became the president in 1909. The group was unable to integrate the most radical approaches like that of Kandinsky because of a more conventional design of art, and the group dissolves at the end of 1911. Kandinsky then founds a new association, the blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with artists closer to his vision of art such as Franz Marc. This association carries out an almanac, called the Almanac of the Blue Rider which known two publications. More numbers were envisaged, but the declaration of the First World War into 1914 put an end to these projects, and Kandinsky turned over at his place to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

Its first great theoretical work on art, heading Of spiritual in art and painting in particular , appears at the end of 1911. It exposes in this court treated its personal vision of the art whose true mission is of a spiritual nature, like its theory of the psychological effect of the colors on the human heart and their interior sonority. the Almanac of the Blue Rider is published little time afterwards. These writings of Kandinsky are used at the same time of defense and promotion of the abstract art, as of demonstration which any form of art authenticates was also able to reach a certain spiritual depth. It penset that the color can be used in painting like a reality autonomous and independent of the visual description of an object or another form.

Return in Russia (1914-1921)

During the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky deals with the development of the cultural policy of Russia, it brings its collaboration in the fields of the pedagogy of the art and the reform of the museums. It is also devoted to artistic teaching with a program resting on the analysis of the forms and the colors, like with the organization of the artistic Institute of culture in Moscow. It paints very little during this period. It makes knowledge into 1916 of Nina Andreievskaïa who will become his wife the following year. Kandinsky received in 1921 for mission of going to Germany to the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius. The following year, Soviet prohibited officially any form of abstract art because considered to be harmful for the socialist ideals.

Bauhaus (1922-1933)

The Bauhaus is then a school of architecture and innovative art which aims to amalgamate the visual arts and the applied arts, and whose teaching rests on the theoretical and practical application of the synthesis of the visual arts. Kandinsky gives to it courses within the framework of the workshop of mural, which take again its theory of the colors in there integral of new elements on the psychology of the form. The development of this work on the study of the forms, in particular the point and the various shapes of lines, conduit to the publication of its second great theoretical work Not and line on plan in 1926.

The geometric standards take in its teaching as in its painting a growing importance, in particular the circle, the half-circle, the angle and the straight lines or curves. This period is for him one period of intense production. By the freedom of which each one of its works testifies, by the treatment of surfaces rich colors and in splendid ranges as in its fabric Jaune - red - blue (1925), Kandinsky clearly dissociates constructivism or Suprématisme whose influence was growing at that time.

The principal forms which constitute this large fabric of two meters broad entitled Jaune - red - blue are a yellow vertical rectangle, a slightly tilted Red Cross and a large circle dark blue, while a multitude of black lines right or sinuous and arcs of circles, like some monochromic circles and some coloured checkerworks contribute to its delicate complexity. This simple visual identification of the forms and the principal masses coloured present on the fabric corresponds only to one first approach of the interior reality of the work whose right appreciation requires an observation much thorough not only of the forms and colors used in painting, but also of their relation, their absolute position and their relative tendency on the fabric, their overall harmony and their reciprocal agreement.

Confronted with the hostility of the right parties, Bauhaus left Weimar to settle with Dessau since 1925. Following a smear campaign baited on behalf of the Nazis, Bauhaus is closed in Dessau in 1932. The school continues its activities with Berlin until its dissolution in July 1933. Kandinsky then leaves Germany to come to settle in Paris.

The great synthesis (1934-1944)

In Paris, it is relatively insulated, the more so as the abstract art, in particular geometrical, is hardly recognized: the artistic tendencies to mode were rather impressionism and the cubism. He lives and works in a small apartment of which he arranged the living room in workshop. Biomorphic forms with flexible and nongeometrical contours make their appearance in his work, of the forms which evoke outside microscopic organizations but which always express the interior life of the artist. He resorts to compositions of new colors which evoke Slavic art popular and which resemble works in invaluable filigree. He also uses sand which he mixes with the colors to give to painting a granulous texture.

This period corresponds in fact to a vast synthesis of its former work, of which it takes again the whole of the elements all while enriching them. It paints in 1936 and 1939 its two last great compositions, these particularly elaborate fabrics and lengthily matured that it had ceased producing since many years. Composition IX is a fabric with the strongly contrasted powerful diagonals and whose central form evokes an human embryo in the belly of his/her mother. The small squares of colors and the coloured bands seem to be detached from the black bottom of Composition X like fragments or filaments of stars, while enigmatic hiéroglyphes with tons pastels recover the great mass chestnut which seems to float in the left higher corner of the fabric.

In works of Kandinsky, a certain number of characteristics jump immediately to the eyes while certain sonorities more discrete and like are veiled, i.e. they appear only gradually with those which make the effort look further into their relationship with work and to refine their glance. One thus should not be satisfied with a first very surface impression or a coarse identification of the forms which the artist used and which it subtly harmonized and put in agreement so that they return effectively in resonance with the heart of the spectator.

Posthumous glory

From death of Wassily Kandinsky and during about thirty years, Nina Kandinsky did not cease diffusing the message and revealing the work of her husband. The whole of works in its possession were bequeathed to the Center Georges Pompidou, in Paris, where one can see the largest collection of his paintings.

Theoretical writings on art

The analyzes of Kandinsky on the forms and the colors do not result from simple associations of arbitrary ideas, but of the interior experiment of the painter who spent the years to create abstract paintings of an incredible sensory richness, to work on the forms and with the colors, observing lengthily and inlassablement its own fabrics and those of other artists, simply noting their subjective and pathetic effect on its heart of artist and poet of a very great sensitivity to the colors.

It is thus about a form purely subjective experiment that each one can make and repeat by taking time to look at its paintings and to let act the forms and the colors on its own alive sensitivity. It is not a question of scientific and objective observations, but of radically subjective and purely phenomenologic interior observations which concern what the philosopher Michel Henry calls absolute subjectivity or the absolute Vie phenomenologic.

The spiritual one in art

Kandinsky compares the spiritual life of humanity with a large Triangle similar to a pyramid and that the artist has for task and the role of involving upwards by the exercise of his talent. The point of the Triangle is only made up of some individuals who bring to the men the sublime bread. A spiritual Triangle which advances and goes up slowly, even if there remains sometimes motionless. During the periods of decline the hearts fall to the bottom of the Triangle and the men seek only external success and are unaware of the purely spiritual forces.

When one looks at the colors on the pallet of a painter, a double effect occurs: a purely physical effect of the eye charmed by the beauty of the colors first of all, which causes an impression of joy as when a delicacy is eaten. But this effect can be much deeper and involve an emotion and a vibration of the heart, or a interior resonance which is a purely spiritual effect by which the color reaches the heart.

The interior required is for Kandinsky the principle of art and the base of the harmony of the forms and the colors. It defines it as the principle of the entry in effective contact of the form with the human heart. Any form is the delimitation of a surface by another, it has interior contents which are the effect that it produces on that which looks it with attention. This interior need is the right of the artist to unlimited freedom, but this freedom becomes a crime if it is not founded on such a need. The work of art is born from the interior need for artist in the mysterious, enigmatic and mystical way, then it acquires an autonomous life, it becomes an animated subject independent of a spiritual breath.

The first properties which jump to the eyes when the unrelated color is looked at, by letting it only act, it is on the one hand the heat or the coldness of the coloured tone, and on the other hand the clearness or the darkness of this tone.

Heat is a tendency to yellow, the coldness a tendency to blue. The yellow and blue form the first great contrast, which is dynamic. The yellow has an eccentric movement and blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface seems to approach us, while a blue surface seems to move away. The yellow is the typically terrestrial color whose violence can be painful and aggressive. The blue is the typically celestial color which evokes calm deep. The mixture of blue and the yellow produces the total immobility and the calm one, the green .

Clearness is a tendency towards the white and the darkness a tendency towards the black. The white and the black form the second great contrast, which is static. The white acts like a major and absolute silence full with possibilities. The black is nothing without possibility, it is a silence eternal and without hope, it corresponds to death. This is why any other color so strongly resounds with its vicinity. The mixture of the white and the black led to the gray, which does not have any force activates and to which the emotional tonality is close to that of the green the gray corresponds to the immobility without hope, it tends towards despair when it becomes dark and finds a little hope while being cleared up.

The red is a hot color very alive, sharp and agitated, it has an immense force, it is a movement in oneself. Mixed with the black, it leads to the brown which is a hard color. Mixed with the yellow, it gains in heat and gives orange the which has a movement of irradiation on the entourage. Mixed with blue, it moves away from the man to give the purple , which is a cooled red. The red and the green form third great contrast, the orange one and purple the fourth.

Not and line on plan

Kandinsky analyzes in this writing the geometric standards which compose any painting, namely the not and the line , as well as the physical support and the material surface on which the artist draws or paints and that it calls the original plane or P.O. It does not analyze them objective and external point of view, but from the point of view of their interior effect on alive subjectivity of the spectator who looks at them and lets them act on its sensitivity.

The not is in practice a small spot of color deposited by the artist on the fabric. The point which the painter thus uses is not a geometrical point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it has a certain extension, a form and a color. This form can be square, triangular, round, in the shape of star or more complex still. The point is the most concise form, but according to its site on the original level it will take a different tonality. It can be alone and insulated or be put in resonance with other points or lines.

The line is the product of a force, it is a point on which an alive force was exerted in a certain direction, the force exerted on the pencil or the brush by the hand of the artist. The produced linear forms can be several types: a right line which results from a single force exerted in only one direction, a line broken which results from the alternation of two forces having of the different directions, or a line corrugated curve or produced by the effect of two forces which act simultaneously. A surface can be obtained by thickening, starting from a line which one makes swivel around one of his ends.

The subjective effect produced by a line depends on its orientation: the horizontal line corresponds on the ground on which the man rests and is driven, with the dish, it has an emotional tonality dark and cold similar to the black or blue, while the vertical line corresponds to the height and no fulcrum offers, it has on the contrary a luminous and hot tonality near to the white or yellow. A diagonal has consequently a more or less hot or cold tonality according to its slope compared to the vertical or with the horizontal one.

A force which is spread without obstacle as that which produces a straight line corresponds to the lyricism , while several forces which are opposed and are opposed form a drama . The angle which form a broken line also has an interior sonority which is hot and close to the yellow for an acute angle (triangle), cold and similar to blue for an obtuse angle (circle) and similar to the red for a right angle (square).

The original plane is in general rectangular or square, it is thus composed of horizontal lines and verticals which delimit it and which define it as an autonomous being which will be used as support with painting by communicating its emotional tonality to him. This tonality is determined by the relative importance of these horizontal lines and verticals, the horizontal ones giving a calm and cold tonality to the original plan, while the verticals communicates a calm and hot tonality to him. The artist has the intuition of this interior effect of the format of the fabric and of his dimensions, which it will choose according to the tonality that it wishes to give to his work. Kandinsky regards even the original plan as an living being that the artist “fertilizes” and of which it feels “breathing”.

Each left the original plan has an emotional coloring which is clean for him and which will influence the tonality of the pictorial elements which will be drawn above, which contributes to the richness of the composition which results from their juxtaposition on the fabric. The high of the original plan corresponds to the flexibility and lightness, while the low rather evokes the density and gravity. It is up to the painter to learn how to know these effects in order to produce paintings who is not the result of the chance, but the fruit of an authentic work and the result of an effort towards the interior beauty.

This book comprises a multitude of photographic examples and drawings resulting from works of Kandinsky which offer the demonstration of its theoretical observations, and which make it possible to the reader to reproduce of it in him the interior obviousness for little that it takes time to look with attention each one of these images, that it lets them act on its own sensitivity and that it lets vibrate the sensitive and spiritual cords of his heart.

Quotations

Quotations of Kandinsky

• “But, just as the body, the spirit is strengthened and developed by the exercise. As a body which one neglects and who becomes weak and finally impotent, the spirit weakens. The innate feeling of the artist is as the talent of the Gospel which should not be buried. The artist who leaves his unemployed gifts is the lazy servant. ” ( Of spiritual in art and painting in particular )

• “painting is an art, and art as a whole is not a vain creation of objects which are lost in the vacuum, but a power which has a goal and must be used with the evolution and the refinement of the human heart, with the movement of the Triangle. It is the language which speaks with the heart, in the shape which is clean for him, of things which are the daily bread of the heart and which it can receive only in this form. ” ( Of spiritual in art and painting in particular )

• “Is beautiful what proceeds of an interior need for the heart. Is beautiful what is beautiful internally. ” ( Of spiritual in art and painting in particular )

• “Any phenomenon can be lived in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrarily related to the phenomena - they rise from the nature of the phenomena, of two their properties: Outside - Interior. ” ( Not and line on plan)

• “the geometrical point is an invisible being. It must thus be defined like immaterial. From the material point of view the point equalizes Zero. Thus the geometrical point is it, according to our design, ultimate and single the union of silence and the word . Therefore the geometrical point found its form material initially in the writing - it belongs to the language and means silence. ” ( Not and line on plan)

• “the geometrical line is an invisible being. It is the trace of the point moving, therefore its product. It was born from the movement - and that by the destruction from the supreme immobility of the point. Here the jump of statics occurs towards dynamics. The external forces which transform the point on line can be of very different nature. The diversity of the lines depends on the number of these forces and their combinations. ” ( Not and line on plan)

• “In this table, I was to tell the truth in search of a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and reached its greater force, that which he sought all the day, to which he aspired all the day. The sun melts any Moscow in a spot which, like an exaggerated tuba, makes enter in vibration all the interior being, the very whole heart. To return this hour seemed largest, most impossible to me of happinesses for an artist. These impressions were renewed each sunny day. They got a joy to me which upset me until the bottom of the heart, and which reached until the extase. ” ( Glances on the past )

• “the world is filled of resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of beings exerting a spiritual action. The dead matter is an alive spirit. ” (article entitled " On the question of the forme" in Glances on the past )

Quotations on Kandinsky

• “Kandinsky did not only produce one work whose sensory magnificence and the richness of invention eclipse that of its most remarkable contemporaries; it gave moreover an explicit theory of abstracted painting, exposing its principles with the highhest degree of accuracy and greatest clearness. Thus work painted doubles it of a whole of texts which light it at the same time as they do of Kandinsky one of principal the theorist of Article” (Michel Henry, Voir the invisible one, on Kandinsky )

• “Kandinsky was fascinated by the capacity of expression of the linear forms. The pathos of a force which enters in action and from which no obstacle comes to oppose the victorious effort, it is lyricism. It is because the straight line proceeds of the setting concerned of a single force to which nothing is opposed that its field is lyric. When two forces on the contrary are in presence and enter in conflict, as it is the case with the curve or with the broken line, we are in the drama. ” (Michel Henry, See the invisible one, on Kandinsky )

• “Kandinsky calls abstract the contents which painting must express, that is to say this invisible life which we are. So that the equation kandinskienne, to which we referred, is actually written as follows: Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract . ” (Michel Henry, See the invisible one, on Kandinsky )

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