🎨 Artistic space #21 - Kandinsky, the forerunner of abstract art
"It looks like the botched work of a talentless eight- or nine-year-old boy." Adolf Hitler defined the work of Wassily Kandinsky in 1937. The "doodles" of the Russian, which would eventually become admired works of art, were not the only ones that the German leader called "degenerate art".
Alongside them, a compilation of more than 500 works by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Modigliani, De Chirico, Chagall, Cezanne, Picasso, Grosz, Kirchner, Matisse or Klee was opened to the public in Munich, and subsequently travelled between Germany and Austria, with the sole aim of ridiculing the skill of such avant-garde geniuses.
Modern art was never a tasteful dish for the Führer and his regime. But even that could not extinguish its splendor. Wassily Kandinsky's brushstrokes matured well and, over the years, rose as the genesis of abstract painting. The Russian genius, however, never knew it.
As usually happens, and although he lived almost 80 years, the success came rather later. He was born on December 16, 1866, 148 years ago today. He studied law and economics, married his cousin and later moved to Germany, where he rubbed shoulders with expressionists, immersed himself fully in the world of art and founded the famous group of artists Blue Rider. In this first stage, he painted dark landscapes, which evolved towards an almost fauve intensity, and fantastic themes based on Russian folkloric traditions or in the German Middle Ages.
When World War I broke out, Wassily Kandinsky left Munich and headed for Switzerland with his second wife. Months later, in the midst of a European upheaval, he returned to Moscow, where he married for the third time in 1917. In 1922 he resumed his German life, where he stopped again to teach in a school that would mark his life, and above all his career, forever: the Bauhaus.
Towards 1931, the National Socialists began a large-scale campaign against this art academy, which was forced to close in 1932. And again, Wassily Kandinsky escaped. He went to France, where he died twelve years later. But halfway through his life, Wassily Kandinsky saw it clearly.
If in his first sketches, the lines represented objects and reproduced the real world, as he drank from the symbolism of color and psychology his canvases began to speak of his feelings, of the internal sensations that, the artist assured, "made his soul vibrate". Thus, Wassily Kandinsky was reformulating the traditional conceptions of aesthetic representation and came to head the squad of pictorial artists who dared to release modernity.
In response to their audacity, they only received criticism, contempt, mockery and even anger during their lifetime. But was Wassily Kandinsky's abstract art the same as that of his contemporaries? Is his abstraction the same as that of Picasso? What exactly did the Russian mean by his segments, his colors, his geometric forms, with all those compositions crammed with triangles, squares, and circles?
Wassily Kandinsky's work has nothing to do with the production of other contemporary names that were linked to Cubism or Impressionism. His singularity, completely removed from the western paradigm, is not only manifested but also reaffirmed in a compilation of theoretical texts with which the Russian accompanied his work. In them, the artist, who is also a theoretician, not only reflects on art but also illuminates his drawings, breaks them down and explains them.
They function, therefore, as a valuable entrance key to his inner whirlpool, to his way of understanding the line, the point, the tone, the seed of the finished canvas. In them, two terms proliferate without timidity, "interior" and "exterior", and a peculiar mysticism, a search for the spiritual, which constantly prevails in his work over the real, campaign at will through his meditations.
Wassily Kandinsky himself once recounted how his interest in capturing these hidden forces arose. One day, on returning from a hard day's work at dusk, he was impressed by the power of representation of a work, hanging in his house, in which it was not possible to recognize any form. He spoke, however," explained the Russian, "the pure secret language of color. It was one of his paintings, hung upside down. He understood then that the problem was in painting natural elements, that if he wanted to reach the essences he had to abandon the object.
It was at this moment that Wassily Kandinsky's talent changed direction. He stopped focusing on that outside world and, after a long and slow period of searching, began to elaborate his famous compositions, based on lines and dots.
His famous Compositions -ambitious inner visions-, Impressions -observations of the natural world- and Improvisations - spontaneous expressions of a state of mind-, vast series of paintings, with subtle references to the natural model, already devoured by rhythm, the values of colour and form, were born here, which became the starting point of 30 years of dedication to this spiritual universe. The message of peace and serenity, disguised in his first romantic and recharged works, becomes more than evident in the works of this last stage, more geometric, which created a singular order to enclose reality.
But the head also appears in his less late watercolors an interior restlessness that Wassily Kandinsky felt the need to externalize and that has a lot to do with the convulsive situation that Europe was going through a century ago. Some of his Improvisations and above all his Compositions evoke the feeling produced in him by the stamps of war, the cataclysm, the collision of East and West. What the Russian genius did was simply to change his language. He stopped telling the world what his eyes saw, to tell the world what they felt when they saw him.
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i was very exited to read this thank you good work
Thank you so much for your nice comment my dear @ferialabashir! <3
have a nice day! =D