Kandinsky, Wassily

Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944). Russian-born painter, printmaker, designer, teacher, and art theorist, who became a German citizen in 1927 and a French citizen in 1939, one of the most important figures in the development of abstract art. He was born in Moscow, the son of a prosperous tea merchant, and grew up in Odessa. From 1886 to 1892 he studied law and economics at Moscow University and immediately after graduation began lecturing in law there. In 1895 he worked briefly as art director for a printing firm in Moscow and in 1896 he turned down the offer of a professorship in law at the University of Tartu (also called Dorpat) in Estonia because he had decided to become a painter. He had been interested in art for some time, and was greatly stimulated by an exhibition of French paintings that he saw in Moscow in 1895 (or 1891?), particularly one of Monet's Haystack pictures, which he thought communicated something about colour and light rather than about haystacks: ‘I had the feeling that here the subject of the picture was in a sense the painting itself', he later recalled, ‘and I wondered if one couldn't go much further along the same route.’ In 1896 he moved to Munich, one of the major artistic centres of Europe; this was to be the focus of his activities until 1914, but he travelled widely in this period and spent a year in Paris, 1906–7. Initially he studied at the art school run by Anton Azbe (1861–1905), meeting Jawlensky and Werefkin there, then at the Munich Academy under Franz von Stuck in 1900. He was older and better educated than his contemporaries and tended to assume a position of leadership among them. One of his fellow students at the Academy was Paul Klee, who later became a close friend. Klee said that Kandinsky's ‘exceptionally handsome, open face inspired a certain deep confidence’ in those around him, and recalled that the student Kandinsky ‘used to mix his colours on the palette with the greatest diligence and a kind of scholarliness'. He was indeed so methodical and fastidious in his working methods (contrary to the standard image of artists) that he joked he could paint in evening dress. His father provided him with a generous allowance, and he lived well with his wife (who was also his cousin) in Schwabing, the bohemian quarter of Munich. In 1901 he was one of the founders of the exhibiting society Phalanx, which also ran an art school, at which he taught; one of his students was Gabriele Münter, who—following the breakdown of his marriage—became his lover until the First World War separated them (from 1908 they divided their time mainly between Munich and Murnau, a picturesque market town nearby, where they bought a house that became a meeting-place for avant-garde artists).

Kandinsky's work at the turn of the century was much influenced by Art Nouveau (Munich was one of its major centres) and had strong reminiscences of Russian folk art (his subjects included fanciful fairytale scenes). In the first decade of the century he exhibited in Berlin (at the Sezession), Dresden (with Die Brücke), Moscow, Paris (at the Salon d'Automne), Vienna, Warsaw, and elsewhere. Landscape was his chief subject at this time, and he constantly reworked and simplified his favourite motifs. His colouring became very intense, under the influence of Fauvism, and his forms became flatter and more attenuated until they began to lose their representational identity. In 1909 (the year in which he was one of the founders of the Neue Künstlervereinigung) he began a series of Improvisations, in 1910 of Compositions, and in 1911 of Impressions; in these he eliminated all representational content to arrive—in about 1910—at pure abstraction. The choice of names, deriving from musical terminology, was significant, for like the Symbolists he was interested in analogies between colours and sounds (a great lover of music, he could play the cello and piano and was a friend of Arnold Schoenberg, whose revolutionary atonality he equated with his own experiments). Kandinsky himself described how he came to recognize that colour and line in themselves could be sufficient vehicles for the expression of emotions; he returned to his studio one evening and failed to recognize one of his own paintings that was lying on its side, seeing in it a picture ‘of extraordinary beauty glowing with an inner radiance … Now I knew for certain that the subject-matter was detrimental for my paintings'. He discussed the issue of abstraction in his book Über das Geistige in der Kunst, which was published late in 1911 (it bears the date 1912) and is the best known of his writings (it has been translated into English as The Art of Spiritual Harmony (1914), On the Spiritual in Art (1946), and Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular (1947); it is now usually referred to as Concerning the Spiritual in Art). His views about the nature of art were influenced by mysticism and Theosophy; he did not completely repudiate representation, but he held that the ‘pure’ artist seeks to express only ‘inner and essential’ feelings and ignores the superficial and fortuitous.

Even some of Kandinsky's closest associates were puzzled and dismayed by his development of abstract art, and when one of his paintings was rejected by the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1911 he resigned and founded a rival organization, the Blaue Reiter. The brief lifetime of this group (broken up by the First World War) marked a period of intense achievement and growing fame for Kandinsky, during which his work was shown at the Knave of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow (1912), the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne (1912), the Armory Show in New York (1913), the ‘Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon’ at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin (1913), and the third exhibition of the Moderne Kunstkring in Amsterdam (1913). The major work he showed at the ‘Herbstsalon’ was Composition VI (Hermitage, St Petersburg, 1913), a huge, gloriously coloured apocalyptic vision. Other important paintings of the time include Light Picture and Black Lines (both Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1913), which he later singled out as Non-Objective works—totally abstract in concept rather than abstracted from nature.

As a Russian citizen, Kandinsky had to leave Munich at the outbreak of war in August 1914 and by the end of the year he was back in Moscow (via Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans). He had obtained a divorce in 1910 (following a legal separation in 1904) and in 1917 he made a very happy second marriage to a much younger Russian woman. This encouraged him to re-integrate into Russian life, and after the October Revolution in 1917 he became highly active as a teacher and administrator in various cultural organizations instituted by the new Soviet regime (see INKHUK, NARKOMPROS, and VKHUTEMAS). However, he was out of sympathy with the growing tide of ideas that subordinated fine art to industrial design in the service of the proletariat (even though he made designs for cups and saucers himself), and in 1922 he accepted an offer to take up a teaching post at the Bauhaus, where he remained until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. He directed the mural painting workshop and also taught elements of form and colour on the preliminary course followed by all students. His own painting of this period became more geometrical, but in addition to circles and triangles he used arrow-like forms and wavy lines in a manner that ran counter to the typical Bauhaus concern with geometrical purity (Swinging, Tate Gallery, London, 1925). The Bauhaus printing workshop produced his portfolio entitled Kleine Welten (Small Worlds, 1922–3), containing drypoints, lithographs and woodcuts and marking perhaps the height of his achievement as a graphic artist, and he also branched out into various types of design work (including stage sets and costumes and ceramic tiles). In 1926, to mark his 60th birthday, an exhibition of his work toured Germany, and by this time he was internationally renowned (his reputation was spread in the USA by the Blaue Vier).

In 1934 Kandinsky moved to Paris and spent the remaining decade of his life in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a much admired and respected figure. He continued to paint and write up to his death, although he had difficulty obtaining materials during the Second World War and often used board rather than canvas. The paintings of this last period represent something of a synthesis between the organic style of his Munich period and the more geometrical manner of his Bauhaus period, but there was also a new element of fantasy in the use of amoeba-like forms that show the impact of Surrealism (Sky Blue, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1940). His influence was immense, through both his paintings and his writings. Examples of his paintings are in many of the world's leading collections, with particularly rich representations in, for example, the Lenbachhaus, Munich (see LENBACH), the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris (many presented by the artist's widow). The best collection of his writings is Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, edited and translated by Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo (2 vols., 1982).