Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky E-Book

Wassily Kandinsky

• Herausgeber: Delphi Classics
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Masters of Art
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 180

Beschreibung

Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist, now celebrated as one of the pioneers of pure abstraction in modern painting. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of the world’s greatest artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Kandinsky’s collected works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)

* A comprehensive range of Kandinsky’s works over his whole career — over 300 paintings, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order
* Includes reproductions of rare works
* Features a special ‘Highlights’ section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information
* Enlarged ‘Detail’ images, allowing you to explore Kandinsky’s celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books
* Hundreds of images in stunning colour – highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smart phones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the paintings
* Easily locate the paintings you want to view
* Includes Kandinsky's celebrated treatise CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART
* Scholarly ordering of plates into chronological order Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art books CONTENTS: The Highlights
ODESSA PORT
PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER
THE BLUE RIDER
COUPLE RIDING
CEMETERY AND VICARAGE IN KOCHEL
MURNAU-VIEW WITH RAILWAY AND CASTLE
PICTURE WITH ARCHER
LYRICAL
IMPROVISATION 26
SMALL PLEASURES
BLACK STROKES I
MOSCOW I
RED OVAL
STOREYS
COMPOSITION VIII
YELLOW-RED-BLUE
SEVERAL CIRCLES
COLOURFUL ENSEMBLE
SKY BLUE
TEMPERED ELAN The Paintings
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS
ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS The Treatise
CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles

Leseprobe

Wassily Kandinsky

(1866–1944)

Contents

The Highlights

ODESSA PORT

PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER

THE BLUE RIDER

COUPLE RIDING

CEMETERY AND VICARAGE IN KOCHEL

MURNAU-VIEW WITH RAILWAY AND CASTLE

PICTURE WITH ARCHER

LYRICAL

IMPROVISATION 26

SMALL PLEASURES

BLACK STROKES I

MOSCOW I

RED OVAL

STOREYS

COMPOSITION VIII

YELLOW-RED-BLUE

SEVERAL CIRCLES

COLOURFUL ENSEMBLE

SKY BLUE

TEMPERED ELAN

The Paintings

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

The Treatise

CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

© Delphi Classics 2015

Version 1

Masters of Art Series

Wassily Kandinsky

By Delphi Classics, 2015

The Highlights

Moscow, c. 1900 — Kandinsky’s birthplace

Kandinsky, 1905

THE HIGHLIGHTS

In this section, a sample of some of Kandinsky’s most celebrated works is provided, with concise introductions, special ‘detail’ reproductions and additional biographical images.

ODESSA PORT

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. During his school years he was interested in many subjects, including law and economics. In later years, the artist recalled his early fascination and stimulated interest in colour, which later developed through concepts of colour symbolism and psychology. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Though successful in this profession, to the extent that he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat, Kandinsky was much more interested in painting studies, including life-drawing, sketching and anatomy.

In 1896, at the age of 30, he took the surprising step of giving up a promising career teaching law and economics to enrol in an art school in Munich. At first he was not granted official admission and had to begin learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Claude Monet. He was particularly interested in the impressionistic portrayal of Haystacks, due to the composition’s powerful sense of colour, which was almost independent of the represented objects themselves. Odessa Port, Kandinsky’s first recorded oil canvas, which was completed in 1898 and now hangs in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, demonstrates the artist’s early interest in Impressionism. The canvas depicts an overcast day in the almost empty port, with a lone ship taking up the main focal point of the image. Taken from a low viewpoint, the ship appears large and almost threatening, as the dark mast propels up into the hazy sky. The depiction of the water surrounding the hull is where the composition is most impressionistic. The division of shadow and light on the sea’s surface is portrayed through thick brushstrokes, presenting the ‘impression’ of movement and reflection, similar to how Monet and the Impressionists convey the movement of water.

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The Port of Odessa today

Kandinsky as a child, aged five

PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER

Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was a German expressionist painter at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. She came from an upper middle-class background and her parents supported her wish to become an artist. Münter took classes at Munich’s progressive new Phalanx School, where she studied woodcut techniques, sculpture, painting and printmaking. Soon after she began taking classes, Münter became attached to Kandinsky, who was the Phalanx School’s director. He was the first teacher that had actually taken Münter’s painting abilities seriously. In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky invited her to join him at his summer painting classes just south of Munich in the Alps. She accepted and their relationship became intimate. Kandinsky and Münter’s professional and personal relationship lasted for twelve years and Kandinsky was married while he was with Münter. They spent a great deal of time together travelling through Europe, including Holland, Italy and France, as well as North Africa. It was during this time that they met Rousseau and Matisse. Münter and Kandinsky fell in love with the village of Murnau in southern Bavaria. Later on, Münter bought a house in this city and spent much of her life there. Together, they helped establish the Munich-based avant-garde group called the New Artists’ Association.

This 1905 portrait of Gabriele Münter, now housed in Munich’s Stadtische Galerie, is a particularly personal depiction of the artist’s lover. The subject looks challengingly at the viewer, a hint of a smile on her lips, while her eyes hint at a more sombre emotion. Thick brushstrokes delineate her white garment, once again stressing Kandinsky’s early interest with Impressionism. The limited background detail helps to serve as a foil to the lucent skin and detailed shadowing of the sitter’s face. Oddly, the focal point of the composition is a large bow worn by Münter, which is also depicted with large blue brushstrokes, exerting a dominating shadow around its border.

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Gabriele Münter, c.1907

THE BLUE RIDER

In 1911 Kandinsky, Münter and Franz Marc founded the Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Within the group, artistic approaches and aims varied amongst artists, though they shared the common desire to express spiritual truths through art. They championed modern art, the connection between visual art and music, the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting in its move towards abstraction. Der Blaue Reiter was united in the rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, a group that Kandinsky had founded in 1909, which they now believed had become too strict and traditional.

The name of the movement is the title of a painting that Kandinsky created in 1903, but it is unclear whether it is the origin of the name of the movement, as Professor Klaus Lankheit learned that the title of the painting had been overwritten. Kandinsky wrote twenty years later that the name is derived from Marc’s enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky’s fondness for using rider motifs, combined with a shared love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal, as explained in his 1911 book On the Spiritual in Art.

Der Blaue Reiter organised exhibitions in 1911 and 1912 that toured Germany. They also published an almanac featuring contemporary, primitive and folk art, along with children’s paintings. In 1913 they exhibited in the first German Herbstsalon. The group was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Franz Marc and August Macke were killed in combat. Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky were forced to move back to Russia because of their Russian citizenship. There were also differences in opinion within the group. As a result, Der Blaue Reiter was short-lived, lasting for only three years from 1911 to 1914.

The Blue Rider is perhaps Kandinsky’s most important painting from the early 1900’s, before he had fully developed his abstract style of music as sound. The painting illustrates a hooded rider cloaked in blue, speeding through a greenish meadow. The painting’s intentional abstractness had led many art theorists to project their own representations into the figure, some seeing a child in the arms of the blue rider. Encouraging viewers to participate their own interpretations of his art was a technique that Kandinsky would use to great effect in his later works, as they became more and more abstract as his career developed.

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The members of the Blue Rider group on the balcony of Kandinsky’s apartment at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich, 191. From left to right: Maria Marc, Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler Sr., Wassily Kandinsky (seated), Heinrich Campendonk and Thomas von Hartmann.

Blue Horse I by Franz Marc, 1911

COUPLE RIDING

In 1889, Kandinsky was part of an ethnographic research group that travelled to the Vologda region, north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past, he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colours that upon entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting. This experience and his studies of the region’s folk art, principally the use of bright colours on a dark background, inspired many of his early canvases. A few years later, Kandinsky would famously compare painting as composing music: “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”.

In Couple Riding (1906), housed in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, the artist depicts an elegantly dressed man and a woman, riding a horse in the foreground, in what appears to be a chivalrous scene of ancient times. However, the canvas combines two worlds, with the development of the new world in the background, separated by a glittering wide river. This duality gives a sense of fragmentation, whereby the painting depicts two worlds in opposition to each other.

The painting is composed of small spots of pure colour and larger brushstrokes of vivid colour, as opposed to contour lines. The only source of light in the otherwise dark painting is emitted from these luminous points of colour within the distant city skyline. The sky in the distance is bright with visible strokes of sea foam green and purple paint, representing light emitted from the city in the background. The small spots that make up the light in the background are also present in the foreground, where they resemble falling leaves, echoing the tapestry on the back of the horse.

Kandinsky’s depiction of the competing worlds of historic tradition and the emerging modern metropolis reinforces the idea of fragmentation experienced during the early twentieth century. The transformation of the modern city, along with the spread of modernity, creates distance from the anachronistic old world of the foreground lovers, as symbolised by the river spanning the width of the painting.

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CEMETERY AND VICARAGE IN KOCHEL

Completed in 1909 and housed in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, this canvas was painted in the district of Bad Tolz-Wolfratshausen in Bavaria on the shores of Kochelsee. Kochel was the home of Kandinsky’s friend and fellow Expressionist painter Franz Marc, with whom he had established Der Blaue Reiter Movement in 1911. The image portrays a wintry scene of the town’s cemetery and vicarage, with snow and blue shadows on the ground.  The influence of Marc’s vivid colouring is evident in the painting, while once again loose brushstroke can be clearly seen, as the houses and buildings seem only tentatively to maintain their forms. A patch of plants in the right foreground is covered with snow, diverting our attention from the dull earthy colours of the buildings.

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Franz Marc (1880–1916) was a painter, printmaker and one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.

MURNAU-VIEW WITH RAILWAY AND CASTLE

After 1908 Kandinsky settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau with Münter, who had become in effect his common-law wife. Also dated to 1909, the following plate depicts a view most likely seen from their garden. A large train hurtles across the composition, entirely depicted in ominous black, trailing a threatening shadow that appears to corrupt the land itself. The painting embodies a subject that was to trouble the artist often during the period before the First World War: the interference of modernity and materialism on the traditional and spiritual world. In the canvas, mechanised violence not only threatens the idyllic and beautiful countryside in Münter’s garden, but the world itself that the artist knows seems under risk of being radically changed by the dark newcomer.

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Murnau today

PICTURE WITH ARCHER

This 1909 canvas is a vibrant scene, presenting a patchwork surface that can be difficult to decipher shapes and forms, shying away from traditional representation and nearing pure abstraction. Picture with Archer draws inspiration from the Parisian Fauves, though Kandinsky adds an Eastern landscape suffused with a folktale atmosphere. Galloping under the trees of a radiant countryside, a horseman turns in his saddle, aiming his bow. In the left foreground, several men in Russian dress stand, while behind them a house and domed tower can be glimpsed, with two bulbous mountain shapes in the distance, marking the picture’s centre. The lone rider with his archaic weapon, the traditional costumes, Russian icons and the rural setting evoke a sense of fantasy and poetic romance.

The horse and rider motif was one that Kandinsky would come back to again and again. The theme was inspired by St. George, the heroic Christian saint often depicted killing a dragon while on horseback, who was a central character in both Russian and Bavarian folk art. For Kandinsky, the rider symbolised his own crusade against conventional values and his belief that art could lead the way to spiritual renewal. The extraordinary range and depth of colours indicate the excitement and promise the artist was feeling at this time while living with Münter in the Bavarian town of Murnau.

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LYRICAL

Housed in Rotterdam’s Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, this 1911 oil painting reprises the theme of a rider and horse.  In the same year Kandinsky published Klänge (Sounds), consisting of thirty-eight prose-poems, which he wrote between 1909 and 1911 and illustrated with fifty-six woodcuts. In the woodcuts Kandinsky veiled his subject matter, creating increasingly indecipherable images, though the horse and rider was his recurring symbol for overcoming objective representation. The 1911 oil painting Lyrical is similar to one of the woodcuts in Klänge, in which Kandinsky has rendered this horse and rider at full gallop with the most minimal of means. Using only a few well placed lines and patches of colour, the familiar leitmotif is created. The artist attains a synthesis of emotion and intellect through his free use of form, line and colour.

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A woodcut from Klänge (1911)

IMPROVISATION 26

Kandinsky liked to use musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings “improvisations” and described more elaborate works as “compositions.” His paintings from this period are large, expressive coloured masses evaluated independently from forms and lines, overlapping freely to form paintings of extraordinary force. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world, expressing instead the inner feelings of the soul in an immediate art form. Kandinsky sought to achieve the same immediate effect of music in his abstract painting. He used the Improvisations to frame sensations received from “inward nature,” visualising inner visions and imaginative thoughts. With these works, the artist genuinely expanded the boundaries of visual art, breaking new ground with regard to what it could represent. Between 1909 and 1914, he created more than thirty-five Improvisations, most of which similarly bear associative subtitles, offering an especially clear illustration of his gradual path to abstraction. To Kandinsky, abstraction meant a sustained effort to conceal and encode representational content in order to convey spiritual ideas in physical form by unfolding their “inner harmony.”

In Improvisation 26 (1912)Kandinsky adds to a skyline a medley of forms floating in space. The strong colours and various shapes, lines and curves are almost entirely abstract, with scarce reference to representation. Only a few shapes, which on closer inspection, can be recognisable as representational in their depiction of form.  The red patch on the right of the composition appears to be a figure, which, in relation to the red arch and six back lines, suggests a rower. Like the recurring symbol of a rider, the rower was often used by the artist as part of his iconography to convey themes of forward movement, liberty and abandonment to the senses, as also used in his later work Small Pleasures.

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SMALL PLEASURES

Now housed in New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, this large canvas from 1913 was produced at a busy time in the artist’s life, was he was organising exhibitions and continuing to further develop his new means of abstract expression in painting. Small Pleasures is centred upon two hills, each crowned by a citadel. On the right-hand side there is a boat with three oars, which is riding a storm under a threatening black cloud. To the bottom left a couple is depicted at a steep angle to the hill and above them three horsemen can be seen at full gallop, while the fiery sun obtrudes the corner. The actual interpretation of these elements has been the subject of much debate since the recent discovery of an unpublished essay on the painting by Kandinsky in June 1913. It appears to discourage the irony which some have read into an imagined discrepancy between the title and the painting, nullifying the heavy apocalyptic signification of the imagery. In the essay Kandinsky even writes of the ‘joyfulness’ of execution he felt at the time. Therefore, the painting is now viewed as a celebration of Kandinsky’s style during this period, affirming the spiritual and practical pleasures he manifestly derived from painting, ‘pouring a lot of small pleasures on to the canvas’.

Though Small Pleasures has a chaotic appearance, it was in no means a product of spontaneity. The various modes of paint application and the complexity of pigment selection were planned with much forethought. The way colours are washed and blurred together and are seldom contained by bounding lines is typical of the artist’s work at this time. The predominantly curvilinear aspect of the work, however, is undermined by the angular geometry of the citadel, perhaps hinting at Kandinsky’s later Bauhaus style. There are few monochrome patches in the composition, underlining the large scale of execution and great pleasure he took in his work. He wrote of the ‘fine, very fine lines’ scrupulously worked in with an extra-thin brush, and of his successful suppression of ‘lustre’ from the gold and silver areas.

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BLACK STROKES I

By 1913 Kandinsky’s aesthetic theories and aspirations were well developed. He valued painterly abstraction as the most effective stylistic means through which to reveal hidden aspects of the empirical world. Expressing subjective realities and aspiring to the metaphysical, his works tended to offer a regenerative vision of the future. Kandinsky wanted the evocative power of carefully chosen and dynamically interrelated colours, shapes and lines to obtain specific responses from viewers of his works. The inner vision of an artist, he believed, could thereby be translated into a universally accessible statement. Completed in 1913, Black Lines is among the first of Kandinsky’s truly non-objective paintings, formed of undulating coloured ovals traversed by animated brushstrokes. The network of thin, agitated lines indicates a graphic, two-dimensional sensibility, as the floating, vibrantly hued forms suggest various spatial depths. The contrast between glowing streaks of colour and the characteristic graphic style is reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy, which the artist admired throughout his life.

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MOSCOW I

When Germany declared war on Russia in 1914, Kandinsky was forced to leave Munich and his German companion Münter to return to Moscow. He lamented: “Of the 16 years that I have been living in Germany, I have given myself entirely to the German art world. How am I now suddenly supposed to feel myself a foreigner?” Aged 50, he was starting a new life and the move to Moscow marked a profound break. The year 1915 was a time of depression and self-doubt, during which he did not paint a single picture.

However, the following year things were to greatly improve. In a letter to Münter, dated June 1916, he wrote: “I felt that my old dream was closer to coming true. You know that I dreamt of painting a big picture expressing joy, the happiness of life and the universe. Suddenly I feel the harmony of colours and forms that come from this world of joy.” During this period Kandinsky painted Moscow I (1916). He wrote, “I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow — taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture — weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra.” Moscow I reprises many of the romantic fairy-tale motifs of Kandinsky’s early paintings, fused with dramatic forms and colours. The artist explained: “The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s soul vibrating.”

The October Revolution would change everything for the artist. As the son of a tea merchant, he had been independently wealthy, but after the Russian Revolution, during which a Communist system replaced the Tsarist rule, Kandinsky lost his property during a land redistribution. Consequently, his plans to build a large studio took second place to financial concerns such as selling work and finding employment. World War I and then the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 slowed his artistic production, partly due to a lack of funds, but also due to his work organising art institutions for the newly formed government.

In Russia, Kandinsky came into contact with younger avant-garde artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko, who practiced a simpler, more reductive form of abstraction. Kandinsky’s spiritual approach was out of step with the dominant principles of rationalism and pure geometry. Due to his artistic isolation and wartime privations, Kandinsky made the decision to leave Russia in 1921, never to return.