Wassily Kandinsky Posters Prints Fine Art

Improvisation No. 23 Art Print

Composizione VIII Art Print

Yellow Red Blue

Merry Structure Art Print

Color Studies Art Print

Blue Art Print

Cercle Jaune Art Print

Quiet Harmony Art Print

Spitze in Bogen

Helles Bild Art Print

Black Lines Art Print

Circles in Circle

Gebogene Spitze Art Print

La Grande Piazza a Kiev

Murnau Art Print

Born in Moscow, Kandinsky lived his early childhood in Odessa. When he was a youth he registered at the University of Moscow and selected to study law and economics. Being rather prosperous in his profession he was offered a professorship chair of Roman Law at the University of Dorpat where he began painting studies, primarily life-drawing, sketching and anatomy at the age of thirty.

In 1896 he relocated to Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He returned to Moscow in 1914 after World War I erupted. He was unsympathizing to the prescribed theories on art in Moscow and turned back to Germany in 1921. There he instructed at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis shut it down in 1933. He then relocated to France where he resided for the rest of his life, and converted a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

Kandinsky's conception of strictly abstract work came after a long time period of growth and ripening of extreme theoretical thought founded on his private artistic experiences. He titled this idolatry to inner beauty, excitation of spirit, and deep spiritual want inner necessity, which was a nuclear facet of his art.

Akzent in Rosa

In Black Circle

Little Worlds Serigraph

All Saints Day

Trente 1937 Art Print

Tribute to Grohmann

Weiches Hart Art Print

Dominant Curve Art Print

Kleine Freuden Art Print

Balancement Art Print

Frohlicher AufstiegArt Print

Hommage a Grohmann Art Print

Kandinsky gained his knowledge from an assortment of sources during his early days and life in Moscow. In later years, he would remember being intrigued and remarkably energized by color as a youngster. The enthrallment with color symbolism and color psychology persisted as he grew, though he appears to have made no effort to study art. In 1889 he was took part of an ethnographic inquiry group that journeyed to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In Looks on the Past he refers that the homes and churches were embellished with such shimmering colors that, upon going into them, he had the opinion that he was walking into a painting. The experience and his study of the folk art in the region, specifically the use of brilliant colors on a dark background, was mirrored in a great deal his early work. A a couple of years afterward, he first associated the act of painting to making music in the style for which he would later become famed and wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings."

It was not until later in his life in 1896 at the age of thirty, that Kandinsky gave up a auspicious career instructing law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. He was not at once awarded admittance in Munich and started out studying art on his own. Also in 1896, before departing Moscow, he came across an showing of paintings by Monet and was especially taken with the illustrious impressionistic Haystacks which, to him, had a potent sense of color almost separate of the objects themselves.

Kandinsky's paintings did not stress any human images. An exception is Sunday, Old Russia (1904) where Kandinsky renovates a highly colorful (and no question imaginary) view of provincials and nobles before the walls of a town. Riding Couple (1907) portrays a man on horseback, carrying a woman with tenderness and concern as they ride past a Russian town with glowing walls across a river. All the same the horse is dulled, while the foliages in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river sparkle with spots of color and luminosity. The work displays the influence of pointillism and works to blend back-, middle-, and foreground into a light surface. Fauvism is also evident in these early works. Colors are applied to show the artist's experience of subject matter not to identify clinical nature.

Dusk Art Print

Murnau-Garden II

Stencil Serigraph

Green Composition Art Print

Church in Murnau

Impression III Concert

Possibly the most crucial of Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider (1903) which presents a humble mantled figure on a hastening horse hurrying through a stony meadow. The rider's cloak is a moderate blue, and the shadow cast off is a duskier blue. In the foreground are more shapeless blue shadows, presumptively the counter parts of the autumn trees in the backdrop. The Blue Rider in the painting is conspicuous, but not distinctly specified, and the horse has an affected gait - which Kandinsky must have recognized. A few consider that a second figure, a child maybe, is being bore by the rider, although this could just as well be an additional shadow from a lonely rider. This case of deliberate disconnection permitting viewers to take part in the conception of the artwork would turn to an progressively intended formula used by the artist in later years culminating in his eminent abstract expressionist works of the 1911-1914. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky records the rider more as a series of colors than of precise details. In and of itself, The Blue Rider is not surpassing in that respect when equated to modern painters, but it does show the focus that Kandinsky would adopt merely a few years after.

From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky passed a good deal of time moving around Europe, he was an affiliate of the Blue Rose art group symbolist group of Moscow until he came to reside in the modest Bavarian town of Murnau. The Blue Mountain (1908-1909) was painted in this era and shows some of his trend towards stark abstraction. A highland of blue is flanked by two wide trees, one yellow, and one red. A progression of unspecified sort with three riders and respective others crosses at the base. The expressions, clothing, and saddles of the riders are all a single color, and neither they nor the walking figures exhibit any actual detail. The noticeable use of color in The Blue Mountain, exemplify Kandinsky's move toward art in which the color itself is introduced independently of form.

His paintings of this period are produced with deep and very communicative colored masses appraised independently from forms and lines which function no more to specify them but are laid over and overlap in a very free way to form paintings of an exceptional power.

The influence of music has entrenched itself as a principal in the birthing of abstract art, as it is abstract by design it does not endeavor to correspond to the outer world but instead to visualize in an direct way the internal notions of the human soul. Kandinsky occasionally employed musical terms to assign his works; he termed numerous impulsive paintings improvisations, while he titled compositions others often more careful and worked at length, a term which vibrated in him like a appeal.

In addition to painting Kandinsky formed a voice as an art theoretician. In truth, Kandinsky's influence on the chronicle of Western art is born possibly more by his theoretic works than by his paintings. He assisted to establish the Neue Künstlervereinigung München New Artists' Association and was the groups president in 1909. The group was ineffectual in attempting to incorporate the more extremist approach of those similar to Kandinsky with more conservative thoughts of art and the group disbanded in late 1911. Kandinsky then acted to start a new group The Blue Rider with similarly inclined artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc. The group published an almanac, named The Blue Rider Almanac, and booked two exhibits. Additional were projected, but the eruption of World War I in 1914 terminated these programs and transported Kandinsky back to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.

Kandinsky's essays in The Blue Rider Almanac and the article On the Spiritual In Art, which was published at about the equivalent time, functioned as both a refutation and advancement of abstract art, as well as an assessment that all classes of art were evenly able to achieve a degree of spirituality. He thought that color could be applied in a painting as something independent and separate from a noticeable description of an object or other form.

During the years 1918 to 1921, Kandinsky addressed with the social growing politics of Russia, he joined forces in the arenas of art education and museum reforms. He dedicated his time to artistic instructing with a program founded on form and color analysis, as well as taking part in the organization of the artistic culture Institute at Moscow. He painted trivial amounts during this time period. In 1916 he met Nina Andreievskaia, who in the next year he married. In 1921 Kandinsky accepted the delegation to go to Germany to attend the Bauhaus of Weimar, on the invitation of its founder, the architect Walter Gropius. The following year, the Soviets formally prohibited all forms of abstract art, pronouncing them as adverse for socialist ideals.

The Bauhaus was an forward-looking architecture and art school established by Walter Gropius. Its mission included the blending of plastic arts with applied arts, shone in its learning methods founded on the theoretical and pragmatic application of the plastic arts synthesis. Kandinsky instructed the primary design class for novices, the class on advanced theory in addition to as directing painting courses of study and a workshop where he filled out his color theory with fresh factors of form psychology. The growth of his works on styles study, in particular on point and various forms of lines, resulted in issue of his second leading theoretical book Point and Line to Plane in 1926.

Geometrical elements assumed accelerative importance in his instruction as well as in his painting, in particular circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves. This time period was a point of extreme output. The exemption of which is defined in each of his works by the handling of planes fertile in colors and splendid gradations as in the painting Yellow - red - blue (1925), where Kandinsky demonstrates his aloofness from constructiveness and suprematism fronts whose influence was growing at this time.

The extensive two meter wide painting that is Yellow - red - blue comprises of a quantity of principal forms: a vertical yellow rectangle, a somewhat bowed red cross and a prominent dark blue circle, with a mass of straight black or curving lines, arcs of circles, monochromous circles and dusting of colored checkerboards add to its ethereal complexity. This mere visual recognition of forms and of the main colored masses demonstrate on the canvas only matches a first view of the inner world of the work whose correct admiration calls for a much broader reflection not exclusively of forms and colors caught up in the painting, but as well of their relation, their unconditioned placement and their relative disposition on the canvas, of their entirely and mutual concord.

In front of the aggression of the right political parties, the Bauhaus departed Weimar and settled down in Dessau from 1925. Shadowing a savage smear crusade from the Nazis, the Bauhaus shut at Dessau in 1932. The school engaged in its actions in Berlin until its disintegration in July 1933. Kandinsky then exited Germany and relocated to Paris.

In Paris he was rather detached for abstract painting, especially geometric abstract forms, was not accepted, the artistic fashions comprising principally Impressionism and cubism. Kandinsky resided in a humble apartment and produced his art in a studio fabricated in the living room. Biomorphic forms with lissome and non-geometric schemes come out in his paintings; forms which indicate outwardly microscopic organisms but which forever convey the artist's innermost life. He expended original color themes which elicit Slavonic fashionable art and which are akin to treasured watermark works. He also at times combined sand with paint to give a coarse texture to his paintings.

This point tallies, in truth, to a immense synthesis of his preceding work, of which he exploited all elements, even enriching it. In 1936 and 1939 he painted his two final outstanding pieces; canvases especially careful and slowly rived that he had not developed for several years. Composition IX is a painting with extremely counterpointed potent diagonals and whose central form grant the notion of a human embryo in the womb. The modest squares of colors and the colored banding appear to jump out against the black background of Composition X, as stars' shards or filaments, while ambiguous hieroglyphs with pastel flavors adorn the ample maroon bulk, which looks to float in the top left corner of the canvas.

In Kandinsky's works, a few characteristics are apparent while careful affects are more discrete and obscured; they show themselves only progressively to those who reach the attempt to heighten their association with his work. He meant his forms, which he subtly accorded and placed, to vibrate with the perceivers own soul.

Writing that "music is the ultimate teacher," Kandinsky ventured on the beginning seven of his ten Compositions. The initiatory three exist only in black-and-white photographs shot by fellow artist and admirer, Gabriele Münter. Although studies, sketches, and improvisations subsist in particular of Composition II, a Nazi raid on the Bauhaus in the 1930s led to the confiscation of Kandinsky's first three Compositions. They were exhibited in the State-sponsored showing "Degenerate Art" then demolished along with works by Paul Klee, Franz Marc and other modern artists.

Molded by Theosophy and the sensing of a approaching New Age, a primary subject among Kandinsky's first seven Compositions is the Apocalypse, or the death of the world as we know it. Penning of the "artist as prophet" in his book, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky made paintings in the years directly leading to World War I exhibiting a approaching cataclysm which would change single and social reality. Nurtured an Orthodox Christian, Kandinsky called upon the Jewish and Christian mythology of Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, Christ's Anastasis and Resurrection, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, respective Russian tales, and the familiar mythological experiences of death and reincarnation. Never seeking to depict any one of these tales as a narrative, he utilized their obscured imagery as symbols of the pilots of death rebirth and destruction conception he felt were at hand to the pre-World War I world.

As he expressed in Concerning the Spiritual In Art Kandinsky sensed that an genuine artist producing art from "an internal necessity" dwells in the tip of an upwardly ascending triangle. This advancing triangle is infiltrating and continuing into tomorrow. Consequently, what was curious or unimaginable yesterday is banality now; what is avant garde and only realized by the few nowadays is basic tomorrow. The modern artist/prophet endures alone at the crest of this triangle arriving at new breakthroughs and introducing tomorrow's world. Kandinsky had become mindful of late developments in sciences, as well as the progressions of contemporary artists who had added to radically fresh ways of considering and knowing the world.

Composition IV and succeeding paintings are mainly interested with arousing a spiritual rapport in spectator and artist. As in his painting of the apocalypse by water Composition VI, Kandinsky places the viewer in the position of undergoing these epic myths by interpreting them into modern terms along with essential sensations of despair, flurry, importunity, and disarray. This spiritual sharing of viewer-painting-artist prophet is indefinable but may be traced to the boundaries of words and envisions.

As the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac essays and hypothecating with composer Arnold Schoenberg suggest, Kandinsky in addition to conveyed this manduction between artist and spectator as being at the same time acquirable to the respective sense faculties as well as to the mind synesthesia. Auditory sense tones and harmonizes as he painted, Kandinsky hypothesized that, for illustrations, yellow is the color of middle-C on a piano, a brazen trumpet blast; black is the color of resolution and the finishes of things; and that compounding and connections of colors bring forth vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. Kandinsky besides evolved an complex theory of geometric figures and their kinships, exacting, for instance, that the circle is the most serene shape and symbolizes the human soul. These possibilities are illustrated in Point and Line to Plane.

During the months of studies Kandinsky constructed in readying for Composition IV he became fatigued when working on a painting and took a walk. In the meanwhile, Gabriele Münter neatened his studio and unwittingly moved his canvas on its side. On coming back and considering the canvas yet not placing it Kandinsky fell to his knees and wept, pronouncing it was the most exquisite painting he had viewed. He had been freed from the bond to the object. As once he first looked at Monet's Haystacks, the experience would alter his life and the story of Western art.

In a another case with Münter on the Bavarian Abstract Expressionist era, Kandinsky was molding his Composition VI. From almost six months of analyzing and readying, he had meant the work to put forward a flood, baptism, devastation, and rebirth at the same time. Subsequently outlining the work on a mural-sized wood board, he became blocked and could not go on. Münter told him that he was ensnared in his intellect and not achieving the true theme of the picture. She advised he merely echo the word "uberflut" - "deluge" or "flood" - and concentrate on its auditory sensation instead of its meaning. Repeating this word similar a mantra, Kandinsky painted and finished the significant work in only a three day time period.

The analytic thinking attained by Kandinsky on casts and on colors does not upshot from mere impulsive ideas connections, but from the inner feel of the painter who has extended years producing abstract paintings of an astounding sensory richness, working on forms and with colors, honoring for a long time and inexhaustibly his own paintings and those of fellow artists, marking only their subjective and hapless consequence on the extreme sensitivity to colors of his artist and poet psyche.

So it is a strictly unobjective form of experience that everybody may do and reiterate selecting the time to look at his paintings and allowing dissembling the forms and the colors on his personal existing sensibility. These are not technological and objective reflections, but inner observances radically prejudiced and strictly phenomenological which is a issue of what the French philosopher Michel Henry terms the sheer subjectivity or the unconditioned phenomenological spirit.

First published in 1911, Kandinsky equates the spiritual life of human beings to a great Triangle similar to a pyramid; the artist has the labor and the mission of directing viewers to the crown by the usage of his gift. The point of the Triangle is comprised only by a few individuals who bestow the empyrean bread to men. It is a spiritual Triangle which motions ahead and ascends slowly, even if it occasionally stays unmoving. During indulgent periods, souls descend to the base of the Triangle and human beings only seek for the outward success and neglect solely spiritual forces.

When we view colorations on the painter's palette, a duplicate outcome occurs: a strictly physical result on the eye, enamored by the beauty of colors foremost, which elicits a jubilant notion similar to when we consume a delicacy. But this force can be a great deal richer and induce an emotion and a palpitation of the soul, or an internal reverberations which is a purely spiritual outcome, by which the color concerns the soul.

The inner requirement is for Kandinsky the rule of the art and the base of forms and colors concordance. He specifies it as the precept of the competent contact of the form with the human soul. All form is the border of a surface by a different one; it has an inner capacity which is the effect it brings forth on the one who takes it in with attention. This inner essential is the right of the artist to an infinite freedom, but this freedom turns a crime if it is not established on such a need. The art work is delivered from the inner requirement of the artist in a cryptic, enigmatic and Orphic way, and then it develops an independent life; it becomes an individual subject vivified by a spiritual breath.

The foremost apparent attributes we can ascertain when we look at detached color and let it act solo; it is on one side the warmth or the frigidity of the colored tone, and on the other side the lucidity or the obscureness of the tone.

The warmth is a leaning to yellow, the coldness a leaning to blue. The yellow and the blue form the first large contrast, which is changing. The yellow owns an unconventional movement and the blue a concentric movement, a yellow surface appears to get nearer to us, while a blue surface looks to move away. The yellow is the usually planetary color whose fury can be agonizing and combative. The blue is the generally ethereal color which calls forth a deep calm. The blending of blue with yellow gives the total fixedness and the calm, the green.

Lucidity is a inclination to the white and obscurity a leaning to the black. The white and the black form the second large contrast, which is motionless. The white behaves similar to a rich and sheer quiet brimming with possibilities. The black is a void without possibility, it is an unending silence without hope, it likens to death. That is why any other color comes across so powerfully on its neighbors. The combining of white with black results in gray, which has no dynamic effect and whose affective tonality is close that of green. The gray represents to fixedness without hope; it inclines to desperation when it goes dark and recovers small hope when it brightens.

The red is a warmth color, very existing, vital and excited, it has an vast drive, it is a motility in oneself. Fused with black, it heads to brown which is a laborious color. Intermingled with yellow, it earns in warmth and brings about the orange which owns an enlightening movement on the environment. Mixed with blue, it backs away from humanity to establish the purple, which is chilled red. The red and the green form the third great contrast, the orange and the purple the fourth.

Kandinsky breaks down in this writing the geometrical components which compile all painting, principally the point and the line, along with the tangible conformation and the physical surface on which the artist draws or paints and which he terms the staple plane or BP. He does not analyze them on an neutral and outside point of view, but on the point of view of their intimate effect on the living subjectiveness of the beholder who views them and lets them move on his sensibility.

The point is in practice a small stain of color put by the artist on the canvas. So the point used by the painter is not a geometric point, it is not a mathematical abstraction, it possesses a certain extension, a form and a color. This form can be a square, a triangle, a circle, like a star or even more complex. The point is the most concise form, but according to its placement on the basic plane it will take a different tonality. It can be alone and isolated or put in resonance with other points or lines.

The line is the result of a power, it is a charge on which a existing force has been practiced in a utilized direction, the force used on the pencil or on the paint brush by the hand of the artist. The resulting linear forms can be of many cases: a straight line which consequences from a single force used in a individual direction, an angled line which leads from the alternation of two powers with dissimilar directions, or a arched or curled line raised by the effect of two forces behaving at the same time. A level can be reached by condensation, from a line revolved around one of its conclusions.

The nonobjective consequence brought about by a line hinges on its orientation: the horizontal line equates to the anchor on which man balances and propels, to flatness, it owns a dark and cold emotional key like with black or blue, while the vertical line represents to height which offers no back up, it has a glowing and warm key close from white and yellow. A diagonal owns by effect a more warm or cold feel harmonizing to its leaning according to the horizontal and to the vertical.

A pressure which deploys itself without obstruction as the one which acquires a straight line represents to lyricism, while numerous forces which face or irritate each other constitute a dramatic event. The angle molded by the angular line has as well an inner resonance which is warm and near to yellow for an acute triangle, insensate and similar to blue for an circle and similar to red for a square.

The primary plane is in all-purpose rectangular or square, therefore it is collected of horizontals and verticals lines which specify and define it as an independent being which will function as support to the painting conveying it its emotive tonality. This tonality is ascertained by the relative importance of horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontals affording a calm and cold key to the common plane, whilst the verticals devote i a calm and warm tonality. The artist owns the suspicion of this inner impression of the canvas format and proportions, which he decides according to the tonality he desires to devote to his work. Kandinsky yet believes the primary plane as a living organism that the artist fertilizes and of which he senses the drawing breath.

Each region of the primary plane has a proper affective color which determines the key of the graphic ingredients that will be drawn on it, and which leads to the fullness of the piece which ensues from their collocation on the canvas. The higher up of the primary plane equates to the play and to light, while the beneath conjures the compression and weightiness. The work of the painter is to hear and to acknowledge these effects in order to create paintings which are not only the result of a haphazard method, but the yield of an unquestionable work and the outcome of an attempt towards the inner beauty.