Wassily Kandinsky | Life and Artworks

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky / Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist.

Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art.

Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school.

He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession - he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat - Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts.

He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I.

Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky "became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky" and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting.

However, by then "his spiritual outlook... was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society", and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920.

There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933.

He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art.

He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944. | Source: © MoMa

Signature style

Wassily Kandinsky's art has a confluence of music and spirituality.

With his appreciation for music of his times and kinesthetic disposition, Kandinsky's artworks have a marked style of expressionism in his early years.

But he embraced all types of artistic styles of his times and his predecessors i.e. Art Nouveau (sinuous organic forms), Fauvism and Blaue Reiter (shocking colours), Surrealism (mystery) and Bauhaus (constructivism) only to move towards abstractionism as he explored spirituality in art.

His object-free paintings display spiritual abstraction suggested by sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.

Driven by the Christian faith and the inner necessity of an artist, his paintings have the ambiguity of the form rendered in a variety of colours as well as resistance against conventional aesthetic values of the art world.

His signature or individual style can be further defined and divided into three categories over the course of his art career: Impressions (representational element), Improvisations (spontaneous emotional reaction) and Compositions (ultimate works of art).

As Kandinsky started moving away from his early inspiration from Impressionism, his paintings became more vibrant, pictographic and expressive with more sharp shapes and clear linear qualities.

But eventually, Kandinsky went further, rejecting pictorial representation with more synesthetic swirling hurricanes of colours and shapes, eliminating traditional references to depth and laying out bare and abstracted glyphs; however, what remained consistent was his spiritual pursuit of expressive forms.

Emotional harmony is another salient feature in the later works of Kandinsky.

With diverse dimensions and bright hues balanced through a careful juxtaposition of proportion and colours, he substantiated the universality of shapes in his artworks thus paving the way for further abstraction.

Kandinsky often used black in his paintings to heighten the impact of brightly coloured forms while his forms were often biomorphic approaches to bring surrealism in his art. | Source: © Wikipedia