Wassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky, Wassily 

(Vasilii Vasil’evich Kandinskii). Born Dec. 4 (16), 1866, in Moscow; died Dec. 13, 1944, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. Russian painter; one of the founders of abstract art.

In 1897 and 1898, Kandinsky studied at the Asbé School in Munich. In 1900 he was a student under F. Stuck at the Munich Academy of Arts. Kandinsky lived in Berlin in 1907. He subsequently settled in Munich, where he and F. Marc founded the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in 1911. As early as 1910, the self-sufficient play of color and line gradually began to replace figurative representations in Kandinsky’s paintings. This stylistic development can be observed in the paintings Ladies in Crinoline (1909, Tret’iakov Gallery), Improvisation No. 7 (1910, Tret’iakov Gallery), Vagueness (1917, Tret’iakov Gallery), and Composition No. 10 (1939, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris).

In his attempt to affirm the principles of “pure” painting, Kandinsky proclaimed the creative process of an artist to be a certain “self-expression and self-development of the spirit.” Thus, “pure” painting reflected the individualistic and subjectivistic tendencies of the culture of 20th-century bourgeois society.

Kandinsky returned to Russia in 1914. He was among the organizers of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in Petrograd and of Inkhuk (Institute of Artistic Culture) in Moscow. In 1921 he returned to Germany, where he became a professor at the Bauhaus in 1922. He settled in Paris in 1933.

WORKS

V. V. Kandinskii (tekst Khudozhnika). Moscow, 1918.
Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Munich, 1912. (Excerpts in Russian appear in the book Trudy Vserossiiskogo s“ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde: Dekabr’ 1911-ianvar’ 1912, vol. 1 [Petrograd, 1914], pp. 47–76.)
Punkt and Linie zu Fldche: Beit rag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente. Munich, 1926.

REFERENCES

Reingardt, L. “Abstraktsionizm.” In Modernizm: Analiz i kritika osnovnykh napravlenii. Moscow, 1969. Pages 101–11.
Grohmann, W. Wassily Kandinsky: Life and Work. New York, 1958.

B. S. TURCHIN