Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (Vassili Vassilievitch Kandinski) (Moscow 1866 - Paris 1944) was a Russian-born French Abstract painter. He is considered one of the fathers of abstract art and was the founder of the Blaue Reiter group of artists in 1911 and taught at the Berlin Bauhaus design school from 1922 to 1933.^[1]

Wassily Kandinsky, is credited with painting one of the first two completely abstract paintings, in 1910. Kandinsky wrote an essay called Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which described his journey from painting naturalistic landscapes to painting abstract works. In it, he writes that painting, like music, should not be a description of the external world, but rather contains its own reality, which comes from the 'inner necessity' of the artist - the inner artistic vision.^[2]

"Kandinsky realized the tremendous power that art could exert over the spectator and that painting could develop powers equivalent to those of music. He felt special attraction to Wagner, whose music was greatly admired by the Symbolists for its idea of Gesamtkunstwerk that embraced word, music, and the visual arts and was best embodied in Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, with its climax of global cataclysm.^[3]

in 1933, Kandinsky settled in France and changed his formal vocabulary, diagrams of amoebas, embryos, and other primitive cellular and plant forms provided the sources for the whimsical biomorphic imagery that would be predominant in his late paintings. Instead of his characteristic primary colors, Kandinsky favored softer, pastel hues—pink, violet, turquoise, and gold—reminiscent of the colors of his Russian origins. [1]

Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) followed the style of Wassily; she also lived with him for a decade until Kandinsky returned to Russia.

Kandinsky learned to play piano and cello at an early age... "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."