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ISBN: 978-1-78525-063-7

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotion. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated.”

 

— Wassily Kandinsky

Contents

 

 

Contents

Index

Biography

Concentration

The Miracle at Murnau

Between East and West

The Return

“The Blue Rider”: A Look Back

Index

 

 

A

Accent in Pink

Akhtyrka - Red Church

All Saints I

All Saints II

Amazon in the Mountains

Amazon with Lions

Arrival of the Merchants

Autumn

Autumn River

 

B

Backward Glance

Black Grid

Black Lines

Black Spot

Black Spot I

Blue Arch (Ridge)

Blue Circle

Blue Mountain

Blue Segment

 

C

Capricious Forms

Circle and Square

Circles on Black

Colourful Life

Composition    1

Composition    2

Composition IV

Composition VII

Composition 8

Composition IX

Composition X

Composition ‘The Grey Oval’

Composition. Red and Black

Country Estate at Akhtyrka

Creeping

Crinoline Lady

Cupolas

 

D/E/F

Decisive Rose

Delicate Tensions

Dominant Curve

Exotic Birds

Farewell (large version)

Final Draft for the Cover of “The Blue Rider Almanac”

Four Figures

 

H/I

Harbour

Heiliger Wladimir

Impression III (Concert)

Improvisation 7

Improvisation 11

Improvisation No. 4

Improvisation No. 20

Improvisation with Cold Forms

In Grey

In the Black Square

 

K/L

Kandinsky in Berlin, January 1922.

Kochel (The Lake and the Hotel Grauer Bär)

Lake

Landscape

Levels

Lyre

The Lyrical

Lyrical (plate 9) from ‘Sounds’

 

M/O

Moscow. Red Square

Moscow. Zubovsky Square

Mountain

Mountain Lake

Munich. Schwabing

Murnau – Castle Courtyard I

Murnau – Grüngasse

Murnau – Johannisstrasse from a Window of the Griesbräu

Murnau, Summer Landscape

Musical Overture. Violet Wedge (Study)

On Light Ground

On White I

P/R

Painting with Points

Painting with White Border

Pastorale

Picnic – Bagatelle No. 4

Picture with the Circle (The First Non-Objective)

The Pink Rider

The Port of Odessa

Railroad at Murnau

Red Oval (Krasny oval)

Red Spot II

River in Summer

Romantic Landscape

 

S/T

Serenity

Several Circles

Sketch for “Akhtyrka - Autumn”

Sketch for “Composition II”

Sketch for “Painting with White Border”

Sky Blue

Small Pleasures

Small Worlds I

Small Worlds IV

Small Worlds V

Solitary

Song (Volga Song)

Southern

A Street at Sunlight

Study for “Church in Murnau”

Study for “Composition VII”

Study for “Composition VII” (Sketch 3)

Study for Cover of “The Blue Rider Almanac”    1

Study for Cover of “The Blue Rider Almanac”    2

Study for Cover of “The Blue Rider Almanac”    3

Study for “Green Border”

Study for “In Grey”

Summer Landscape

Through-going Line

To the Unknown Voice

Troubled

Twilight

Two Ovals (Composition No. 218)

 

U/V/W/Y

Untitled    1

Untitled    2

Various Actions

Various Parts

View of Murnau

White Oval

Winter Day. Smolensky Boulevard

Winter Landscape

Yellow-Red-Blue

Kandinsky in Berlin, January 1922.

Photograph.

Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris.

Biography

 

 

16 December 1866: Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky is born in Moscow. His parents are Lidia Ticheeva and Wassily Silvestrovich Kandinsky.

1871: The Kandinsky family moves to Odessa where Wassily attends a classical grammar school and takes cello and piano lessons as well as drawing classes.

1886: He begins to study Law and Economics at the University of Moscow.

1892: He receives his Ph.D. and works as a teacher at the law faculty. He marries his cousin Anna Chimyakina. At this time he starts turning increasingly towards painting.

1896: He moves to Munich, at the time one of Europe’s art centres, to devote himself completely to art.

1897-1899: In Munich he attends the school of Anton Ažbe.

1900: Studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. His teacher is Franz Stuck, then considered the best draughtsman in Germany.

1901: Kandinsky and his colleagues found the Phalanx artists’ group, which soon opens its own drawing school. Kandinsky later becomes the group’s president. During the following four years he organises exhibitions.

1902: He meets young artist Gabriele Münter, for whom he will divorce his wife in 1910. The same year he exhibits in the Berlin Secession for the first time.

1903: First solo exhibition in Moscow.

1903-1908: He and Münter undertake several journeys: Holland, Tunisia (Kairouan), France (Paris), Russia, Italy (Rapallo), Germany (Dresden and Berlin). They move into a house in Murnau, Bavaria in 1908.

1904: Two solo exhibitions in Poland. His work is shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

1909-1910: Kandinsky founds the Munich New Artists’ Association (Die Neue Künstlervereinigung München). Kandinsky spends autumn and winter of 1909 in Russia, where he exhibits fifty-two works at the “International” Salon in Odessa and participates in an exhibition of the Knave of Diamonds group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1911: Together with Franz Marc, Kandinsky founds The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter).

Piper Verlag publishes Kandinsky’s first important written work, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), the first theoretical base for abstract art.

1914: At the outbreak of the First World War, he separates from Münter and goes back to Russia through Switzerland, Italy, and the Balkans. The couple’s last meeting, in Stockholm during the winter of 1915-1916, marks the end of their relationship.

1917: Kandinsky marries Nina Andreewskaya, aged 17. His political environment is shaped by the Russian Revolution. The Soviets are looking for Russian avant-garde artists. After the October Revolution, Kandinsky holds a number of different positions in the newly created Soviet cultural institutions. He is among the founders of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) and heads its monumental painting studio.

1918: He becomes a professor at the Russian Academy of Arts and writes his autobiography which is translated into Russian.

1920: He starts a professorship at Moscow University. The Soviets reorient towards Socialist Realism.

1921: Kandinsky and his wife leave Moscow for Berlin. He joins the Bauhaus in Weimar as a professor.

1923: Kandinsky has his first one-man exhibition in New York. The following year, together with his Bauhaus colleagues, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexei Jawlensky, he organises the Blue Four group whose lectures and exhibitions reach the United States.

1925: The Bauhaus is moved to Dessau where he teaches mural painting.

1926: His essay Point and Line to Plane is published.

1928: His production of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is performed at the Friedrich Theatre in Dessau.

1933: The National Socialists close the Bauhaus. Kandinsky immigrates to Paris.

1937: Kandinsky works are defamed at the “Degenerate Art” propaganda exhibition. The National Socialists confiscate 57 pieces of his work.

1940: After the German invasion of France, Kandinsky flees to the Pyrenees.

13 December 1944: Kandinsky dies in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

	Concentration   Not long ago it seemed that the 20th century had not only begun with Kandinsky, but ended with him as well. But no matter how often his name is cited by the zealots of new and fashionable interpretations, the artist has passed into history and belongs to the past and to the future, perhaps to a greater degree than to the present. So much has been written and said about Kandinsky.
	Mountain Lake 1899 Oil on canvas, 50 x 70 cm Manukhina Collection, Moscow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His works, including his theoretical ones, are so well-known that this abundance of knowledge and commonplace opinions often hinders our seeing the artist in his individuality, in his real – not mythologised – significance. With a fresh gaze. From the threshold of the third millennium.   Weary of arch postmodernist games, the experienced and serious viewer today seeks in Kandinsky that which no one had seen in him earlier – and had not attempted to see: a buttress in an unstable world of artistic phantoms and fashionable shams.

The Port of Odessa c. 1900 Oil on canvas, 65 x 45 cm The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

What just less than a hundred years ago was born as a bold revelation has now passed over into the category of eternal values. Among the titans of modernist art, Kandinsky was a patriarch. Matisse was born in 1869; Proust, in 1871; Malevich, in 1879; Klee, in 1879; Picasso, in 1881; Kafka, in 1883; Chagall, in 1887. Kandinsky himself was born in 1866, a year that also witnessed the birth of Romain Rolland and the publication of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Anna Karenina had yet to be written and no one had yet pronounced the term “Impressionism”. Kandinsky, in a word, was born in “the very depths” of the 19th century.

A Street at Sunlight c. 1900 Oil on canvas, 23 x 32 cm Odessa Art Museum, Odessa