Since my first encounter with Kandinsky's art I was amazed by their complexity and always wondered about the creative and intellectual mind, which was responsible for them.

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Concerning the Spiritual in Kandinsky                                             Naomi Powell - Brown

Abstract

Since my first encounter with Kandinsky’s art I was amazed by their complexity and always wondered about the creative and intellectual mind, which was responsible for them. The few books I managed to find on Kandinsky were extremely useful as they outlined his entire career and had a substantial amount of illustrations. There were also a number of websites available on the Internet, which contained critiques from other art historians, critics and fellow artists from around the world. But there is not a large number of his paintings available in Britain therefore could only experience his art at first hand on three occasions. If I were to attempt this coursework again I would perhaps try to widen my research by travelling outside of the U.K. and experiencing at first hand some of Kandinsky’s more grand pieces, in order to fully feel their effects.

Introduction

Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky’s painting, my eyes and indeed my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky’s quest for a pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at first glance would most likely view Kandinsky’s paintings as simply abstract.

        Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake, whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of colour and form became means of expression in their own right. This theory stemmed from his fundamental belief of the importance of a “spiritual” art, which could be extracted only from the “inner voice” of the artist. Kandinsky believed that this spiritual domain was indestructible and therefore had the utmost authoritative power to create artistic messages that were as alive and pure as nature. His preoccupation with music and the freedom of expression that it provided, fascinated Kandinsky and inspired his observations on the “sounds” of colours, a theory based on an idea that these colours had a psychological effect on the viewer similar to the emotional effect created by a musical composition.

        

Kandinsky the Russian

Born in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky would spend the majority of his life in Germany and Paris but constantly carrying the love of Moscow – his homeland, in his heart. For Kandinsky, Moscow represented everything that was Russian and inspired all of his artistic accomplishments. As a child the effects of colour were deeply felt. The beauty of the sunset over the cupolas of Moscow and the intensity of the colour in peasant art, contrasting with the grey vastness of his native country, enlightened his vision. Russian peasant art was often highly symbolic and based on old legends and folklores; in it Kandinsky would have seen their spiritual quality emphasized by strong use of colour. Music also played an inspirational role in Kandinsky’s childhood. His father was very artistic and took the young Kandinsky to exhibitions while his mother who played the piano encouraged him to take up the piano and cello.

        Kandinsky didn’t travel down the artistic path until later on in his life, as he didn’t feel he was skilful enough to artistically express his emotions through painting. Initially he attended university where he achieved a degree in law and economics and graduated at the age of 26. However, throughout this educational period in his life, both painting and music continued to fascinate, surprise and satisfy Kandinsky in ways, which his academic studies could never possibly provide. Whilst visiting the Hermitage in St. Petersburg Kandinsky saw in Rembrandt’s paintings a “mighty chord” in the contrasts between his division of the light and dark colours. The composer Wagner supplied Kandinsky with his first experience of a total work of art. During a performance of Lohengrin, the orchestral sounds created in Kandinsky’s minds eye the colours of a Moscow evening of which he had longed to paint. With this, he realized that painting could create such emotional powers as music possesses. Kandinsky held the ability for a synaesthetic experience, where he would associate colours with sound instead of purely perceiving them in terms of objects. These sounds would range in different intensities of high to low and sharp to soft.

        Another important experience that would change Kandinsky’s perception of art occurred during his last year as a law student in Moscow, when he saw an exhibition of Monet’s Haystacks series and couldn’t identify the subject. For the first time Kandinsky realized that colour had the power to completely render the object insignificant. Before he attempted to move away from figurative painting, his viewings and experiences of Impressionistic work had already given him an unconscious realization that the power of the palette alone could establish the impact of the painting. This was indeed a revelation for Kandinsky as he now understood and appreciated the importance that colour and form held, a belief which became the basis of all of his artistic endeavours as he began to renounce the object.

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        These experiences led to Kandinsky’s decision to leave the academic legal path and follow his heart by becoming a painter. In 1896 at the age of 30, he left Moscow for Munich leaving a job as the director of a printing works specializing in art reproductions.

Munich – a New Beginning

Munich had become a rising artistic city, with a number of new and innovative art movements for example, founded in 1892 the Munich Secession gave a platform for progressive artists to showcase their artworks. Embracing a wide range of stylistic movements such as academic historicism ...

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