Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky, one of the inventers of modern and abstract art, exploited the strong images, memories and feelings between colour and form to create an artistic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that abstraction was the possibility for thoughtful, inspiring expressions and that copying from nature restricted with the process, so he went against it, creating diverse and deformed art inspired by different aspects of things. He was highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, modernising a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist’s inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three stages, starting from his early, representative canvases and their divine symbolism to his energetic operatic compositions, to his late geometric biomorphic flat planes of colour. Kandinsky’s ideas and art work inspired many generations of different artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the abstract expressionists after World War 2.

composition VII

Commonly known as the highpoint of Kandinsky’s pre- WW1 achievement. This composition of ‘VII’ shows Kandinsky’s rejection of graphic, symbolic representations through a swirling hurricane of colours and shapes. The operatic and loud mixing of forms around the canvas demonstrates Kandinsky’s belief in that painting could induce sounds the way music was in-titled to mind certain colours and forms; even the title of the composition aligned with his interest in the twists and twins of the musical with the visual and highlighted Kandinsky’s non-presentational focus in this work.

As the different colours and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and placed the simple different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers. Anxious by the theme of disaster and improvement throughout the 1910’s, Kandinsky formally tied the whirling composition of the painting to the theme of the cyclical processes of destruction and salvation. Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Kandinsky maintained several symbolic references in this painting. Among the various forms that built Kandinsky’s visual vocabulary, he painted glyphs of boats with oars, mountains and figures. However, he did not intend for the viewers to read these symbols literally and instead imbued his paintings with multiple references to the last judgment, the deluge, and the Garden of Eden, seemingly all at once.

Painting was, above all; deeply spiritual for Kandinsky.  He wanted to carry out deep spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colours that transcended cultural and physical boundaries. Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the “inner necessity” of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a fortune-teller whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society. He viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art - musicians could evoke images in listeners’ minds simply with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich painting that referred to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.