Wassili Kandinsky

He was born in Moscow in 1866 where he studied Economics and Law. In 1896 he settled in Munich to dedicate himself to painting. In 1902 he gave life to the group "Die Phalanx" and in 1906 he settled in Sèvres, near Paris. At that time the Parisian artistic environment was dominated by Fauvism and the chromatic richness that immediately caught Kandinsky's attention.
The artist conceived the possibility of a "Pure Painting," in which primary colors would be the basis of his language, thus becoming the creator of Abstraction in 1910, the year of the first abstract watercolor. This first abstract period within the Lyrical Expressionism of "Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider), founded together with Klee and F. Marc, is related to the romantic idea of connecting the world of music with color. Kandinsky's work until the 1st World War possesses a great sense of freedom. In 1912 he published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," a notable work in the theoretical field of art.
During the War he lived in Moscow, where he directed the Museum of Pictorial Culture (1919) and was among the founders of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1921. In 1922 he returned to Germany and took the position of professor at the Bauhaus in Weimar; the profound change in Kandinsky's conception of painting during the period 1922-33 is due to a process of rationalization of his abstract work. This renunciation of his previous freedom implies a greater and deeper relationship between theory and practice. In 1926 he would write "Point and Line to Plane," starting from the fact that the point is the primary and original element of all composition and in movement engenders the line.
With the rise of the Nazi regime to power, the Bauhaus School was closed. 1933-1944; this is the last stage where paintings appear filled with irregular abstract-geometric configurations, in which new chromatic contrasts occur.
According to Kandinsky, there are no longer any truths other than those that lie within ourselves sustained by what he calls the "Principle of Inner Necessity." It is a search for the absolute. In an essay he writes that colors are destined more for the soul than for the sensitivity of the viewer, because they proceed from the depths of being. The "pure" artist only tries to express "inner and essential" feelings, leaving aside the superficial.
An artist recognized worldwide and master of the theory of modern art.
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Russian painter whose research on the possibilities of abstraction places him among the most important innovators of modern art. He played a fundamental role, as an artist and as a theorist, in the development of abstract art. Born in Moscow on December 4, 1866, he studied painting and drawing in Odessa, and law and economics at the University of Moscow. At age 30 he moved to Munich to begin his career as a painter. Although his early works fall within a naturalistic line, from 1909 onwards, after a trip to Paris where he was deeply impressed by the works of the Fauves and Post-Impressionists, his painting became more colorful and acquired a freer organization. Murnau, the exit to Johannstrasse (1908) and Painting with Three Spots (1914), both in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid (Spain), are two of the works he created in Munich before returning to Russia after the beginning of World War I. Around 1913 he began to work on what would be considered the first completely abstract works within modern art, they made no reference to objects of the physical world and were inspired by the world of music, from which they took their titles. In 1911 he formed, together with Franz Marc and other German Expressionists, the group Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider, a name that comes from Kandinsky's predilection for the color blue and Marc's love for horses). During that period he created both abstract and figurative works, all of them characterized by brilliant color and design complexity. His influence on the development of twentieth-century art became even greater through his activities as a theorist and professor. In 1912 he published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the first theoretical treatise on abstraction, which spread his ideas throughout Europe. He was also a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow between 1918 and 1921, and between 1922 and 1933 at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. After World War I his abstractions became increasingly geometric, as he moved away from the fluid style of his early period to introduce strokes with very marked profiles and clear designs. Composition VIII (1923, Guggenheim Museum, New York, United States), for example, is a harmonious set of lines, circles, arcs and other simple geometric forms. In much later works such as Circle and Square (1943, private collection) his style becomes more elegant and complex and thus achieves works of beautiful balance. He was one of the most influential artists of his generation. As one of the first explorers of the principles of non-representational or pure abstraction, he can be considered one of the painters who sowed the seed of abstract expressionism, the dominant school of painting since World War II. He died on December 13, 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris.