Music played an important role in the birth of abstract art since music is abstract in nature : it does not seek to represent the external world, but expresses the inner feelings of the soul directly. Kandinsky was an art theorist whose influence on the history of Western art perhaps has more to do with his theoretical work than with his paintings. His work in The Blue Rider’s Almanac and Spiritual in Art (published 1910 ) were both a defense and a promotion of abstract art and a claim that all forms
Although he spent most of his life in Germany and more recently in France, he continually spoke and wrote about Russia and in particular about his hometown of Moscow and how his unique beauties shaped his special view of peace.
Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa (now Ukraine) where he graduated from the Odessa Art School. Grekov. In Glimpses of the Past he says that houses and churches were decorated with such iridescent colors that he felt he was being moved in the picture. He studied law, economics and ethnography at the Moscow University and later became a professor of law.
Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian artist and art theorist who studied law and economics at the Moscow University as a young man and later became Professor of Roman law at the University of Dorpat in Estonia when he began his painting studies at the University of Munich focusing on life drawing, sketching and anatomy.
Artist of Russian origin Wassily Kandinsky is considered the leader of avant-garde art and one of the founders of pure abstraction in painting at the beginning of the 20th century. At the age of 30, Wassily Kandinsky moved to Munich to study drawing and painting. Monet’s obsession led him to explore his creative concepts of color on canvas. In the early 20th century Kandinsky became a respected leader of the abstract art movement.
In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich and first studied at the private school of Anton Azbes and then at the Academy of Arts. In 1914, Kandinsky returned to Moscow where he played an important role as member of the People’s Commissariat of Education.
When social realism became the dominant aesthetics, Kandinsky returned to Germany and became one of the most important collaborators of the Weimar Bauhaus as his painting absorbed the influence of the geometric direction of the school, while around the same time, he turns to the Russian epic of ancient times, creating mesmerizing images (Russian horseman, 1902; Russian beauty in a landscape, 1904) and creating mysterious legends
Thus, he founded the Phalanx art group in Munich in 1901 and established a school he studied independently, organizing twelve exhibitions of artists belonging to the Phalanges for four years in June 1922. He taught at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar until its closing in 1933 in Berlin.
His legacy continues in the new Kandinsky Prize, which awards the up-and-coming young Russian artist a € 55,000 prize and seeks to raise the profile of contemporary Russian art. No one could be less aesthetic, less keen on art for art than Kandinsky, and he was not one of those born artists who can enjoy the physical properties of oil and pigment without caring about what they mean.
He wanted a type of painting in which colors, lines and shapes could develop into a capable visual language free of the annoying work of illustrating recognizable objects – as for him the abstract language of music – to express general ideas and induce deep feelings. In a lecture given at Cologne in 1914, he insisted that all he did was to represent.
The artist believed that abstract art could establish a direct connection between the artist’s inner vision and the viewer’s imagination and evoke a certain emotional response. For him, abstraction was a means of direct expression bypassing language.
Wassily Kandinsky asked this question in December 1911 in his book The Spiritual in Art, a text that sets out his argument for abstraction. In the same month he seemed to answer his own question by creating a radically new type of painting – Composition V. Both his text and painting made Kandinsky a central player in the movement towards abstraction, unfolding in the years immediately before the First World War through the network of artists, poets and musicians.
