Kandinsky Before Abstraction, 1901–1911

http://www.guggenheim.org/

Kandinsky Before Abstraction, 1901–1911

Vasily Kandinsky was born on December 4, 1866, in Moscow. From 1886 through 1892 he studied law and economics at the University of Moscow, where he lectured after graduation. In 1896 he declined a teaching position in order to study art in Munich with Anton Azbe from 1897 to 1899 and at the Kunstakademie with Franz von Stuck in 1900. Kandinsky taught in 1901–03 at the art school of the Phalanx, a group he cofounded in Munich. One of his students, Gabriele Münter, would be his companion until 1914. In 1902 Kandinsky exhibited for the first time with the Berlin Secession and produced his first woodcuts. In 1903 and 1904 he began his travels in Italy, the Netherlands, and North Africa and his visits to Russia. He showed at the Salon d’Automne in Paris from 1904.

In 1909 Kandinsky was elected president of the newly founded Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM). The group’s first show took place at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. In 1911 Kandinsky and Franz Marc began to make plans for Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, although the publication would not appear until the following year. Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art was published in December 1911. He and Marc withdrew from the NKVM in that month, and shortly thereafter the Blaue Reiter group’s first exhibition was held at the Moderne Galerie. In 1912 the second Blaue Reiter show was held at the Galerie Hans Goltz, Munich. Kandinsky’s first solo show was held at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1912. In 1913 one of his works was included in the Armory Show in New York and the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. Kandinsky lived in Russia from 1914 to 1921, principally in Moscow, where he held a position at the People’s Commissariat of Education.

Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. In 1923 he was given his first solo show in New York by the Société Anonyme, of which he became vice-president. Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Paul Klee made up the Blaue Vier (Blue Four) group, formed in 1924. He moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925 and became a German citizen in 1928. The Nazi government closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and later that year Kandinsky settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris; he acquired French citizenship in 1939. Fifty-seven of his works were confiscated by the Nazis in the 1937 purge of “degenerate art.” Kandinsky died on December 13, 1944, in Neuilly.

음악, 미술, 악기, 색채, 디자인, 이 모든 것을 넘나들던 칸딘스키라 그런가,,,

바우하우스 교수였던 그는 모든 것을 그림으로 표현했다.

리듬이 느껴지는 것 같기도 하고, 고전 명화도 보인다.

he history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is intertwined with the work of Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) more so than any other artist of the twentieth century. Artist, art advisor, and the museum’s first director Hilla Rebay encouraged founder Solomon R. Guggenheim to begin collecting Kandinsky’s work in 1929 and to later meet Kandinsky at the Dessau Bauhaus in July 1930. This introduction initiated an ongoing acquisition period of Kandinsky’s art, with more than 150 works ultimately entering the museum’s collection.

Three decades prior to that fateful Dessau meeting, Kandinsky launched his artistic career. In 1895, he abandoned a legal profession to become the art director of the printing firm Kushnerev in Moscow. One year later Kandinsky left for Munich and formed associations with the city’s leading avant-garde groups, including Phalanx, Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association of Munich), and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

In Munich, Kandinsky quickly realized his talent for working with three classic printmaking techniques—etching, woodcut, and lithography—and began to evolve as an artist and theoretician. The woodcut in particular, which challenged artists to capture the essence of their vision or story through a reduced means of expression, provided Kandinsky with a vehicle for articulating his romantic tendencies. Recollections of Russia, such as the brightly decorated furniture and votive pictures that he had observed in the homes of the peasants, combined with romantic historicism, lyric poetry, folklore, and pure fantasy informed his early work.

Kandinsky began traveling extensively in 1904 with his partner, the German artist Gabriele Münter, making trips to Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, Tunisia, and Russia, before settling in Munich again in 1908 and translating his printmaking to landscape painting. Such graphic elements as clearly delineated forms, flattened perspective, and the black-and-white “noncolors” of his woodcuts, pervade the jewel-colored Bavarian landscapes of 1908–09. These paintings differ remarkably from his earlier exercises in Neo-Impressionist painting.

By 1913, he had already reduced his recognizable and recurrent motifs—including the horse and rider, rolling hills, towers, and trees—to broad areas of bright, radiant color that were subsidiary to the expressive qualities of line and color. These calligraphic contours and rhythmic forms reveal scarce traces of their representational origins. Kandinsky was finally able to evoke what he called the “hidden power of the palette” and move away from his pictorial beginnings, thus embarking on the road to abstraction.