Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Kandinsky
    Kandinsky
    Kandinsky
    Ebook194 pages50 minutes

    Kandinsky

    By Mikhail Guerman

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter credited as being among the first to truly venture into abstract art. He persisted in expressing his internal world of abstraction despite negative criticism from his peers. He veered away from painting that could be viewed as representational in order to express his emotions, leading to his unique use of colour and form. Although his works received heavy censure at the time, in later years they would become greatly influential.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParkstone International
    Release dateJul 13, 2015
    ISBN9781783104192
    Kandinsky

    Read more from Mikhail Guerman

    Related to Kandinsky

    Related ebooks

    Art For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Rejecting the Standard

      Jun 1, 2022

      Rejecting the Standard
      6 min read

    • Article

      An Unsung Muse

      Jul 1, 2022

      An Unsung Muse
      6 min read

    • Article

      The New School

      Oct 1, 2021

      The New School
      6 min read

    • Article

      David Hockney

      Apr 18, 2017

      David Hockney
      1 min read

    • Article

      Memories Of Paint

      Apr 1, 2020

      Memories Of Paint
      6 min read

    • Article

      MASTERS At Work

      Dec 24, 2020

      MASTERS At Work
      8 min read

    • Article

      Triptych by Sonia Delaunay

      May 6, 2020

      Triptych by Sonia Delaunay
      1 min read

    • Article

      My Art Journey

      Nov 29, 2019

      My Art Journey
      5 min read

    • Article

      A His Tory Of Collage

      Jan 30, 2020

      A His Tory Of Collage
      4 min read

    • Article

      Worldly Observations

      Nov 1, 2022

      Worldly Observations
      6 min read

    • Article

      Art History

      Jan 29, 2021

      Art History
      4 min read

    • Article

      An Endless Pursuit

      Dec 1, 2022

      An Endless Pursuit
      7 min read

    • Article

      Lena Krashevka

      May 20, 2023

      Lena Krashevka
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Importance Of A Light Source

      Feb 8, 2018

      The Importance Of A Light Source
      2 min read

    • Article

      Preserving The Past

      Dec 1, 2022

      Preserving The Past
      6 min read

    • Article

      3. Value And Drama

      Dec 27, 2019

      3. Value And Drama
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Abstract Expressionist

      Oct 25, 2018

      The Abstract Expressionist
      2 min read

    • Article

      Jessamyn Plotts

      Sep 5, 2023

      Jessamyn Plotts
      1 min read

    • Article

      Symphonies Of Color

      Dec 1, 2021

      Symphonies Of Color
      6 min read

    • Article

      3. Notan

      Sep 6, 2019

      3. Notan
      4 min read

    • Article

      Exhibitions

      May 13, 2022

      Exhibitions
      2 min read

    • Article

      Shape & Forms

      Jul 1, 2022

      ARTIST GIGI Mills is known for painting simple and elegant images that are merely reflections of the physical world. Each canvas features abstracted forms seen from an impossible point of view to create an imagined space, while the flat, geometric sh

      1 min read

    • Article

      Hockney: The Early Years

      Oct 27, 2023

      Hockney: The Early Years
      3 min read

    • Article

      Castles In Spain

      Apr 1, 2021

      Castles In Spain
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Kandinsky

    5/5

    3 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Kandinsky - Mikhail Guerman

      Notes

      Exotic Birds, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

      Concentration

      We are still — though in a somewhat free handwriting and a way that is upsetting enough to the bourgeois — painting the things of reality: people, trees, country fairs, railroads, landscapes. In that respect we are still obeying a convention. The bourgeois calls those things real which are seen and described pretty much the same way by everybody, or at least by many people.

      –Hermann Hesse, Klingsor’s Last Summer

      Not long ago it seemed that this century had not only begun with Kandinsky, but ended with him as well.[1] But no matter how often his name is cited by the zealots of new and fashionable interpretations, the artist has passed into history and belongs to the past and to the future to a greater degree, perhaps, than to the present. So much has been written and said about Kandinsky. His works, including his theoretical ones, are so well-known that this abundance of knowledge and commonplace opinions often hinders our seeing the artist in his individuality, in his real — not mythologized — significance. With a fresh gaze. From the threshold of the third millennium.

      Weary of arch postmodernist games, the experienced and serious viewer today seeks in Kandinsky that which no one had seen in him earlier — and had not attempted to see: a buttress in an unstable world of artistic phantoms and fashionable shams. What just less than a hundred years ago was born as a bold revelation has now passed over into the category of eternal values. Among the titans of modernist art, Kandinsky was a patriarch. Matisse was born in 1869; Proust, in 1871; Malevich, in 1878; Klee, in 1879; Picasso, in 1881; Kafka, in 1883; Chagall, in 1887. Kandinsky himself was born in 1866, a year that also witnessed the birth of Romain Rolland and the publication of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Anna Karenina had yet to be written and no one had yet pronounced the term Impressionism. Kandinsky, in a word, was born in the very depths of the nineteenth century. Kandinsky was twenty when the last exhibition of the Impressionists opened; he was thirty-four when Ambroise Vollard held the young Picasso’s first one-man show in his gallery. At the turn of the century Kandinsky was only just beginning to become a professional, his name was still unknown — and he did not yet know himself.

      Gouspiar, Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

      Prayer.

      The Port of Odessa, late 1890s.

      Oil on canvas, 65 x 45 cm,

      Tretyakow Gallery, Moscow.

      Kandinsky’s intellectualism and that of his art have constantly been noted by scholars and essayists. This situation is not typical: the young paladins of the avant-garde attracted their adepts not so much with knowledge and logic as with the radicalism and the spiritedness of their opinions; and, more often, with a meaningful incomprehensibility interspersed with brilliant revelations. The destiny of a master who linked his art with Russia, Germany and France; his work as a teacher in the celebrated Bauhaus; his prose, verse and theoretical writings; his unbending and determined path towards individuality — all of these things have made Kandinsky more than just another of the great artists of the twentieth century. In the culture of our age he has occupied a quite exceptional place: the place of an artist alien to vanity and with a desire to shock the viewer; the place of a master inclined to constant and concentrated meditation, to unswerving movement towards a synthesis of the arts, to the quest for more perfect, ascetic and strict formal systems. Moreover, Kandinsky’s art does not reflect (or, if one may say so, is not burdened by) the fate of other Russian avant-garde masters. He left Russia well before the semi-official Soviet esthetic turned its back on modernist art. He himself chose where he would live and how he would work. He was forced neither to struggle with fate nor to enter into conspiracy with it. His struggles took place with himself (Boris Pasternak). The persecutions to which leftist artists in Russia were subjected left him untouched and did not complicate his life. Neither, however, was he was awarded a crown of thorns or the glory of a martyr, like the lot of those famous avant-garde artists who remained in Russia. His reputation is in no way obliged to fate — only to art itself. The culture of the past was for him precious and intelligible: he was not concerned with the smashing of idols. Creating the new occupied him entirely. He aspired neither to iconoclasm nor to scandalous behavior. It could hardly be said that his work lacked daring, but this was a daring saturated with

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1