Russian avant-garde, Russian artist Kandinsky, Vasily Vasilyevich
Kandinsky became the creator of abstract art in its pure form, its theorist and creator. In his early works, which strongly influenced the French and German influence, and undoubtedly in the later ones, the artist asserts the possibility of self-expression, freed from reality, painting, born “from the artist”, “from the mental vibrations”; born not as a “dead word”, but as a “fertilizing abstract spirit that has found a form for revelation” and “spilling over into a symphony whose name is the music of the spheres”.
After the October Revolution, abstraction was for some time proclaimed official art, and Kandinsky held leading positions in virtually all institutes and colleges, research museums and centers, but his ideas were not in demand by the Soviet society. However, the rejection of art, where the “brush itself seeks paint,” began even before October. Creativity Kandinsky “rooted in the culture of the end of the century did not meet the specific search for the avant-garde, which since 1912 fully supported the rhetoric of cubism.”
After the revolution, society broke with the past and concrete, more utilitarian demands began to be made to painting. Theoretical reflections of Kandinsky “were perceived negatively as a belated relapse of” bourgeois “art understanding, far from the new artistic tasks and mindsets.”
During this period, Walter Gropius invited Kandinsky to teach at the Bauhaus. Kandinsky and his wife arrived in Weimar in 1922. Here, no one limited him to choosing an art program, he could safely create. Between 1926 and 1933, he painted 159 small paintings, 300 watercolors, and a number of works in a different technique.
At Bauhaus, he began teaching a course on the study of the artistic possibilities of forms.
In 1932, the Bauhaus was forced to move to the outskirts of Berlin. However, the school was soon closed (1933). After the Nazis came to power, Kandinsky started having problems – his art was declared “decadent”. When comparing the beginning and the end of this period, we can conclude that the forms used were reduced in volume and began to resemble the usual geometric shapes less. Each form did not exist by itself, but was part of a common compositional plan. Unfortunately, many works of this stage of the creative path have been lost.
For security reasons, the artist is forced to move to France. In Paris, Kandinsky loses more connection with the pure geometry of forms. In the paintings began to be traced soft sinusoidal forms (“biomorphic”). These elements appear to be floating on the surface of the canvas.
Kandinsky considered his art to be the natural result of stadial development. The artist continues to work actively until his death. He dies on December 13 in France, remaining not fully understood by his contemporaries.