KANDINSKY, Wassily (Moscow, 1866 – Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944)
Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow on 4 December 1866, and spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Odessa. He studied Law and Economics at the University of Moscow from 1886 to 1892. After working as an associate professor in the Law Faculty in Moscow, Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896, where he began to study painting in Anton Azbé’s private school. There, he met other Russian art students, such as Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. He completed his studies in the studio of Franz von Stuck and in 1901 he was amongst the founder members of the artists’ association Phalanx, whose first exhibition took place in August of that same year. In 1902 he met Gabriele Münter, a student of his in the painting classes the artist had begun to give at the Phalanx-Schule, and who became his partner for over twelve years. With her, he travelled widely in the following years and in 1908 they settled again in Munich and spent their summers regularly in Murnau (High Bavaria). Those landscapes inspired many of his paintings, and their work showed their increasing interest in popular art. In 1909, together with Jawlensky and other artists, Kandinsky created the Neue Künstlervereinigung, considered the first artistic association of Munich Expressionism. In 1911 he founded with Franz Marc the association Der Blaue Reiter, which at the end of the year organised its first exhibition in the Tannhauser gallery in Munich. This coincided with the publication with Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the first essay in which Kandinsky introduced the reader to the values of the new subject-less painting, of a similar effect to that of music. In May 1912 the first and only issue of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter came out, marking one of the fundamental episodes in 20th-century art literature. Between 1909 and 1911, Kandinsky’s painting had gone through a transformation directed towards the exploration of pure art based on the expressiveness of colour and forms, culminating in totally abstract works, such as Composition V (Switzerland, private collection), Improvisation 19, Saint George II and Impression III (Concert) (Munich, Lenbachhaus), all of 1911. The latter, chronologically the earliest, was inspired by a concert of music by Schönberg held in Munich on 1 January 1911. A masterpiece from the second decade of the 20th century is certainly Composition VII (Moscow, Tretiakov Gallery), a monumental painting for which he made many drawings, sketches and studies. After the outbreak of the First World War, the artist decided to return to Russia in December 1914, where he remained until the end of 1921. Kandinsky’s influence on Russian artists had been significant in the years before his return, but during that period the effect of his work on Soviet art increased substantially. When he returned to Germany, he accepted Walter Gropius’s offer to join the teaching staff at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught, among other subjects, the workshop on murals. He remained a teacher at the Bauhaus also after the school moved to Dessau in 1925, and even in the Berlin period, where it was definitively closed by the Nazi regime in 1933, the year when he left Germany with his wife Nina. During the Bauhaus years, Kandinsky’s art adopted a stricter language, dominated by geometrical abstraction and with traits similar to those of constructivism, with works such as Composition VIII (New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) or the design of the sets and costumes for the staging of Pictures for an Exhibition in Dessau in 1928. Kandinsky and his wife settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the outskirts of Paris, in December 1933. In the ten years before his death on 13 December 1944, at the age of 78, Kandinsky still executed 144 paintings, as well as hundreds of drawings and watercolours. In the summer of 1937 his works had been included in the defamatory exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which took place in Munich, as well as in Origines et Développement de l’Art International Indépendant, presented in Paris as an antifascist response.
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