Wassily Kandinsky
Biography
Wassily Kandinsky was born on Dec. 4, 1886 in Moscow, Russia into the family of a well-off businessman. He took art lessons when he was five years old. He liked to paint pictures. He went to grammar and gymnasium school. He learned to play a piano and a cello and began drawing with a coach. He said of that time, "I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality". His childhood paintings used exact color combinations. About that he later said, "each color lives by its mysterious life".
His parents wanted him to be a lawyer and was sent to a law school but quit and entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich because he wanted to completely devote himself to art. He joined the Law school of Moscow University in Russia in 1886. Six years later, he married Anna Chimyakina. In 1893 he became an associate professor. He only decided to become an artist when he was 30 years old. This happened after his visiting an exhibition of the French impressionists in Moscow in 1895. He was also inspired by K. Monet's, "Haystacks", and an impression of Richard Wagner's "Lohengrin" at the Bolshoi Theater. In 1896 he left for Munich, at that time considered to be one of the centers of the European art, and entered Anton Azbe's (Yugoslavian artist) well-respected private painting school, where he received the first skills in image composition, in work with line and form. In 1900 after a failure of the previous year, Kandinsky entered the Munich Academy of Arts, and studied under Franz Stuck, "German graphic artist Number One". He started out painting impressionist and focused on sketches of human bodies. Later, he started painting more abstract paintings. In the 1930's, some of his works were taken by the Nazis who called his work Degenerate Art. When World War II began Kandinsky was compelled to leave Germany. When he was done being an artist, he wrote three books about all his ideas how he painted and sculpted in art.
Style
Wassily Kandinsky had a very abstract modern style. His style is not very modern today, but it was in his day. When he first started painting he use to put the paint on the canvas with a paint spatula and it looked kind of blotchy. Later he started a more precise and abstract. His art is kind of random. He uses a lot of shapes and colors. He liked music also and used it to describe art. Wassily Kandinsky did mainly abstract Expressionism art but did other types too. One of his first art pieces was the blue rider which is a dramatic piece of art. Wassily Kandinsky is a amazing artist and did tons of wonderful paintings.
Work
His art is divided into five types over time:
- Artistic metamorphosis (1896–1911)
- The Blue Rider (1911–1914) The Blue Rider was a group of artists around Munich, Germany. The group was started by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. They and another group of artists, The Bridge, centered around Berlin, practiced a type of art called German Expressionism.
- Return to Russia (1914–1921)
- The Bauhaus (1922–1933) The Bauhaus was a german school of arts and crafts that existed from 1919, after the first World War, to 1933 when it was closed by the Nazi government. It was known for teaching modernism, a style of art that broke away from traditional forms.
- The great Synthesis (1934–1944
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External Links
Kandinsky at Artsmarts4kidsBiographical Map
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