Vaslily+Kandinsky

Kandinsky's creation of purely abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense theoretical thought based on his personal artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and deep spiritual desire //inner necessity//, which was a central aspect of his art. Kandinsky learned from a variety of sources during his youth and life in Moscow. Later in his life, he would recall being fascinated and unusually stimulated by color as a child. The fascination with color symbolism and psychology continued as he grew. In 1889 he was part of an ethnographic research group that travelled to the Vologda region north of Moscow. In //Looks on the Past// he relates that the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colors that, upon entering them, he had the impression that he was moving into a painting. The experience and his study of the folk art in the region, in particular the use of bright colors on a dark background, was reflected in much his early work. A few years later, he first related the act of painting to creating music in the manner for which he would later become noted and wrote, "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings." It was not until 1896, at the age of 30, that Kandinsky gave up a promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in art school in Munich. He was not immediately granted admission in Munich and began learning art on his own. Also in 1896, prior to leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Monet and was particularly taken with the famous impressionistic //Haystacks// which, to him, had a powerful sense of color almost independent of the objects themselves. Later he would write about this experience: He was similarly influenced during this period by Richard Wagner's //Lohengrin// which, he felt, pushed the limits of music and melody beyond standard lyricism.
 * < **“** || That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This non-recognition was painful to me. I considered that the painter had no right to paint indistinctly. I dully felt that the object of the painting was missing. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably on my memory. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendour. ||> **”** ||

Kandinsky was also spiritually influenced by H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. Theosophical theory postulates that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series of circles, triangles, and squares. Kandinsky's book //Concerning the Spiritual In Art// (1910) and //Point and Line to Plane// (1926) echoed this basic Theosophical tenet. 

[edit] Artistic metamorphosis (1896–1911)
Kandinsky's //Der Blaue Reiter// (1903). Kandinsky's time at art school, typically considered difficult to get through, was eased by the fact that he was older and more settled than the other students. It was during this time that he began to emerge as a true art theorist in addition to being a painter. The number of existing paintings increased at the beginning of the 20th century and much remains of the many landscapes and towns that he painted, using broad swathes of color but recognizable forms. For the most part, however, Kandinsky's paintings did not emphasize any human figures. An exception is //Sunday, Old Russia// (1904) where Kandinsky recreates a highly colorful (and fanciful) view of peasants and nobles before the walls of a town. //Riding Couple// (1907) depicts a man on horseback, holding a woman with tenderness and care as they ride past a Russian town with luminous walls across a river. Yet the horse is muted, while the leaves in the trees, the town, and the reflections in the river glisten with spots of color and brightness. The work shows the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field is collapsed into a flat luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works. Colors are used to express the artist's experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature. Perhaps the most important of Kandinsky's paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was //The Blue Rider// (1903), which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider, though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider. This type of intentional disjunction, allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, would become an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years, culminating in the (often nominally) abstract works of the 1911–1914 period. In //The Blue Rider// Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself, //The Blue Rider// is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later. From 1906 to 1908 Kandinsky spent a great deal of time travelling across Europe, (he was an associate of the Blue Rose symbolist group of Moscow) until he settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau. //The Blue Mountain// (1908–1909) was painted at this time and shows more of his trend towards pure abstraction. A mountain of blue is flanked by two broad trees, one yellow and one red. A procession of some sort with three riders and several others crosses at the bottom. The faces, clothing, and saddles of the riders are each a single color, and neither they nor the walking figures display any real detail. The broad use of color in //The Blue Mountain//, illustrates Kandinsky's move towards an art in which color is presented independently of form.