Kandinsky's Art

Since my first encounter with Kandinsky's art I was amazed by their

complexity and always wondered about the creative and intellectual

mind, which was responsible for them. The few books I managed to find

on Kandinsky were extremely useful as they outlined his entire career

and had a substantial amount of illustrations. There were also a

number of websites available on the Internet, which contained

critiques from other art historians, critics and fellow artists from

around the world. But there is not a large number of his paintings

available in Britain therefore could only experience his art at first

hand on three occasions. If I were to attempt this coursework again I

would perhaps try to widen my research by travelling outside of the

U.K. and experiencing at first hand some of Kandinsky's more grand

pieces, in order to fully feel their effects.

Introduction

Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky's painting, my eyes and indeed

my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed

impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour

and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its

representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a

series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding

forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky's quest for a

pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate

belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the

soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at

first glance would most likely view Kandinsky's paintings as simply

abstract.

Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his

theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to

revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the

founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional

limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake,

whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of

colour and form became means of expression in their own right. This

theory stemmed from his fundamental belief of the importance of a

"spiritual" art, which could be extracted only from the "inner voice"

of the artist. Kandinsky believed that this spiritual domain was

indestructible and therefore had the utmost authoritative power to

create artistic messages that were as alive and pure as nature. His

preoccupation with music and the freedom of expression that it

provided, fascinated Kandinsky and inspired his observations on the

"sounds" of colours, a theory based on an idea that these colours had

a psychological effect on the viewer similar to the emotional effect

created by a musical composition.

Kandinsky the Russian

Born in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky would spend the majority of