Artist who paints like a child: Who is Wassily Kandinsky?

Wassily Kandinsky was born on December 16, 1866, in Moscow into a wealthy and aristocratic family. His father is a wealthy tea merchant and supports Wassily throughout his long education life. Raised in Russian Orthodoxy, Kandinsky adheres to this belief all his life, except for a brief youth.

He had a remarkable childhood with academic achievements. Painting and music always fascinates Kandinsky, who played both the piano and the cello as a child. When he was just 13-14 years old, he saved up to buy his first set of oil paintings. Art and music, ranging from traditional Russian icons to Rembrandt's oil paintings and Wagner's opera Lohengrin, leave deep traces on him.

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (16 December 1866 – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odesa, where he graduated from Odesa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia)—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

His education life begins in Odesa, Crimea, where his family moved in 1871. Visiting Moscow often, Kandinsky settled there in 1886 to study political economy and law. One year after his graduation in 1892, he was appointed as a law lecturer at Moscow University. A Moscow exhibition in 1895 introduced Kandinsky to the French Impressionists, and the emotions that Monet's Haystacks aroused in him seemed to foretell the fate that awaited Kandinsky.

A year later, in 1896, 30-year-old Kandinsky turned down his professorship at the Estonian Dorpat University and went to Munich to study painting. At that time, Munich had a well-deserved reputation as one of the most influential experimental centers in Germany, as well as one of Europe's major centers for serious art education. In the early 1900s, Kandinsky was under the influence of Jugendstil (German art nouveau) and lyrical naturalism, which still dominates the Munich art world. He would be able to create his own unique style only after a long period of travel.

These early works of Kandinsky, although successful for their time, are not considered very important. They stand out because of some of the features that stand out in the artist's later paintings, such as the creative use of bright colors and fairy tale elements.

Many of Kandinsky's early works have Russian nostalgia. He performed this style of work with tempera on wood. It was also polished to give the painting a mosaic look. The Volga Song is one of the artist's paintings in this genre. The painting takes its subject from the song of the boatmen of the Volga River to endure their tiring work and rowing against the waves.

Gabriele Münter, a student Kandinsky met while teaching at the Phalanx Art School in 1903, causes him to leave his wife. During this period, the artist often went on long-term trips abroad, where he took Münter with him. Kandinsky, who settled in Paris during the one-year period between 1906 and 1907, watched many of the first exhibitions of the Fauvists and was very impressed. He sees color being released in these paintings and incorporates it into his art over the next few years.

The artist's breakthrough came in 1908 when he returned to Munich and spent time with the painter Gabriele Münter in the mountainous Murnau region of Bavaria. They head to Lake Staffel near Murnau in the Bavarian Alps. Münter bought a house here in 1909. Known as the Russian House, the house is furnished with decorative elements sourced from local folk art. Kandinsky begins to produce his most important expressionist landscapes, combining the effect of the fovist color understanding on him with the primitiveness and directness that can be attributed to his Russian heritage.

The use of color in his landscapes in Murnau has become richer and more intense than descriptive. Recognizable landscape elements such as mountains, trees, and structures are added to the whole, heralding the symbols that will appear in late landscape paintings. As in this work, all of Kandinsky's landscapes reflect the artist's intense feelings for the beauty of the Bavarian coast.

The motifs we encounter in many of Kandinsky's paintings are of Russian origin and have a spiritual tone related to the artist's emotional state.

 Kandinsky expresses his thoughts openly and freely in his magnificent work On the Spiritual in Art (Über Das Geistige In Der Kunst), published towards the end of 1911. This book was of particular importance in the dissemination and acceptance of new principles that greatly influenced modern art. In the book, Kandinsky declares on paper the goal he will try to achieve on canvas for the next four years, namely the idea of separating art from the objective world and a new issue based solely on the artist's inner need. The book has other interesting features as well. The second chapter, On Painting, contains observations on the psychological effects of colors, reflecting Kandinsky's search for a universal means of communication separate from nature.

With the outbreak of the First World War, difficult days begin for Kandinsky. Two days after the war broke out, they went to Switzerland with Münter. They stay here for three months in the hope that the war will end. In 1914, Kandinsky returns to Russia and Münter returns to Munich, and thus the relationship between the two ended. In 1915, Kandinsky did not paint any pictures. He made only 41 oil paintings between 1916 and 1921. In 1917, the artist married Nina Andreevskaya, who would be his life partner throughout his life. After 1917, he held various administrative positions under the new government in Russia and eventually became a professor at Moscow University.

The 1920s were the years when geometric forms were seen in Kandinsky's works. This change can be seen in his work Circles on Black. In the works of this period, there is no trace of the understanding of abstraction in the paintings he made during the Munich period. In these works realized in Moscow, definable geometric forms such as rectangles and circles, spots, and dots are combined with the forms in his repertoire. Kandinsky defines the circle, which he frequently used in his works of this period, according to this, the circle is the synthesis of great contrasts. Balances are interesting and concentric forces.

Kandinsky, who lived a comfortable life until the Russian Revolution, began to experience financial difficulties with the revolution. During the redistribution of the lands by the new administration, his house is taken from him. He has to sell some of his work and starts looking for a civil service job. He becomes chairman of the state commission and is given the task of opening new museums in Russia. In 1919 he founded the Moscow Art Culture Institute. Soon after, Kandinsky gets into a conflict with the members of the institute. The reason for this is the artist's comments on abstraction. At the end of 1921, he got rid of this environment where he was overwhelmed with the offer of teaching from the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919, is the most important educational institution that contributed to the formation of modern art and architecture. At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky teaches basic art education, and since 1925 he organizes color seminars, researching and experimenting with his students on the relationship between colors and forms.

Kandinsky's book, Point and Line Straightening (1926), which he wrote for the Bauhaus School, also forms the basis of the Basic Art Education courses.

Kandinsky's paintings are based on deep observation. According to him, everything in nature is in a rhythm associated with human nature. Every color has a form of sensitivity associated with every line. Thus, certain geometric shapes express certain areas of sensibility. The relationships he establishes between color and forms form the basis of abstract geometric painting. In this way, the connection between the artist and music can be understood. Music is the most abstract art, it reaches the soul directly. These sounds form an inner image. Kandinsky expresses this state of formation in his painting. Paintings consisting of lines and colors that create spiritual vibrations create deep feelings in the viewer.

Wassily Kandinsky, one of the most important figures of abstract painting, became a French citizen in 1939 and died in Paris on 13 December 1944 at the age of 78.

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