Wassily Kandinsky: Father of Abstract Painting

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was the son of a Russian merchant who becamse a lawyer and academic, and one of a small circle of artists who so influenced the direction of art in the twentieth century that it can be said he changed painting forever.. He was a devout Russian Orthodox believer and a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who was as proponent of Theosophy, spiritualism and the occult. Kandinsky was author of a seminal manifesto, “Concerning the Spiritual In Art” (1910), a work that lays out  his conception of the language of the soul in form and color, and establishes a foundation for abstract art.  It is influential to this day.

The artist is credited with making some of the earliest advances in modern abstract painting that reverberate to the present, over 100 years since he painted them. Now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, many of these oil on canvas paintings, made between 1911 and 1914, are regarded as the earliest pure abstractions, consisting of striking color, lines and shapes that allude to a real-world narrative of mythical horsemen and mountain valleys, in what Kandinsky hoped would be the painterly equivalent of the music of Richard Wagner (1813-1883).

These paintings show Kandinsky exploring the essence of time, place and appearances. At this point, Kandinsky was an artist in search of something ethereal, something spiritual, manifest in the natural world. As his career progressed, the artist abandoned the references to the visible world characteristic of his lyrical expression for a more formal, geometric style, typical of the Bauhaus, where he taught. Some art historians trace this transformation to the experience of World War I, which so devastated Europe and forever altered its cultures and societal structures. As a consequence of their alientation from the past, many artists turned to the esoteric, embracing obscurity and secrecy.

I offer two examples of Kandinsky’s work. Composition VII, 1913 (79 inches X 118 inches) (above) is from his early abstract work, when the ideas were fresh. The other is Composition VIII, 1923 (55 inches X 79 inches) (below) from the Bauhaus period, when the artist had turned to more restricted, some would say refined, forms. Kandinsky’s work was well known to young artists of the 30s and 40s, including Arshile Gorky, Joan Miro and Jackson Pollock.