A Giant of the Bauhaus
Vasiliy Vasilyevich Kandinskiy was an active 20th century art theorist, publishing a number of books on art theory, and developed a complex emotional theory about the ability of colors and shapes to represent sound and evince human emotion.
He started as a well educated Russian painter and art theorist in Moscow, but bravely left the University of Dorpat, where he was the chair of Roman Law to pursue his evolving theories of art.
Kandinsky began self-taught painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30, and began his lifelong interest in the psychological aspects of visual art.
Kandinsky is considered one of the first pioneers of abstract art
After the Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Soviets after 1917, Kandinsky found that he didn’t fit into the oppressive new society. He concluded that there were better, more creative opportunities in Germany at the new Bauhaus – and so he left his native Russia in 1920.
In Weimar & Dessau, Germany he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933.
He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most influential pieces. While in France, he lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris. Ironically, at the end of his life he was surrounded there by the occupying Nazis, and eventually died at home in 1944.
Transition to Germany in 1918-1921
Kandinsky was involved during this early period in the artistic cultural politics of Russia and collaborated with many groups in art education and museum reform. He didn’t create many painting projects during this period, but instead devoted his time to artistic teaching, with a program based on form and color analysis.
He also helped organize the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow of which he was the first director. His spiritual, expressionistic view of art was ultimately rejected by the extremist members of the Institute as too bourgeois so he made plans to find a less politicized school to pursue his philosophy.
In 1921, he uncovered a new group of visionary artists at the Bauhaus of Weimar, and was invited to attend by its visionary founder, architect Walter Gropius, who had heard of his dramatic new color theories that derived from spiritualism and psychology.
This move would change his life and give him a platform to expose his art and theories to millions.
Bauhaus style, often known as the International Style, is marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object and its design.
Many innovations eventually associated with the artists of the Bauhaus like simplified forms, functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit were partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
Ironically, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay in the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before World War I, in spite of the prevailing conservatism of that era.
Bauhaus beginnings during 1922 – 1926
In May of 1922 he added his starpower to the radical International Congress of Progressive Artists and signed the “Founding Proclamation of the Union of Progressive International Artists” that called for a permanent, international exhibition of art from the whole world and an annual universal, international music festival.
From 1922 to 1925, Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners and the course on advanced design theory in Weimar. He also conducted painting classes and a workshop in which he augmented his line & color theory with the ‘new elements of form’ psychology.
After the Bauhaus move to Dessau in 1926 to avoid political pressure from the new German right wing, his classes were in this building that became one of the iconic buildings of 20th century architecture.
Sadly, this great Dessau building was used after 1934 as a school for teaching women cooking and sewing, and before the beginning of World War II in 1939, it transitioned further to became a training school for Nazi party officers.
The development of his work on form study, particularly on point and line forms, led to him publishing his second theoretical book (Point and Line to Plane) in 1926.
His book ‘Point and Line to Plane‘ is still in print at Amazon.com as of this writing.
His examinations of the effects of forces on straight lines, leading to the contrasting tones of curved and angled lines, coincided with the research of Gestalt psychologists, whose work was also generally discussed during most advanced art classes at the Bauhaus.
Gestalt psychologists focused on the processing of spatial relationships. The idea that proximity, similarity, continuity, and connection determine how humans perceive different objects visually.
This led to the often-used phrase, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, which is tied into mid-century matrix theory and computer arrays.
His 3 major eras of work
Kandinsky was very open to learning from a variety of sources, starting early in Moscow. He studied many fields while in school, even law and economics, all the while fascinated and stimulated by color. His fascination with color symbolism and psychology continued as he matured as a creator and teacher, and he sought out many mentors who broadened his understanding of them.
Searching for a style
In 1889, as part of a University research group which traveled to the Vologda region north of Moscow where the houses and churches were decorated with such shimmering colors that upon entering them, he felt that he was walking into a painting.
“Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul”.
This experience, and his study of the region’s folk art (particularly the use of bright colors on a dark background), was reflected in much of his early work. Years later he would liken painting to composing music in the manner for which he would become historically associated.
At the age of 30, Kandinsky gave up his promising career teaching law and economics to enroll in the Munich Academy, where his teachers would eventually include painter Franz von Stuck. He was not immediately granted admission, so he began learning art on his own until he was in their program.
Before leaving Moscow later that year, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Claude Monet. He was particularly taken with the impressionistic style of the 25 canvas series called Haystacks. To him, these had a powerful sense of colour & technique over and above the objects themselves.
That it was a haystack, the catalog 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 fairy-tale power and splendor.
He was also influenced by the Theosophists and their leader, Madame Blavatsky, who postulated that creation is a geometrical progression, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the progression is expressed by a descending series of circles, triangles and squares.
A book called Thought-Forms (1901), compiled by 2 members of the Theosophical Society, had a profound impact on him. Its illustrations by the English painter John Varley and the book’s ‘Meanings of Colors’ chart influenced him visually as well.
Kandinsky’s books Concerning the Spiritual In Art (1910) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) are based on theosophical thought and ideas about color.
His book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art‘ is still in print on Amazon.com
And his book ‘Point and Line to Plane‘ is still in print on Amazon.com.
Art school went well for the mature Kandinsky, and during this time he broadened his learning as an art theorist as well as a painter. As a result, his creation of integrated paintings increased during this decade. Luckily, many of the landscape and town canvases he painted, showing his use of broad swaths of color and recognizable form, remain today.
For the most part, however, Kandinsky’s paintings did not include human figures. An exception is Ancient Russia (1904), in which he recreates a colorful and romantic view of a gathering of peasants and nobles in front of the walls of a fortified 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 blue river. 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.
This work demonstrates the influence of pointillism in the way the depth of field collapses into a flat, luminescent surface. Fauvism is also apparent in these early works.
Colors are used to express Kandinsky’s experience of subject matter, not to describe objective nature.
Another of his 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 medium blue, which casts a darker-blue shadow.
In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, the counterparts of the fall trees in the background.
The intentional disjunction – allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork, became an increasingly conscious technique used by Kandinsky in subsequent years; it culminated in the abstract works of his 1911–1916 period.
In The Blue Rider, Kandinsky shows the rider more in a series of colors than in specific detail.
This painting is not exceptional in that regard when compared with contemporary painters, but it is famous for showing the direction his work would take a few years later, as seen below in Painting on light ground (1916).
His iconic Gestalt style of 1920 – 1933
His study of the effects of forces on straight lines with others at the Bauhaus, leading to the contrasting tones of curved and angled lines, coincided with the research of Gestalt psychologists, whose work was also discussed as part of the classes.
The drawings here from that era show the bare-bones abstraction lines he found within each figure. They are classic drafting concepts used in reverse.
His Bauhaus paintings make much more sense after seeing these original black and white studies. I use them as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for a better understanding of his works.
As he developed his theories, free-flowing geometrical elements developed increasing importance in both his teaching and painting—particularly the circle, half-circle, the angle, straight lines and curves which appear in many of his most famous works.
This period from 1922 to 1933 was intensely productive & well received by the public as well as his contemporaries.
This freedom is characterized in his works by the treatment of planes rich in colors and gradations—as in Yellow–red–blue (1925), where Kandinsky illustrates his distance from the constructivism and suprematism movements influential at the time.
One of the high points of this period is his watercolor Picture XVI – The Great Gate of Kiev, seen here, that was used as the basis for a stage set behind a playing of Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition‘ in Dessau’s Friedrich Theater during April of 1928.
These complex and influential stage compositions were among the first to ever be presented as an interaction of scenery, music, color, light, geometric shapes, and plastics.
Fast forward: think Pink Floyd or Grateful Dead stadium concerts with their stunning visuals.
Isolation in Paris 1933-1944
The artistic community turned out to be reserved to Kandinsky’s presence after his move to Paris. The reasons for that were his isolation from foreign colleagues and absence of recognition of abstract painting in general in the Paris art scene.
As a result of this he lived and worked almost alone, being limited to socializing only with a few old friends who could visit. At this time the final major evolution of his painting system occurred.
He didn’t use a combination of primary colors but worked with soft, refined, subtle nuances of color in reduced pallets. Simultaneously, it supplemented and complicated the repertoire of forms: in the foreground there appear biomorphic elements, which feel at ease in the space of a picture as if floating inside the boxed-in canvas.
Many pictures of this period are far from the usual feeling of engineered romanticism. In them, life bubbles like the figures in Sky Blue, 1940, below. He described this period of work as “really a picturesque fairy tale.”
During the war-time period because of the shortage of materials the formats of his pictures become ever less, up to that moment when the artist was driven to be satisfied with small gouache paintings on cardboard. Still, he was confronted with resistance from the purchasing public and his creative contemporaries.
But he also developed and improved the basics of his line and color theory.
Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with ‘reality,’ next to the real world. Deeper down, it is subject to the common laws of the ‘cosmic world.’ And so a ‘new world of art’ is juxtaposed to the ‘world of nature.’ This ‘world of art’ is just as real, just as concrete. For this reason I prefer to call so-called ‘abstract art’ ‘concrete art.’
Kandinsky up to the very end of his working life had never doubted his “inner world” – the world of images where abstraction was not an end in itself.
The language of his forms was not dropped onto the canvas – they arose from his inner will, developed sharpness, and maintained their vitality.
With Free-Floating-Figure (1942) we can see his evolution away from previous dull biomorphic figures into this vibrant upright creature.
A legacy that inspires even now
An instigator in the minimalism trend, which is still one of the most popular styles to date, Kandinsky’s linear and angular influences can be seen everywhere from furniture to dance to graphic design.
His work helped show why the design world needed to step away from the gaudy designs of the early 20th century toward an emphasis on lean function rather than flabby form.
Other leading styles, like Scandinavian, industrial, and mid-century modern, are unmistakable in their Kandinsky skeletal lines, showing how far the spread of his teachings reached during the 20th century and into the 21st. Even BMW motorcycles created a celebratory design for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. . . .
This influence has become so entrenched in the design world that what were once unusual and striking designs, like the modern chair are now so familiar we might miss them if we don’t take a step back to really look at them.
When you see all the internet artwork, infographics, & graphical compositions like my email graphic below, it’s easy to look back and see elements from Kandinsky’s concentrated inspiration and it’s remarkable that his ideas can still make us rethink the nature of art and human perception.
It’s an impressive legacy that keeps on inspiring.
Some recommended reading – ‘Kandinsky: Complete Writings‘ (1994)
All of Kandinsky’s writings on art are translated into English by Editors Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, who have taken their translations directly from Kandinsky’s original texts, and have included interviews, lecture notes, and more formal writings.
The pieces range from one-page essays to book-length treatises On the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926), and are arranged in chronological order from 1901 to 1943.
The Kandinsky poetry, good enough to stand on its literary merits, is presented with all the original accompanying illustrations. And the book’s design follows his intentions, preserving the spirit of the original typography and layout.
‘Kandinsky: Complete Writings‘ (1994) is still in print at Amazon.com at the time of this writing.
Sources: Wikipedia, Architecture Daily, Nature Magazine, Bauhaus 100,
