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    Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky
    Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky
    Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky
    Ebook497 pages2 hours

    Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky

    By Wassily Kandinsky

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    Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist, now celebrated as one of the pioneers of pure abstraction in modern painting. Delphi’s Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of the world’s greatest artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Kandinsky’s collected works in beautiful detail, with concise introductions, hundreds of high quality images and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)* A comprehensive range of Kandinsky’s works over his whole career — over 300 paintings, fully indexed and arranged in chronological and alphabetical order
    * Includes reproductions of rare works
    * Features a special ‘Highlights’ section, with concise introductions to the masterpieces, giving valuable contextual information
    * Enlarged ‘Detail’ images, allowing you to explore Kandinsky’s celebrated works in detail, as featured in traditional art books
    * Hundreds of images in stunning colour – highly recommended for viewing on tablets and smart phones or as a valuable reference tool on more conventional eReaders
    * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the paintings
    * Easily locate the paintings you want to view
    * Includes Kandinsky's celebrated treatise CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART
    * Scholarly ordering of plates into chronological orderPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting e-Art booksCONTENTS:The Highlights
    ODESSA PORT
    PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER
    THE BLUE RIDER
    COUPLE RIDING
    CEMETERY AND VICARAGE IN KOCHEL
    MURNAU-VIEW WITH RAILWAY AND CASTLE
    PICTURE WITH ARCHER
    LYRICAL
    IMPROVISATION 26
    SMALL PLEASURES
    BLACK STROKES I
    MOSCOW I
    RED OVAL
    STOREYS
    COMPOSITION VIII
    YELLOW-RED-BLUE
    SEVERAL CIRCLES
    COLOURFUL ENSEMBLE
    SKY BLUE
    TEMPERED ELANThe Paintings
    CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS
    ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGSThe Treatise
    CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ARTPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDelphi Classics
    Release dateAug 11, 2015
    ISBN9781910630815
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      Book preview

      Delphi Collected Works of Kandinsky - Wassily Kandinsky

      Wassily Kandinsky

      (1866–1944)

      Contents

      The Highlights

      ODESSA PORT

      PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER

      THE BLUE RIDER

      COUPLE RIDING

      CEMETERY AND VICARAGE IN KOCHEL

      MURNAU-VIEW WITH RAILWAY AND CASTLE

      PICTURE WITH ARCHER

      LYRICAL

      IMPROVISATION 26

      SMALL PLEASURES

      BLACK STROKES I

      MOSCOW I

      RED OVAL

      STOREYS

      COMPOSITION VIII

      YELLOW-RED-BLUE

      SEVERAL CIRCLES

      COLOURFUL ENSEMBLE

      SKY BLUE

      TEMPERED ELAN

      The Paintings

      CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

      ALPHABETICAL LIST OF PAINTINGS

      The Treatise

      CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL IN ART

      © Delphi Classics 2015

      Version 1

      Masters of Art Series

      Wassily Kandinsky

      By Delphi Classics, 2015

      The Highlights

      Moscow, c. 1900 — Kandinsky’s birthplace

      Kandinsky, 1905

      THE HIGHLIGHTS

      In this section, a sample of some of Kandinsky’s most celebrated works is provided, with concise introductions, special ‘detail’ reproductions and additional biographical images.

      ODESSA PORT

      Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow, the son of Lidia Ticheeva and Vasily Silvestrovich Kandinsky, a tea merchant. During his school years he was interested in many subjects, including law and economics. In later years, the artist recalled his early fascination and stimulated interest in colour, which later developed through concepts of colour symbolism and psychology. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Though successful in this profession, to the extent that he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat, Kandinsky was much more interested in painting studies, including life-drawing, sketching and anatomy.

      In 1896, at the age of 30, he took the surprising step of giving up a promising career teaching law and economics to enrol in an art school in Munich. At first he was not granted official admission and had to begin learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Moscow, he saw an exhibit of paintings by Claude Monet. He was particularly interested in the impressionistic portrayal of Haystacks, due to the composition’s powerful sense of colour, which was almost independent of the represented objects themselves. Odessa Port, Kandinsky’s first recorded oil canvas, which was completed in 1898 and now hangs in the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, demonstrates the artist’s early interest in Impressionism. The canvas depicts an overcast day in the almost empty port, with a lone ship taking up the main focal point of the image. Taken from a low viewpoint, the ship appears large and almost threatening, as the dark mast propels up into the hazy sky. The depiction of the water surrounding the hull is where the composition is most impressionistic. The division of shadow and light on the sea’s surface is portrayed through thick brushstrokes, presenting the ‘impression’ of movement and reflection, similar to how Monet and the Impressionists convey the movement of water.

      Detail

      Detail

      Detail

      The Port of Odessa today

      Kandinsky as a child, aged five

      PORTRAIT OF GABRIELE MÜNTER

      Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was a German expressionist painter at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. She came from an upper middle-class background and her parents supported her wish to become an artist. Münter took classes at Munich’s progressive new Phalanx School, where she studied woodcut techniques, sculpture, painting and printmaking. Soon after she began taking classes, Münter became attached to Kandinsky, who was the Phalanx School’s director. He was the first teacher that had actually taken Münter’s painting abilities seriously. In the summer of 1902, Kandinsky invited her to join him at his summer painting classes just south of Munich in the Alps. She accepted and their relationship became intimate. Kandinsky and Münter’s professional and personal relationship lasted for twelve years and Kandinsky was married while he was with Münter. They spent a great deal of time together travelling through Europe, including Holland, Italy and France, as well as North Africa. It was during this time that they met Rousseau and Matisse. Münter and Kandinsky fell in love with the village of Murnau in southern Bavaria. Later on, Münter bought a house in this city and spent much of her life there. Together, they helped establish the Munich-based avant-garde group called the New Artists’ Association.

      This 1905 portrait of Gabriele Münter, now housed in Munich’s Stadtische Galerie, is a particularly personal depiction of the artist’s lover. The subject looks challengingly at the viewer, a hint of a smile on her lips, while her eyes hint at a more sombre emotion. Thick brushstrokes delineate her white garment, once again stressing Kandinsky’s early interest with Impressionism. The limited background detail helps to serve as a foil to the lucent skin and detailed shadowing of the sitter’s face. Oddly, the focal point of the composition is a large bow worn by Münter, which is also depicted with large blue brushstrokes, exerting a dominating shadow around its border.

      Detail

      Detail

      Detail

      Gabriele Münter, c.1907

      THE BLUE RIDER

      In 1911 Kandinsky, Münter and Franz Marc founded the Expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Within the group, artistic approaches and aims varied amongst artists, though they shared the common desire to express spiritual truths through art. They championed modern art, the connection between visual art and music, the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting in its move towards abstraction. Der Blaue Reiter was united in the rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, a group that Kandinsky had founded in 1909, which they now believed had become too strict and traditional.

      The name of the movement is the title of a painting that Kandinsky created in 1903, but it is unclear whether it is the origin of the name of the movement, as Professor Klaus Lankheit learned that the title of the painting had been overwritten. Kandinsky wrote twenty years later that the name is derived from Marc’s enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky’s fondness for using rider motifs, combined with a shared love of the colour blue. For Kandinsky, blue is the colour of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal, as explained in his 1911 book On the Spiritual in Art.

      Der Blaue Reiter organised exhibitions in 1911 and 1912 that toured Germany. They also published an almanac featuring contemporary, primitive and folk art, along with children’s paintings. In 1913 they exhibited in the first German Herbstsalon. The group was disrupted by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Franz Marc and August Macke were killed in combat. Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Alexej von Jawlensky were forced to move back to Russia because of their Russian citizenship. There were also differences in opinion within the group. As a result, Der Blaue Reiter was short-lived, lasting for only three years from 1911 to 1914.

      The Blue Rider is perhaps Kandinsky’s most important painting from the early 1900’s, before he had fully developed his abstract style of music as sound. The painting illustrates a hooded rider cloaked in blue, speeding through a greenish meadow. The painting’s intentional abstractness had led many art theorists to project their own representations into the figure, some seeing a child in the arms of the blue rider. Encouraging viewers to participate their own interpretations of his art was a technique that Kandinsky would use to great effect in his later works, as they became more and more abstract as his career developed.

      Detail

      Detail

      Detail

      Detail

      The members of the Blue Rider group on the balcony of Kandinsky’s apartment at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich, 191. From left to right: Maria Marc, Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler Sr., Wassily Kandinsky (seated), Heinrich Campendonk and Thomas von Hartmann.

      Blue Horse I by Franz Marc, 1911

      COUPLE RIDING

      In 1889, Kandinsky 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 colours that upon entering them, he felt that he was moving into a painting. This experience and his studies of the region’s folk art, principally the use of bright colours on a dark background, inspired many of his early canvases. A few years later, Kandinsky would famously compare painting as composing music: Colour 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.

      In Couple Riding (1906), housed in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, the artist depicts an elegantly dressed man and a woman, riding a horse in the foreground, in what appears to be a chivalrous scene of ancient times. However, the canvas combines two worlds, with the development of the new world in the background, separated by a glittering wide river. This duality gives a sense of fragmentation, whereby the painting depicts two worlds in opposition to each other.

      The painting is composed of small spots of pure colour and larger brushstrokes of vivid colour, as opposed to contour lines. The only source of light in the otherwise dark painting is emitted from these luminous points of colour within the distant city skyline. The sky in the distance is bright with visible strokes of sea foam green and purple paint, representing light emitted from the city in the background. The small spots that make up the light in the background are also present in the foreground, where they resemble falling leaves, echoing the tapestry on the back of the horse.

      Kandinsky’s depiction of the competing worlds of historic tradition and the emerging modern metropolis reinforces the idea of fragmentation experienced during the early twentieth century. The transformation of the modern city, along with the spread of modernity, creates distance from the anachronistic old world of the foreground lovers, as symbolised by the river spanning the width of the painting.

      Detail

      Detail

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