| Wassily Kandinsky - Anticipating
the Future |
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| Figure 1. Composition VIII 1923; Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York | |||||
| Kandinsky anticipated the future by 72 years ! "Kandinsky described his reaction to the nuclear atom: ‘The collapse of the atom model was equivalent, in my soul, to the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the thickest walls fell. I would not have been amazed if stone appeared before my eye in the air, melted, and became invisible.’ The radical nature of the scientific advances in the early twentieth century reverberated in modern culture. The fundamentals of art and literature and our understanding of psychology all changed radically at the tie. Although some attribute these developments to the upheaval and havoc of World War I, artists such as Wassily Kandinsky used the fact that the atom was penetrable to justify the idea that everything can change, and that in art, therefore, everything is allowed. Finding heavy particles is not easy. Yet that’s what we must do if we are to discover the structure underlying ..., ultimately, the physical makeup of the universe.” 1 * Collider Detector
at Fermilab
** designation of the collision point between protons and antiprotons at which the detector was located.
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Other Works by Kandinsky |
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Figure 3. Aquarelle aus Dem, 1922 |
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| Biographic
Snapshot |
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 1866
- 1944 Born in Moscow, Kandinsky
spent his early childhood in Odessa. His parents played the piano and
the zither and Kandinsky himself learned the piano and cello at an
early age. The influence of music in his paintings cannot be
overstated, down to the names of his paintings Improvisations,
Impressions, and Compositions.
In 1886, he enrolled at the University of Moscow, chose to study law
and economics, and after passing his examinations, lectured at the
Moscow Faculty of Law. He enjoyed success not only as a teacher
but also wrote extensively on spirituality, a subject that remained of
great interest and ultimately exerted substantial influence in his work. |
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In 1895 Kandinsky attended a French Impressionist exhibition where he saw Monet's Haystacks at Giverny. He stated, "It was from the catalog I learned this was a haystack. I was upset I had not recognized it. I also thought the painter had no right to paint in such an imprecise fashion. Dimly I was aware too that the object did not appear in the picture..." Soon thereafter, at the age of thirty, Kandinsky left Moscow and went to Munich to study life-drawing, sketching and anatomy, regarded then as basic for an artistic education. Ironically, Kandinsky's work moved in a direction that was of
much greater abstraction than that which was pioneered by the
Impressionists. It was not long before his talent surpassed the
constraints of art school and he began exploring his own ideas of
painting - "I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with
a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could..."
Now considered to be the founder of abstract art, his work was
exhibited throughout Europe from 1903 onwards, and often caused
controversy among the public, the art critics, and his contemporaries.
An active participant in several of the most influential and
controversial art movements of the 20th century, among them the Blue
Rider which he founded along with Franz Marc
and the Bauhaus which also attracted Klee,
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), and Schonberg, Kandinsky continued to
further express and define his form of art, both on canvas and in his
theoretical writings. His reputation became firmly established in the
United State
s through numerous exhibitions and his work was introduced to Solomon
Guggenheim, who became one of his most enthusiastic supporters. |
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| 1 Lisa Randall, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (HarperCollins, 2005) |
