Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinskywas an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorshipat the University of Dorpat—Kandinsky began painting studiesat the age of 30...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth16 December 1866
CityMoscow, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age.
A parallel between color and music can only be relative – just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments.
Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.
The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.
The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions of every part of the work.
The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.
There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression.
The world is full of resonances. It constitutes a cosmos of things exerting a spiritual action. The dead matter is a living spirit.
Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor; the object was discredited as an indispensable element of the picture.
emotion that I experienced on first seeing the fresh paint come out of the tube... the impression of colours strewn over the palette: of colours - alive, waiting, as yet unseen and hidden in their little tubes...
Doubts must be resolved alone within the soul. Otherwise one would profane one's own powerful solution.
Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.
A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.
Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.