Wassily Kandinsky

The Bauhaus School of Design was a modern design institution that opened on April 12, 1919 in Weimar, Germany. The school was formed when Walter Gropius replaced the former director of the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, Henri van de Velde. Gropius was confirmed as the new director of an institution formed by merging the applied arts – oriented Weimar Arts and Crafts School with a fine arts school, the Weimar Art Academy. Gropius was permitted to name the new school Das Staatliche Bauhaus which translated to the State Home for Building. “Recognizing the common roots of both the fine and applied visual arts, Gropius sought a new unity of art and technology as he enlisted a generation of artists in a struggle to solve problems of visual design created by industrialism” (Meggs 326-327).

The Bauhaus years at Weimar were inspired from expressionism, producing very visionary pieces of art. As I researched, I found a Bauhaus educator who seemed to reflect this style of design. Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow. As a child, he was inspired by the colors of nature. He studied music, law, economics and ethnography, but eventually he decided to become a painter. At the age of 30, Kandinsky enrolled in the art school in Munich. He wasn’t granted admission immediately, so he began to learn art on his own. He saw an exhibit of paintings by Claude Monet, and he was taken with the impressionistic style of Monet’s “Haystacks.” As I searched to find a Kandinsky painting that was reflective of Monet's painting, I found "Beach Baskets in Holland." I thought that this had a similar look to Haystacks, with the objects being the main focus, with the impressionist style. 

 Claud Monet "Haystacks: Snow Effect" 1891

Wassily Kandinsky "Beach Baskets in Holland" 1904

“During these prentice years his experiments in Impressionism and post-Impressionism only served to intensify his abiding memories of the romantic, mythical Russia of his youth, and his art took on the character of a mystical quest, a longed-for return to a lost ideal” (Wassily Kandinsky and his paintings 1). His paintings began to serve the spiritual values that inspired them.

Kandinsky returned to Germany, he joined the teaching staff of the Bauhaus in 1923. He made a fresh start and began working on a more scientific basis. “Composing in an essentially dynamic key expressive of movement, growth and flux, he worked out a precise, minutely calculated idiom of his own, a formulation of points and lines, combining and contending with each other to create curves, circles and significant geometric figures” (Wassily Kandinsky and his paintings 2).  “Kandinsky’s work began transforming. Individual geometrical elements increasingly entered the foreground, and his palette was sated with cold color harmonies” (Oleg Ku 1).  “Composition VIII” by Kandinsky is a good example of his style of design during the Weimar period. Another painting that he created a few years later was “Small Dream in Red.”

Wassily Kandinsky "Composition VIII" 1923

Wassily Kandinsky "Small Dream in Red" 1925

 After the Bauhaus closed, Kandinsky traveled to Paris around 1934 to 1944. During this time, the last transformation of Kandinsky’s painting design occurred. He moved from using a combination of primary colors to using soft, refined, and subtle colors within his paintings.

At this time the last transformation of his painting system happened. Now Kandinsky did not use a combination of primary colours but worked with soft, refined, subtle nuances of colour. “Simultaneously, it supplemented and complicated the repertoir of forms: on the foreground there appear biomorphic elements, which feel at ease in the space of a picture as if floating all over the surface of a canvas” (Oleg Ku 2). We can see this difference clearly in his painting from 1939, “Complex-Simple.”

Wassily Kandinsky "Complex-Simple" 1939

“There is only one road to follow, that of analysis of the basic elements in order to arrive ultimately at an adequate graphic expression." 

- Wassily Kandinsky

Works Cited

Kandinsky, Wassily. Composition VIII. Digital image. Guggenheim.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/1924>.

Ku, Oleg. "The Biography." Wassilykandinsky.net. N.p., Apr. 2008. Web. 2 Mar. 2014. <http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/>.

Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. Hoboken: J. Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print.

"Wassily Kandinsky and His Paintings." Wassily-kandinsky.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Mar. 2014. <http://www.wassily-kandinsky.org/index.jsp>.