Wassily Kandinsky: Improvisation XIV (1910)

Wassily Kandinsky began to experiment with abstracting from landscape and with painting expressive narrative pictures that were symbolic, though not taken from real scenes. This painting is one of his ‘improvisations’, implying that it is constructed rather than painted from observation, yet there is clearly a landscape within the balanced, rhythm of Fauve-like colours.

It is around this time that Kandinsky and Franz Marc formulated the ideas that were to define Der Blaue Reiter, a group of artists who shared artistic vision and exhibited together, based around an occasional journal also titled Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

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You can find an image of this painting amongst this gallery of Kandinsky's Improvisations 

Click on image above for more info or to buy this excellent Taschen book on Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky: Cossacks (1912)

Deceptively simple and almost childish, this painting is at once: narrative, expressionistic, romantic, fauvist, abstract, symbolic, allegorical… The Cossacks of the title are reduced to cartoon-like blobs of colour and bold use of negative space on the right of the picture, the plume of smoke from the barrage of long rifles on the left is a fiery blood red cloud, the guns of either side bristle from the landscape that seems to be sliding into the valley… At the top, the dynamic forms of two more sabre-wielding Cossacks seem to be carving up the land itself, a confusion of calligraphic lines perhaps represents their slicing or the cross-fire of battle over the rainbow that holds the picture together and forms a bridge between the two sides, both hopeful of a brighter future and an end to hostilities…

It is not a painting of a battle, but a painting of some of the emotions and meanings of a battle, it depicts the violence and confusion, but is also romanticised. In this image, both sides are heroic in their fight for a better future and should instead be united by these hopes and not in conflict. Kandinsky is championing the bravery of the soldiers, whilst condemning war as useless and destructive. At the same time it operates as a representational scene and as an abstract composition of colour and line.

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Image of this painting with notes at the Tate website

Wassily Kandinsky: Black Spot 1 (1912)

There still seems to be elements of landscape here, though this is an abstract composition. The title refers to a formal element within the painting and not what the painting may represent, indicating the prime importance of form and structure here. The use of line is bold and, in some ways, is reminiscent of some earlier Fauve painters, but here the colour is not strictly contained by line and is also set free entirely from line. The relationship between line and colour becomes one of balance and interplay. The result is a dynamic composition that bypasses rational meaning, becoming directly expressive in a similar way to music. Kandinsky often avoided using titles that gave a clue to the meaning of a picture in order to ‘side-step’ the rational mind that is eager to categorise and dismiss. If the intellectual faculty was momentarily confounded, then this allowed the spiritual, or subconscious, faculty to engage with the work…

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Image of this painting at Olga's abc Gallery Kandinsky Pages

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Wassily Kandinsky: Composition 6 (1913)

Kandinsky was, arguably, the first painter to successfully achieve true abstraction. Here he is working directly with the canvas and each colour and line is governed by its relationship with those around it. The softer organic shapes are balanced by slashing lines, the soft tones are counter-pointed by bold fiery colours, the dark in harmony with the light. The composition has movement and flow and in many ways has been created by the artist by a similar approach to a composer creating a piece of music.

Kandinsky hoped to achieve the same direct expressiveness of great music in his paintings and dealt with similar elements of rhythm, tempo, tone, volume… This series of early ‘Compositions’ are generally cited as the first abstract paintings.

Like his friend and colleague, Franz Marc, Kandinsky believed that art should strive to be a synthesis of both the intellectual faculty and the emotions. He thought that art can express the “inner grace” of the artist and reveal that quality in the viewer. His work, along with others of Der Blaue Reiter, would be a notable influence on all abstract art to follow including Synchromism, Orphism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Activism, De Stijl as well as the Dadaists and Surrealists (particularly Juan Miro). Kandinsky survived the First World War and was hugely influential between the wars. He was an influential teacher at the Bauhaus and an important conduit of ideas between Russia and the West.

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Good scan of this early abstract painting can be found at the WebMuseum Kandinsky pages

www.wassilykandinsky.net/  has extensive content...