Kandinskys Art :: Wassily Kandinsky Artists Painters Essays

Since my first encounter with Kandinsky's art I was amazed by their complexity and always wondered about the creative and intellectual mind, which was responsible for them. The few books I managed to find on Kandinsky were extremely useful as they outlined his entire career and had a substantial amount of illustrations. There were also a number of websites available on the Internet, which contained critiques from other art historians, critics and fellow artists from around the world. But there is not a large number of his paintings available in Britain therefore could only experience his art at first hand on three occasions. If I were to attempt this coursework again I would perhaps try to widen my research by travelling outside of the U.K. and experiencing at first hand some of Kandinsky's more grand pieces, in order to fully feel their effects. Introduction Upon my first encounter with Kandinsky's painting, my eyes and indeed my mind were overcome with a sense of puzzlement, as it seemed impossible to decipher what lay beneath his passionate use of colour and distorted forms. Kandinsky hoped by freeing colour from its representational restrictions, it, like music could conjure up a series of emotions in the soul of viewer, reinforced by corresponding forms. Throughout this essay, I will follow Kandinsky's quest for a pure, abstract art and attempt to determine whether his passionate belief in this spiritual art and his theories on its effects on the soul, can truly be felt and appreciated by the average viewer, who at first glance would most likely view Kandinsky's paintings as simply abstract. Kandinsky was indeed a visionary, an artist who through his theoretical ideas of creating a new pictorial language sought to revolutionize the art of the twentieth-century. Regarded as the founder of abstract painting, he broke free from arts traditional limitations and invented the first painting for paintings sake, whereby the dissolution of the object and subsequent promotion of colour and form became means of expression in their own right. This theory stemmed from his fundamental belief of the importance of a "spiritual" art, which could be extracted only from the "inner voice" of the artist. Kandinsky believed that this spiritual domain was indestructible and therefore had the utmost authoritative power to create artistic messages that were as alive and pure as nature. His preoccupation with music and the freedom of expression that it provided, fascinated Kandinsky and inspired his observations on the "sounds" of colours, a theory based on an idea that these colours had a psychological effect on the viewer similar to the emotional effect created by a musical composition. Kandinsky the Russian Born in Moscow in 1866, Wassily Kandinsky would spend the majority of