GRAPHIC DESIGN HISTORY 2009: 1900 - 1920 - Robyn Rand

Wassily Kandinsky

"Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings."

A Russian artist, he is one of the most famous early 20th Century artists and painted some of the first modern abstract works. A successful lawyer, he chose to study art at the age of 30 and only 26 years later was teaching at the Bauhaus. Mostly he learnt to love colour and contrast as a child and, as the quote above implies he related the act of painting to that of creating music.

From 1909 to 1911 Kandinsky painted a large series of paintings he called 'Improvisations', these were a great development in the painting style of the time and he called this style 'Expressive Abstraction' in which he displayed his own 'inner nature'.

In all of his work, particularly in his Improvisations, Kandinsky used colour to find forms of expression that would be capable of representing inner visions, associations and emotional or intellectual matters in pictorial form, as if seen through the senses. He seems to show us a conflict between line and colour which brings release from the traditional painting of an object. Using shape, space and colour to help with placement and represents the object rather then trying to imitate or reproduce an exact image of the object. Doing this he seems to have achieved a 'floating in space' state for the image which exceeds the limits of traditional perspective and presents a sort of 4th dimension through the use of weight, placement and colour, which gives his paintings amazing visual energy.

Kandinsky co-founded a number of movements with in the two decades we are looking at, the most well known are: The Phalanx in 1901, The New Artists Association in 1909, and Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. He was also well known to, and worked with some of the most influential artists of that era. His experiments with colour, space and placement have had and still is having a huge impact on the art world. Kandinsky was always adamant about the importance of including text, music and movement to make a complete work of art, so I think he would be thrilled to use the materials we have available to us today (and probably would be a huge contributor to youtube).