Some More Art Learnin': Vassily Kandinsky, German Experessionist Painter

Here's more of my Art History writing. The Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern has some paintings by Kandinsky. They spell his first name as Wassily (it's pronounced like "v"). I also included some information about Franz von Stuck because I like his works (which are also in the MPK) and was excited to learn about his influence on Kandinsky's career).

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Vassily Kandinsky, Russian by birth, became a famous painter in the German Expressionist style. He was born in 1866 in Moscow, Russia; as an adult, he practiced law in Russia (Wassily Kandinsky). However, at 30 years old he decided to become an artist and moved to Munich in Germany. Prior to his move, he saw works by Impressionists, including those of Claude Monet. Monet’s primacy of color over subject influenced Kandinsky greatly (Wassily Kandinsky).

In Munich, Kandinsky studied under Franz von Stuck, a Symbolist painter and a member of the Munich Secession. This tutorship had a lifelong effect on Kandinsky; during his education, Kandinksy was made to abandon color and work in black and white to create better forms. Following this, Kandinsky spent the rest of his life studying positive and negative space, which became an important advancement in art (Makela 112). 

In 1911, he founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a German Expressionist group, with Franz Marc, naming the group after their interest in horses and the color blue (Kleiner 841). Their paintings depicted their feelings in pictorial form while “eliciting intense visceral responses from viewers” (Kleiner 841).

Science, in addition to Kandinsky’s artistic and humanities training, influenced his works. Studies in atomic make up “convinced Kandinsky that material objects had no real substance;” after this, he lost “faith in a world of tangible things” (Kleiner 841). Instead, artists would need to show their deepest feelings by “orchestrating color, form, line, and space” (Kleiner 841). 

Works Cited

Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art through the Ages: a Global History. Vol. 2. 14^th ed. [Australia]: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013. 

Makela, Maria. The Munich Secession: art and artists in turn-of-the-century Munich. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

"Wassily Kandinsky." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Biography In Context. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

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Also, here is my disclaimer: the following is copyright 2013 by Around the Wherever. Do not reproduce in any way (especially if you're writing a paper for a class; don't be academically dishonest and copy this in any form).