Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter credited as being among the first to truly venture into abstract art. He persisted in expressing his internal world of abstraction despite negative criticism from his peers. He veered away from painting that could be viewed as representational in order to express his emotions, leading to his unique use of colour and form. Although his works received heavy censure at the time, in later years they would become greatly influential.

Wassily Kandinsky and artworks

Tra gli artisti più noti del XX secolo, Kandinsky si distinse per il valore internazionale della sua parabola esistenziale e della sua arte, che congiunse Russia, Germania e Francia; per il suo impegno come insegnante al celebre Bauhaus e la produzione di versi e scritti teorici; per il suo saldo e determinato cammino verso l'individualità. Nella cultura odierna egli occupa un posto d'eccezione: il posto di un artista che rifuggì la vanità e il desiderio di scioccare lo spettatore; il posto di un maestro incline alla meditazione, fondatore del Blaue Reiter e autore di Lo spirituale nell'arte; il posto di un artista che fu sempre fedele al movimento che porta alla sintesi delle arti e orientato alla ricerca di sistemi formali ascetici e perfetti.

Wassili Kandinsky

Kandinsky

Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) était un peintre russe qui fut l'un des premiers à réellement s'aventurer dans l'art abstrait. Il s'évertua à représenter son monde intérieur d'abstraction malgré les critiques négatives de ses pairs. Il s'éloigna de la peinture potentiellement figurative dans le but d'exprimer ses émotions, le conduisant à un usage inédit de la forme et de la couleur. Bien que ses fluvres aient été fortement censurées à son époque, elles eurent énormément d'influences quelques années plus tard.

Der russische Maler Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) gilt als einer der Ersten, die sich auf das Feld der abstrakten Kunst gewagt haben. Trotz negativer Reaktionen einiger Kollegen bestand er darauf, sein Innenleben mithilfe der Abstraktion darzustellen. Dazu entfernte er sich immer mehr von einer Malerei, die als gegenständlich bezeichnet werden kann, was in seinem einzigartigen Gebrauch von Form und Farbe resultierte. Obwohl seine Werke zunächst heftiger Kritik ausgesetzt waren, würden sie sich schließlich als wegweisend erweisen.

L'écrivain russe Mikhaïl Guerman, célèbre historien de l'art, nous raconte sa passion pour Paris et la manière dont la ville a été présente tout au long de sa vie. Il a découvert la Ville lumière dès son enfance avec la littérature, notamment les récits de mousquetaires à la Dumas. Citoyen de l'Union soviétique résidant à Leningrad, il reçoit l'autorisation de visiter Paris en 1965 : le regard de ce voyageur ébahi par le monde qu'il découvre, submergé par le foisonnement des détails et le heurt du réel et de l'imaginaire, constitue un témoignage émouvant et souvent plein d'humour. Ce voyage sera suivi de nombreux autres, d'abord hantés par la peur de ne plus jamais être autorisé à quitter l'URSS. Entre musées, gares et brasseries, le visiteur arpente les quais et les boulevards, et s'émerveille devant les tableaux de la vie parisienne. Du Bateau-Lavoir au jardin du Luxembourg, Mikhaïl Guerman part à la recherche de Paris et des artistes qui ont fait vivre la ville, et nous offre des pages brillantes sur les oeuvres picturales ou photographiques dédiées aux diverses facettes de la capitale française.

A la recherche de Paris, ou l'éternel retour

Kandinsky's art does not reflect and is not burdened by the fate of other Russian avant-garde masters. He left Russia well before the semi-official Soviet aesthetic turned its back on modernist art. He had been to Paris and Italy, even giving Impressionism its due in his earliest works. However, it was only in Germany that he aspired to study. It is obvious that in his preference for Munich over Paris, Kandinsky had been thinking more about schools than about artistic milieu. The qualities of salon Impressionism, a hint of the dry rhythms of modernism (Jugendstil), a heavy "demiurgic stroke" reminiscent of Cézanne, the occasionally significant echoes of Symbolism and much more can be found in the artist's early works. Kandinsky began working in Murnau in August, 1908. The intensity with which he worked during this period is stunning. In his early Murnau landscapes it is not hard to recognise a Fauvist boiling of colours and an abruptness in their juxtapositioning, the dramatic tension of Expressionism, which was gathering strength at that time, and the insistent texture of Cézanne. Kandinsky was leaving behind the earthly gravitational field of objects for the weightlessness of the abstract world, where the principal coordinates of being up and down, space and weight are lost. According to the myths of the twentieth century, by leaving reality behind, Kandinsky renounced illusion and, therefore, drew closer to a higher reality. In 1911, Kandinsky participated in the foundation of the group Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider). Kandinsky had already acquired a name in his Russian homeland. His On the Spiritual in Art (1912) was known from lectures and other accounts. When, with the "Improvisations" and "Compositions" of 1915-20, Kandinsky made his final break with the object world, he preserved until the early 1930s the feeling of dynamic, even organic, life in his paintings. In the summer of 1922, Kandinsky began teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus. It was then, in the first Bauhaus years, that he began working on his "Worlds", works in which he quite directly contrasted the grandeur of the great and the small. Kandinsky's fame grew with that of the Bauhaus. Kandinsky determined the essence of what was happening to him in the context of his environment. On the one hand, the presence of surrealistic overtones in his art is unquestionable. Those splendid carnivals of the subconscious, those "landscapes of the soul," realised in his simultaneously menacing and festive paintings from the 1910s, had already been in partial contact with the poetics of Surrealism. In Russia he had come to know himself as an artist: Russian motifs and sensations nourished his brush for a long time. In Germany he had become a professional and a great master; a transnational master. In France, where he was already welcomed as a world celebrity, he completed brilliantly and a bit dryly what he had begun in Russia and Germany.

Chagall aimait le bleu. " Le bleu du ciel qui combat sans cesse les nuages qui passent, qui passent... " (Baudelaire). La trajectoire de Marc Chagall commence dans sa Russie natale et s'achève dans la consécration parisienne, avec cet extraordinaire plafond de l'Opéra de Paris commandé par Malraux.
Chemin faisant, son inspiration embrasse le XXe siècle de ses couleurs, sans jamais renier ses origines de Juif russe. Cet ouvrage suit le parcours de l'artiste avec ses œuvres fondatrices, sa découverte des Etats-Unis, sa passion pour la France. Marc Chagall, sans adhérer à un mouvement, mais influencé par ses rencontres avec Bakst, Matisse et Picasso, reste sans conteste le peintre de la poésie.

Wassily Kandinsky and artworks

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