Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter, educator, and art theorist. His initial training was in law and he began an academic career, but in 1896 he turned down the offer of a professorship and left Russia for Munich to study painting. He remained there, apart from a year in Paris (in 1906-7) until 1914 when he returned to Russia. After the revolution in 1917, he held a number of positions as an art administrator and educator but left for Germany again in 1922 to join the faculty of the Bauhaus, an art school that was a center for modernism in the 1920s. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death.
This assignment consists of selections from a short book first published in German in 1912, soon after Kandinsky began to paint abstract works. By the time this translation was published (in 1914), he had accumulated a substantial body of such work, and the book included illustrations of four of his paintings. The selections in the handout focus on the first part of the book, where Kandinsky develops his view of the “spiritual” and presents a theory of the development of art and culture generally. Much of the second part is specifically focused on painting and, in particular, on the spiritual significance of color. You can find the whole book along with its illustrations on the course Moodle site.
• One range of ideas to think about in Kandinsky center on the term “spiritual.” This is his focus in the introductory chapter, and some of his most important comments about it appear early (such as the contrast between “shapeless emotions” and “subtler emotions, as yet unnamed” on p. 2 of the handout). And it again becomes the focus of much of the selections from the second part. But he has things to say that are relevant to it throughout.
• Another group of ideas concern the development of art. This is the focus of most of the first part (chs. 2-4) but there is also relevant discussion in the second part, especially near the end. The key idea here is the “moving triangle” (ch. 2), but you should also think about the “three mystical elements” of “inner need” (p. 15).
• Finally, think about the relation between Kandinsky and others you have read from this same period (i.e., 1895-1915). There are clear connections with Bell and less direct ones with Bullough and Croce, but think also of Tolstoy.
There are clear differences between the two Russians. Kandinsky regards as a hero the Belgian Symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), who appears regularly in Tolstoy’s examples of counterfeit or bad art. Tolstoy speaks of contraction to the apex of a cone (¶10.63) while Kandinsky speaks of expansion from the apex of a triangle (ch. 2). But both emphasize the idea of counterfeit, soulless art, and the art that they classify this way is not always different: one of the techniques for counterfeiting art that Tolstoy points to is “imitation,” which he says, among others things, “assimilates painting to photography” (p. 94, not on the handout).