LaurieAnnie's photos with the keyword: Kandinsky

Little Painting with Yellow (Improvisation) Vasily Kandinsky, French (born Russia), 1866 - 1944 Date: 1914 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 31 x 39 5/8 inches (78.7 x 100.6 cm) Framed: 32 3/4 x 41 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (83.2 x 105.4 x 6.4 cm) Curatorial Department: Modern Art Accession Number: 1950-134-103 Credit Line: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art Wassily Kandinsky's statement that "painting is like a thundering collision of different worlds that are destined in and through conflict to create that new world called the work"1 finds colorful expression in this dynamic painting, in which blue, red, and green lines intersect with large areas of yellows, purples, and pinks. One of the founders of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of Expressionist artists in Munich, Kandinsky was among the first painters to produce abstract works, which he called Improvisations. Inspired by the relationship between music and painting, he valued shapes, lines, and colors as carriers of spontaneous emotional and spiritual expression. Kandinsky created Little Painting with Yellow in Munich just before the outbreak of World War I, which forced him to return to Russia. No doubt affected by the increasingly unstable political environment and his belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, he painted a whirlwind of explosive lines and colors that suggest both the terror of catastrophe and the elation of rebirth. In his influential essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Kandinsky linked certain colors with emotions and sounds. Little Painting with Yellow is a moving combination of repeating rhythmic forms, colorful harmonies, and jarring dissonances. Emily Hage, from Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art (2007), p. 132. Note: 1) Wassily Kandinsky, "Reminiscences" (1913), as translated in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1, 1901-1921, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 373. Text from: www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51018.html?mulR=1948057831|5

Improvisation No. 29 (The Swan) Vasily Kandinsky, French (born Russia), 1866 - 1944 Geography: Made in Germany, Europe Date: 1912 Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 41 3/4 x 38 3/16 inches (106 x 97 cm) Curatorial Department: Modern Art Accession Number: 1950-134-102 Credit Line: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950 Label: In his paintings and writings, Kandinsky expressed the belief that painting could be a form of visual music. This musical analogy led the artist to categorize his works as Impressions, Improvisations, or Compositions, depending on the degree of spontaneity or formalization. This Improvisation is built on subtle color harmonies applied with an agility that derives from Kandinsky’s rich experience working in watercolor. Additional information: Publication: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Kandinsky initially found the subject matter of his paintings in the folk art and fairytales of his native Russia and of Germany, his adopted country, especially in the landscape around Munich, where he lived and worked from 1896 to 1914. In 1909 he began to free color, shape, and line from the constraints of describing objects or suggesting readable narratives, increasingly dissolving the contours that separated discrete images in his pictures. Music was the prototype he adopted as he envisaged the possibility of abstract painting compositions organized to balance the allusive and the recognizable. Articulating these ideas in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written the same year he completed Improvisation No. 29 (The Swan), Kandinsky carefully considered the equilibrium of abstraction and representation in his work. The musical analogy informed the way Kandinsky categorized his paintings, as Impressions, Improvisations, or Compositions, depending on the degrees of spontaneity and description they balanced. Improvisation No. 29 (The Swan), one of many Improvisations Kandinsky painted between 1908 and 1917, reads as a pulsating abstraction created from subtle color harmonies delicately applied in a manner that derives from the artist's experience working in watercolor. Within its assortment of invented forms and marks, it is possible to discern landscape elements such as plants and stones in the foreground and the presence of birds on the left. The artist's use of aerial perspective eliminates the horizon, flattening and distorting observed nature while also unifying the composition with an overall organic vibrancy. Whether or not the artist intended the subliminal, symbolic imagery to be decoded by the viewer—even as he hailed the revelatory power generated by pure form and color—is one of the abiding mysteries of Kandinsky's pre-World War I painting. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 30. Text from: www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/51017.html?mulR=320374401|2

Wassily Kandinsky. Russian, 1866-1944 The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27) 1912 Oil on canvas Accession # 49.70.1 Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.

Vasily Kandinsky. (French, born Russia. 1866-1944). Picture with an Archer. 1909. Oil on canvas, 68 7/8 x 57 3/8" (175 x 144.6 cm). Gift and bequest of Louise Reinhardt Smith. Publication excerpt The Museum of Modern Art , MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 61 The color in Picture with an Archer is vibrantly alive—so much so that the scene is initially hard to make out. The patchwork surface seems to be shrugging off the task of describing a space or form. Kandinsky was the first modern artist to paint an entirely abstract composition; at the time of Picture with an Archer, that work was just a few months away. Kandinsky took his approach from Paris—particularly from the Fauves—but used it to create an Eastern landscape suffused with a folktale mood. Galloping under the trees of a wildly radiant countryside, a horseman turns in his saddle and aims his bow. In the left foreground stand men in Russian dress; behind them are a house, a domed tower, and two bulbous mountainy pinnacles, cousins of the bent–necked spire in the picture's center. Russian icons show similar rocks, which do exist in places in the East, but even so have a fantastical air. The lone rider with his archaic weapon, the traditional costumes and buildings, and the rural setting intensify the note of fantasy or poetic romance. There is a nostalgia here for a time or perhaps for a place: in 1909 Kandinsky was living in Germany, far from his native Russia. But in the glowing energy of the painting's color there is also excitement and promise. Text from: www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80104