Wassili Kandinsky

Wassili Kandinsky was one of those artists that everyone seems to like and yet few can say why. He still has many followers and his art is still very popular.

He was born in Russia but trained to be a lawyer rather than an artist. He was good at that and made a good living. He actually got to the age of 30 before he even started to take painting seriously. Eventually he got a teaching place at the famous German Bauhaus school, but this was only after the constraints of the Soviet Russian State and its thoughts on Modernist Art became too much for him to bear. He left to go to Germany. This was when he joined the Bauhaus.

He had a very good career in Germany and became a very important figure in the theory of Art, He got into the philosophy of THEOSOPHY. This was the same line of thought that had influenced Piet Mondrian and  which helped to develop his strong style of vertical and horizontal lines to form rectangles, filled with bright primary colours or white. For Kandinsky it took him in a different direction. He built on the strong use of vertical and horizontal lines, but developed the use of lines having curves and a point. He also saw the strength of colour and shape.

Kandinsky became one of the most important abstract artists over a long period. He carried this on when the German Nazi regime took over in Germany and closed the Bauhaus School. Kandinsky saw the writing on the wall and moved away from Germany to live the rest of his life in France. That was in 1933.


This video is part of the Digital Modernist collection. You can view it here, or go to the YouTube channel and see more video in full screen by going to this link .