On November 25, 1913, Miinter noted in her diary that the canvas for Composition VII had arrived after dinner and that Kandinsky had started to work the same evening. The next morning she took the first photograph of the painting and in the afternoon the second one. Her diary entry on the 28th recorded that the painting had been completed.
Kandinsky, Composition VII Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Juliana Kreinik, and Dr. Steven Zucker provide a description, historical perspective, and analysis of Kandinsky’s Composition VII. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII , 1913, oil on canvas, 79 × 119 in (200.7 × 302.3 cm), (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
· For Kandinsky, color also had the ability to put viewers in touch with their spiritual selves. He believed that yellow could disturb, while blue awakened the highest spiritual aspirations. Just a year before he painted Fragment 2 for Composition VII, Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art. An important statement of Kandinsky’s ...
Summary of Wassily Kandinsky. One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience …
He once said, “the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble.”.
Conceived for the theatre, Kandinsky created experimental performance-based expressions of synesthesia– The Yellow Sound being the most famous–which utilized original musical scores, lighting, and various media to explore prevalent color theories of the time.
Key painting to look for: Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913. The neurological phenomenon Kandinsky experienced is called synesthesia (or “joined perception,” from the Greek word syn meaning “join” and aisthesis meaning “perception”). It’s a rare but real condition in which one sense, like hearing, concurrently triggers another sense, ...
Just a year before he painted Fragment 2 for Composition VII, Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art. An important statement of Kandinsky’s theories on art’s potential to evoke psychological, physical, and emotional responses, the treatise is considered the first theoretical foundation of abstraction.
The famous Viennese composer Arnold Schönberg was one influence. Schönberg abandoned tonal and harmonic conventions in his compositions the same way that Kandinsky rejected the figure or recognizable object in favor of shapes, lines, and discordant colors in his work.
In fact, it was after having an unusually visual response to a performance of Wagner’s composition Lohengrin at the Bolshoi Theatre that he abandoned his law career to study painting at the prestigious Munich Academy of Fine Arts. He later described the life-changing experience: “I saw all my colors in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”
Preoccupied by the theme of apocalypse and redemption throughout the 1910s, Kandinsky formally tied the whirling composition of the painting to the theme of the cyclical processes of destruction and salvation. Despite the seemingly non-objective nature of the work, Kandinsky maintained several symbolic references in this painting. Among the various forms that built Kandinsky's visual vocabulary, he painted glyphs of boats with oars, mountains, and figures. However, he did not intend for viewers to read these symbols literally and instead imbued his paintings with multiple references to the Last Judgment, the Deluge, and the Garden of Eden, seemingly all at once.
Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
Summary of Wassily Kandinsky. One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public.
Commonly cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky's pre-World War I achievement, Composition VII shows the artist's rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling hurricane of colors and shapes. The operatic and tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. As the different colors and symbols spiral around each other, Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all cultures and viewers.
Although he continued to refine his abstraction, he represented the city's monuments in this painting and captured the spirit of the city. Kandinsky painted the landmarks in a circular fashion as if he had stood in the center of Red Square, turned in a circle, and caught them all swirling about him. Although he refers to the outside world in this painting, he maintained his commitment to the synesthesia of color, sound, and spiritual expression in art. Kandinsky wrote that he particularly loved sunset in Moscow because it was "the final chord of a symphony which develop [ed] in every tone a high life that force [d] all of Moscow to resound like the fortissimo of a huge orchestra."
As with many paintings from this period, he represented the apocalyptic battle that would lead to eternal peace. The notion of battle is conveyed by the Cossacks, while the calm of the flowing forms and reclining figures on the right alludes to the peace and redemption to follow. In order to facilitate his development of a non-objective style of painting, as described in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky reduced objects to pictographic symbols. Through his elimination of most references to the outside world, Kandinsky expressed his vision in a more universal manner, distilling the spiritual essence of the subject through these forms into a visual vocabulary. Many of these symbolic figures were repeated and refined in later works, becoming further and further abstracted as Kandinsky developed his mature, purely abstract style.
The rational, geometric order of Composition VIII is a polar opposite of the operatic composition of Composition VII (1913). Painted while he taught at the Bauhaus, this work illustrates how Kandinsky synthesized elements from Suprematism, Constructivism, and the school's own ethos. By combining aspects of all three movements, he arrived at the flat planes of color and the clear, linear quality seen in this work. Form, as opposed to color, structured the painting in a dynamic balance that pulses throughout the canvas. This work is an expression of Kandinsky's clarified ideas about modern, non-objective art, particularly the significance of shapes like triangles, circles, and the checkerboard. Kandinsky relied upon a hard-edged style to communicate the deeper content of his work for the rest of his career.
Wassily Kandinsky was obsessed with color which he believed directly influenced the soul.
Matisse's work is set in the day and Picasso's at night.
Early silent films appealed to working-class immigrant audiences because they didn't have to understand the language (usually English).
Dadaists saw language as a vehicle for nationalism and war. Composed nonsensical sound poems to protest the empty rhetoric of nationalism.
Parisian audiences hissed and booed it on opening night because they thought it was Radical music. It was very jarring to the ears; a cacophony of sound.
They pasted those things because they wanted to challenge the space between life and art.
Composition VIII has a long and obscure history. Kandinsky himself considered it to be the acme of his early Bauhaus period. No formal element can morphologically be related to any figurative prototype. The geometric vocabulary seems to consist of comparatively few components like circles, semicircles, angles, rectangles, and lines.
Because of the impossibility of giving a lucid description of Composition VIII, the attractive temptation is to bypass the problem by comparing the elements in the painting with those in atomic physics which, of course, are also not part of the objective world.
There appears to be no logic in the imagery; the components do not "respond" to each other; no organic continuity is evident and no psychological associations are evoked. Comparable to the sublime humor of a divertimento, the elements - although they seem to be strictly geometric - actually deviate from their mathematically defined shapes.
The colors are not "applied" to any object; they have no brio, or pastose quality, but are phenomena in their own right, as are the geometric forms.
Kandinsky taught this and other lessons at the Bauhaus, the historic Weimar institution that brought together artists including Joseph Albers , Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and Piet Mondrian, amongst others.
Following. An early champion of abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky is known for his lyrical style and innovative theories on nonfigurative art . In his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky made famous his belief that abstract colors and forms can be used to express the “inner life” of the artist.