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Composition VII
Composition VII. Wassily Kandinsky · Public domain · source

Wassily Kandinsky

Public domain1866-1944·Russian·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Moscow on 16 December 1866 and died at Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, on 13 December 1944. He gave up an academic career in law at thirty and went to Munich in 1896 to paint; he co-founded the Blue Rider in 1911, taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933, and spent his last years in France.

Why they matter

He is one of the founders of abstract painting and its most articulate theorist. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) and Point and Line to Plane (1926) argued that colour and form could act on the viewer directly, as music does, without depicting anything. He traced it to seeing one of Monet's Haystacks: "That it was a haystack the catalogue informed me. I could not recognise it."

What to buy

Prints: the paintings are big and saturated, and most reproduce well; buy one at a generous size from a reputable printer. Read before you buy: Dover's inexpensive paperback of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in M. T. H. Sadler's translation, is the book that explains the pictures, in his own words. Originals: Kandinsky was a real printmaker, and his prints are catalogued by Hans Konrad Roethel, the Lenbachhaus director who first saw Munter's hidden collection; dealers cite the Roethel numbers. The landmark is Kleine Welten (Small Worlds), published by Propylaen in Berlin in 1922: twelve sheets, four lithographs, four woodcuts and four drypoints, in an edition of 200 on Butten paper plus 30 on japan, every sheet signed. Sheets from it come up singly as well as in complete portfolios. The trap is the lithographs "after Kandinsky" printed by Mourlot for Maeght's magazine Derriere le Miroir from the 1950s on - Promenade (1957), for instance, is a lithographic reproduction of a 1920 painting, with the initials printed in the stone. They are attractive and honest when sold as what they are, but they were made after his death and are not Kandinsky prints.

Notes

The Lenbachhaus in Munich holds the great early collection, from Munter's gift of 1957: ninety oil paintings by him, about 330 watercolours and drawings, his sketchbooks, reverse glass paintings and his printed work. The Guggenheim in New York has a large group, including Several Circles (1926); Composition VII (1913) is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. MoMA holds sheets from Kleine Welten.

Story

Kandinsky met Gabriele Munter in 1901, when she enrolled in the beginners' class at the Phalanx, the art school he had founded in Munich. They travelled and worked together for over a decade and furnished a home together at Murnau, south of Munich. When war broke out in 1914 he returned to Russia without her; in 1917 he married Nina Andreevskaya. Munter sent some of his paintings and drawings back to him, but much of what he had left behind stayed with her. Under the Nazis, abstract art was condemned as "degenerate". Munter had the works by herself, Kandinsky and their circle brought to the Murnau house and stored them in the basement. The house was searched several times; the pictures were never found. In 1956 Hans Konrad Roethel, soon to direct Munich's Lenbachhaus, was finally allowed to see the whole collection. The next year, for her eightieth birthday, Munter gave it to the city: more than a thousand works by the Blue Rider artists, among them ninety oil paintings by Kandinsky - the man who had left her four decades before.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Guggenheim ↗MoMA (Small Worlds, 1922) ↗The Met ↗National Gallery, London ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Dover (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) ↗AbeBooks (Roethel, catalogue of the prints) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

Swann Galleries ↗eBay ↗

See also

Edvard Munch 1863-1944Paul Klee 1879-1940James Ensor 1860-1949Georges Rouault 1871-1958Marianne von Werefkin 1860-1938Jan Toorop 1858-1928Ellen Thesleff 1869-1954Paul Gauguin 1848-1903

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