Wassily Kandinsky

I don't know much about Kandinsky.  I didn't know his first name was Wassily.  I didn't know he was from Russia.  I didn't know who his friends were and where he found inspiration.  I knew that the first I heard of him I think I was in high school and it was from a friend who either showed me a print or pointed out some Kandinsky work some where.... I don't know.  But I had a feeling about him.  Like he was an important abstract artist.  And as my visits to the Chicago Art Institute became more frequent and I began to go there to study different artists I began to notice Kandinsky.  More so after the accident I think.  But I can't swear to it.

Anyway, through the years I have done a few studies of Kandinsky's work and probably only noticed his name after I studied them.  Still, I've always had a good feeling about him.

So when I began to trace this painting on a door that has haunted me since the Chicago Art Institute's exhibit, "Degenerate Art:  Fate of the Avante-Garde in Nazi Germany."  I finally called the Art Institute and asked about this painting on a door.  I found out the exhibit was in 1991 which was three years before the accident.  So that's cool.  That this image has stayed with me when so much was lost gave it a certain significance over the years.  I found out there was a book about it so I ordered it through my library.  And I've been looking through it and I decided to do some research on the artists, whose work I admired.  There were quite a few.

Yesterday I studied Franz Marc.  It is a very different thing, to find out about how an artist lived or where they lived and what was going on around them.

Today is Wassily Kandinsky.  He too was deemed by the Nazi's to be a degenerate artist.

The first thing I did was search out some Kandinsky images.  And then I found some good informative sites about him.  He was quite a sociable man.  He was married a few times.  He lived in a few places and even changed his citizenship a few times.  Let's see, yes, he started out as a Russian and then he went to study in Munich and he became a German.  And then just before WWI happened he left Germany and he went to Paris.  He was quite a bit older than Franz Marc.  And quite a bit more experienced in the world and he was an educated and lettered man who gave up being a lawyer and professor to become, I know it... an artist.

Hold on.  I'm feeling that sense of jumping without a parachuet.
The air of freedom whirling past...
all yielded to the flow and
drop
and then bam
reality
its hard to keep focused on your work
and make a living at it.

So I give the man credit.  The specifics I don't need to know.  If anything stands out I'll add it but what I dig the most is that he chose to fly.

So there he is, in the upper hemisphere, looking at nature and creating some of the most powerful, elegant work I've ever seen.  I mean Odessa. Port, 1898.  This is amazing.  It has movement and a calm and a dawning and massive wood pieces and smaller ones and the life of the water....  its so beautiful... and not at all what I was expecting.

I had expected to see something more abstract, not necessarily less skillfully done but certainly more cubist in nature.

The Wassily Kandinsky I thought I'd see were more like these
Kochel -- Waterfall was painted two years later, 1900.  It was vibrant and his perspective brilliant.  It pulled me right into the painting.  Not like some formula piece that tricked me to looking at one side of the canvas and moving my lazy ass eye around it but this painting took me in.  Like a breath of fresh air mixed with a winded exhale after a walking down a long path and turning round a curve to see what the rumbling was all about.  Yeah.

   
The painting to the right, Study of sluice was painted in 1901.  I mean this is some amazing work and this was in the beginning of his flight.
There are so many brilliant works of art during his first ten years as an artist.  This one is a must to include.  It is called, "Bei Starngerg - "Winter and it was also painted in 1902.  Oh his brilliance continues.  But these pieces are truly poetry written with a brush.
 


The next ten years his work changes.  It becomes more detached.  It had feeling.  I don't mean it that way.  But they were more mathematical equations.  Symbols and lines and circles and bright colors, mostly.

And then in 1917 things got real quiet.  And they moved and shifted.  And the war seeped into the medium.  And for awhile I think all was nearly lost.  And things became more disconnected.  Less identifiable.

Like ancient Egyptians heiroglyphics.  The meanings attached to these symbols were known only to him and maybe a very select few other.....     This one is called, "Wall Panel (for Edwin R.Campbell's Villa).
This one was painted in 1914.  That's remarkable really.  Sixteen years in and look at how his work has grown. This is another wall panel for Edwin.  Pretty neat.


 This one was painted in 1916 and it is called, "To the Unknown Voice."  I wonder who was the unknown voice.
 
And check out Gray Oval, done in 1917.  Something had changed.




And then the war was over.  The war to end all wars finally ended in 1918.  And everyone left, started to pick up the pieces and put it all back together again.

Only hearts were shattered and left with a knowledge that led to uncertainty.  And maybe this was what brought on the disconnection.  That a lot of art expresses to this day.


I had studied "Landscape With Two Poplars" and I think another but the more symbolic pieces I must have walked right by.

I had always associated skill with being able to create something that either made some one think or stirred a feeling in them or something that had a sense of life.  This intrigued me, the a sense of a moment could be captured on the end of a brush and left on some linen or canvas or board or paper for others to see many years later and some how feel connected to was what thrilled me the most about paintings, oils and watercolors.  It was the way they used color and the way they used something invisible with the paint and moved it around with a brush that just did it for me.

So a few sticks, thrown seemingly, haphazrdly probably wouldn't have even slowed my pace all that much.
 Transverse Line , 1923
on left On White II, 1923
       and Calm Bend, 1925

 
Above "Movement I" was done in 1935.
Whether his work seemed to be all orderly and in place or not
it still whispered and some times screamed.... indifference  And that I dig.

Some times what can't be said directly, or even defined, can come to life through art.  That whole idea blew my mind.  I think that's what I had to figure out. How could water move or a piece of fruit looks so real, even if the details were missing?  And for another ten years I studied.

Because I was a writer.  And a woman.  And art was for men.  And writing was too back then.  My passions would probably never be fulfilled.  But the world had already opened up to me and after that curiosity took a footing it got all fired up and nearly kilned me. Sorry. couldn't resist.

I was to love art and poetry and writing and
express it all of my life and
it would probably never be taken
in
seriously

Yeah, so when that thought occurred to me I figured, so what.  I'm going to buy some paints and just start doin' the damn thing.  I don't need to be great or perfect.  I have the passion.  That's all I need.  The rest will be what it will be.

And maybe
its not for me to say,
maybe.

So when I look at Kandinsky's work now I think.... here is someone who went from amazing to phenomenal to chartering new ground at such a pace.... not even he could have seen it coming.  And this was back in the early to mid-1900's.  He just went there and let everything else fall where it laid.  And that I respect.  Kandinsky.

Oh, let's see.  Yeah, I guess I use symbols some times in my artwork too.  I never thought about it until after I finished a painting.  Some times they talk to me and tell me what they are about.  This one is an oil on canvas and it is called, "Windhorse."

Franz Marc

Franz Marc is the first artist I was intrigued by in the Degenerate Art: Fate of the Avante-Garde in Nazi Germany.  I wanted to see more of his artwork.  These are the paintings I was drawn to:

Yellow Cow                                                      

The Red Horses

And below, Large Lenggries Horse, is one of the most beautiful works I've ever seen.  The forms of these horses appear on the canvas like a dream; a golden, nearly transparent dream that I never want to end.

The trauma of the war for Marc was such that, at the end, only death could give him relief. In that state his own innocence could be restored. One of Marc's last letters:

"I understand well that you speak as easily of death as of something which doesn't frighten you. I feel precisely the same. In this war, you can try it out on yourself - an opportunity life seldom offers one...nothing is more calming than the prospect of the peace of death...the one thing common to all. It leads us back into normal "being". The space between birth and death is an exception, in which there is much to fear and suffer. The only true, constant, philosophical comfort is the awareness that this exceptional condition will pass and that "I-conciousness" which is always restless, always piquant, in all seriousness inaccessible, will again sink back into its wonderful peace before birth... whoever strives fro purity and knowledge, to him death always comes as a savior.”  Wow.  My thoughts exactly.

I read this quote from Franz Marc about Vincent Van Gough:

"Van Gogh is for me the most authentic, the greatest, the most poignant painter I know. To paint a bit of the most ordinary nature, putting all one's faith and longings into it - that is the supreme achievement... Now I paint... only the simplest things... Only in them are the symbolism, the pathos, and the mystery of nature to be found.”  Is that cool or what.

My thoughts, he uses a lot of color, which is probably what initially attracted me to his work.  I chose some of my favorites of his work.  They are lyrical, mystical pieces delicate, bold and stretch with a vibrancy that is muscular in nature.  He was part of The Blue Rider Group.  When I went back to Columbia College my art teacher went overseas for a project for a month or so and a colleague of his came from NYC to work with us.  He used to come over to me and just watch.  When I would stop and stand back to look at the way it was moving he asked me questions like why did I use this color or why did I use the paint and move it this way or that.  And I'd answer...   I'll show you.

This is the painting I was working on.

It was a live model work and the model was extremely thin.  I could see the bones of her ribcage.  Like a cage with a bird inside.  She didn't look emaciated by choice but maybe by some other reason, self image or something.  Anyway, she was sitting in a chair with a typical studio back wall.  The rest of this composition and the coloring of her was what I felt like putting on the canvas.  I told the teacher about my accident and brain injury and that ever since then I felt a connection with nature. That all that separated me from the trees and the road and the breeze had disappeared and it had all become movement.  And that this winds up finding its way into my work, without a plan.  I actually painted this one twice.  The first time I wanted to even some paint out and accidentally scratched a hole in the canvas.  So I did it again and ripped up the first one.  The reason I gave it the name, "Schroedinger's Cat," was completely intentional.

Then he asked me if I had ever heard of The Blue Rider Group and I said no.  I hadn't had a clue.  I looked up the Fauves, which was the other name he asked me about and I saw the similarity, bright use of color.  For the first time I felt like the right word, expressionist, described the kind of artwork I did.  Until I read the bio and some of the thoughts of Franz Marc I did not understand his depth or the spiritual connection he was expressing.  I did not understand how the turmoil that was in the world at this time had effected his work and the work of several of his contemporaries.  I did not understand the onset of WWI.  

It is ironic that for five years before the accident and my brain injury I was interviewing and writing the stories of  WWII survivors, death camp captives and death camp liberators and reading countless books trying to understand how regular people could become complicit in the worst kind of acts against one another I'd ever read about or seen.  It was such a world wide spread of questionable ethical and moral behavior.  And I often wondered, what would I have done? 

 

Back to Franz Marc, in  1911 he co-founded the Der Blaue Reiter journal or the Blue Rider Group with Wassily Kandinsky.  And in 1914 he was living in France where his work continued to ripen into pure genius.  This became the center of an artist circle with Macke and Kandinsky and others who split off from the (New Artist's Association) movement.

Wassily Kandinsky later recalled how the name Blue Rider was born:

"Franz Marc and I chose this name as we were having coffee one day on the shady terrace of Sindelsdorf. Both of us liked blue, Marc for horses, I for riders. So the name Blue Rider came by itself." For Franz Marc the group had become something like a home. He suddenly had companions with whom he could exchange his ideas about art. He developed a close friendship with Kandinsky and with August Macke. The group had a very positive effect on Marc's creativity. His artistic output nearly exploded - both in quality and in quantity.

The above painting is called, "Fate of Animals."  In Franz Marc's own words, "And all being is flaming agony"in a letter to his wife during WWI he wrote, it "is like a premonition of this war—horrible and shattering. I can hardly conceive that I painted it."  Below is Fighting Form.  I  could spend my entire life looking at this everyday and still there would be room for one more thought.

 

This piece is so amazing that if I looked at it everyday of my life I would still feel like I was exploring new territory.

And I just realized that one of my favorite paintings in the Chicago Art Institute, "The Waterfall," was painted by Franz Marc.  I've even done a color pencil study of it and never made a connection with the artist who created it.

 

In 1916 he enlisted as a cavalryman in the German army and he started painting huge canvases that were the forefront of camouflage that was used to hide troop movement and weapons.  The army decided to put him in a list of those artists that should be taken out of battle but before this happened he was struck in the head by a shell splinter and he died on the battlefield in 1916.

In 1937, Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda organized a public exhibition of banned art. The exhibition was called, "Entartete Kunst," which meant, "Degenerate Art." Most who were on this list were tortured or killed, if they hadn't escaped already.