All posts tagged Taschen

Rivera by Andrea Kettenmann (1997)

The German art publishers Taschen recently repackaged their Basic Art range into a standardised, large, hardback format, retailing at £10. Each volume in the series focuses on one famous painter or art movement.

The attraction of Taschen editions is that the text is factual, accurate and sensible, and the books have lots of good quality colour reproductions. Even if you don’t bother to read the text, you will be able to skim though plenty of paintings, alongside photos where relevant, of the artist or movement being discussed. The text of this one was written (as usual) in Germany, back in 1997, then translated into English.

Rivera’s life story is brilliantly told in the imaginative, sardonic and whimsical Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by journalist Patrick Marnham, published in 1998, so not much in the text surprised me, although, being much shorter, it had the effect of making the sequence of government buildings which Rivera created murals for a lot clearer, and it also explained the last decade or so of Rivera’s life (he died in 1957) a bit better.

What I wanted was a record of Rivera’s paintings. I’ve read and seen a lot about the murals, but they generally overshadow his easel paintings. I wanted to see more of the latter.

Rivera was immensely gifted, started drawing early (the earliest work here is a very good goat’s head, drawn when he was 9) and enrolled at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico when he was just ten, quickly hoovering his way through late academic styles. He went to Spain in 1907, aged 21, and studied Velasquez and El Greco. And then onto Paris in 1910, where he quickly discovered the avant-garde and was an early adopter of cubism.

For the first 20 years of his life, he was an omnivore, a chameleon, and I am impressed by the ability,and variety, of these early works.

French impressionism

The House on the Bridge by Diego Rivera (1909)

The House on the Bridge by Diego Rivera (1909)

Psychological realism

Head of a Breton Woman by Diego Rivera (1910)

Head of a Breton Woman by Diego Rivera (1910)

Cubism

Adopting the cubist style wasn’t just a fad. From 1913 to 1917 Rivera painted solely in the cubist style, completing some 200 works, took part in impassioned debates about various types of cubism, was friends with Picasso and Juan Gris. When he exhibited some of the works in Madrid in 1915, they were the first cubist paintings ever seen in Spain.

Zapatista Landscape by Diego Rivera (1915)

Zapatista Landscape by Diego Rivera (1915)

Futurism

Futurism is different from cubism because whereas the latter started out as a new way of seeing very passive objects – landscapes, but particularly Parisian still lifes, wine bottles and newspapers on café tables – Futurism uses a similar visual language of dissociated angles and fractured planes, but in order to depict movement. Also, if this makes sense, its angular shapes are often more rounded, a bit more sensuous (it was, after all, an Italian movement).

Woman at a Well by Diego Rivera (1913)

Woman at a Well by Diego Rivera (1913)

Russian modernism

Rivera experimented with a brighter, more highly coloured, more nakedly geometric types of modernism, a style that reminds me of Malevich. Maybe influenced by conversations with Russians in Paris, including Voloshin and Ilya Ehrenburg. And the fact that Rivera’s mistress, Angelina Beloff, was Russian. This is her suckling their baby.

Motherhood by Diego Rivera (1916)

Motherhood by Diego Rivera (1916)

Mural style

In 1917 Rivera definitively broke with cubism. He studied Cézanne, and the earlier Impressionists. Deprived of the sense of belonging to a communal avant-garde he was at a loss, stylistically.

Toying with returning to Mexico after 13 years in Europe, in 1920 Rivera gained funding to go on a long tour of the frescos of Italy.

In 1921 he finally arrived back in Mexico, and was one of several leading artists taken by the new Minister of Education and Culture, José Vasconcelos, on a tour of pre-Columbian ruins, studying the carvings of men and gods.

At last Rivera felt he had come ‘home’. The Italian frescos, but especially the pre-Colombian art, and the encouragement of the left wing populist minister all crystallised his new approach. He would completely reject all the stylistic avant-gardes of Europe, and melding everything he had learned into a new simple and accessible art for the public. He wanted to:

‘reproduce the pure basic images of my land. I wanted my painting to reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth to show the masses the outline of the future.’

The Mexican revolutionary government wanted to commission public murals to educate a largely illiterate population. Rivera received a commission to create murals depicting Mexican art and culture and history and festivals at the Mexico City Ministry of Education, and thus began his long career as a public muralist, and as one of the leaders of what was soon a Mexican school of mural painting.

Mural of exploitation of Mexico by Spanish conquistadors in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City by Diego Rivera

Part of the mural titled Exploitation of Mexico by Spanish conquistadors, in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City by Diego Rivera

But he was surprisingly badly paid ($2 per day) and so had to continue selling sketches, drawings and paintings to tourists and collectors. Often they were sketches or trials for individual subjects which would then appear in murals.

Bather of Tehuantepec is well known because it marks such a radical break with the immense sophistication of his earlier work. It is highly stylised but not so as to make it almost unreadable (as in cubism). The opposite. It is stylised to make it simple, ‘naive’, peasant, and accessible. Note the child-like simplicity, the primal colours. And the child-like use of space, the plants at the bottom simply giving structure and space to the bending body. It points to the mural style which incorporate elements not for any ‘realism’ but subordinated to narrative and message. Here the message is the primal simplicity, the utter lack of pretension, of the Mexican Indian washing.

Bather of Tehuantepec by Diego Rivera (1923)

Bather of Tehuantepec by Diego Rivera (1923)

Lilies

Rivera liked flowers. Calla lilies are, in a way, highly schematic plants. Big, tall and simple, with simple bold flowerheads, Rivera featured them in a whole series of paintings. This picture uses an immensely sophisticated grasp of perspective, colour and volume to create a strikingly ‘simple’ picture.

Flower Day by Diego Rivera (1925)

Flower Day by Diego Rivera (1925)

After looking at it for a while I noticed the compact, squarely arranged feet of the peasants at the bottom of the picture. Showing the way Rivera’s interest in cubes and angles and blocs of paint, was transmuted into the semi-cartoon simplification of the mural style.

Mexican realism

Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party after a difficult trip to the Soviet Union in 1927. In the early 1930s he went to America and painted murals in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, but these commissions came to a grinding halt when he fell out with the Rockefellers in New York after painting the face of Lenin into a mural in the new RCA skyscraper in 1933. He was fired and the mural was pulled down.

Back in Mexico in the 1930s, Rivera found government commissions hard to come by and developed a profitable sideline in a kind of Mexican peasant realism. He painted hundreds of pictures of Mexican-Indian children, sometimes with their mothers – selling them by the sackful to sentimental American tourists. They kept the wolf from the door while he tried to get more mural commission but… it’s hard to like most of them.

Modesta and Inesita by Diego Rivera (1939)

Modesta and Inesita by Diego Rivera (1939)

Surrealism

I know from the Marnham book that André Breton, godfather of the Surrealists, came to stay with Rivera and Frida in 1938. I didn’t know that Rivera made an excursion into the Surrealist style and exhibited works in a major 1940 exhibition of Surrealist art.

The Hands of Dr Moore by Diego Rivera (1940)

The Hands of Dr Moore by Diego Rivera (1940)

Society portraits

Right to the end he made important and striking murals, such as the striking Water, The Origin of Life of 1951, an extraordinary design for the curved floor and walls of a new waterworks for Mexico City.

But at the same time – the late 1940s and into the 1950s – Rivera also produced commissions, usually portraits, for rich people, especially society women, which are surprisingly at odds with his commitment to the violent rhetoric of the Stalinist Communist Party.

Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Diego Rivera (1943)

Portrait of Natasha Gelman by Diego Rivera (1943)

Obviously, the striking calla lilies a) echo the slender elegant shape of the svelte millionaire’s wife b) echo their use in quite a few earlier paintings. But there’s no getting round the contradiction between this kind of rich society portrait and the intense engagement with the poor, with landless Indians, with the conquered Aztecs, of so many of his murals.

Having slowly trawled through his entire career, I admire the murals, and am often snagged and attracted by this or that detail in the immense teeming panoramas he created – the Where’s Wally pleasure of detecting all the narratives tucked away in a panoramic work like the Exploitation of Mexico, above.

But, given a choice, it’s the early cubo-futurist, or futuro-cubist works, which give me the purest visual pleasure.

Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913) by Diego Rivera

Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913) by Diego Rivera

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by Simon on November 29, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 29, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/29/rivera-andrea-kettenmann/

Marc by Susanna Partsch (1991)

Another of Taschen’s coolly laid out, large format, coffee-table-sized but light and handy paperback introductions to key artists and movements, this one devoted to Franz Marc.

Generally described as an Expressionist, Marc (b.1880) is most associated with the ‘Blue Rider’ art movement in Munich 1911 to 1913, before being killed, tragically young, in the Great War, in 1916.

Marc and animals

Marc is best known for his animal paintings. Partsch devotes a chapter to analysing their origins and development. Basically, he preferred animals to humans, who he found repellent. As he wrote to his wife, Maria Franck, during the war:

I think a lot about my own art. My instincts have so far guided me not too badly on the whole, even though my works have been flawed. Above all I mean the instinct which has led me away from people to a feeling of animality, for ‘pure beasts’. The ungodly people around me (particularly the men) did not arouse my true feelings, whereas the undefiled vitality of animals called forth everything good in me… I found people ‘ugly’ very early on; animals seemed to me more beautiful, more pure. (quoted page 39)

He not only theorised about animals, he loved them in real life. He was brought up with dogs and when he did a year’s military service in 1899, he spent it in the cavalry where he acquired a lifelong love of horses. By the time he was settled with a place of his own, in the 1910s, Marc owned a dog, two cats and – his pride and joy – two pet deer which he named Schlick and Hanni!

Note how schematic the animal forms are. And how stylised the background of zoomorphic snow, highlighted by blue and green shadows. From the same period comes a loving portrait of his pet dog, Russi.

The sense of depth and shape is created by shading which is (when you look closely) quite angular, and yet the overall feel is sensuous and lush.

Some thoughts

1. Brilliant draughtsman

Marc was a brilliant draughtsman right from the start, with a tremendous gift for depicting the natural world in oil paint even in his earliest works. Here he is aged 21 demonstrating the academic style he was being taught at Munich art school, delicately painting every leaf onto each of the trees in this landscape.

Just a few years later he was painting in a far more free and expressive manner, but the draughtsmanship is still awesome – note the fluff of feathers at the dead bird’s throat.

Not only is his figuration a joy to see, but the palette of browns contributes to the picture’s unity. In some other artists the early pictures are things you skim over to get to the mature works, but all of the early works shown here are marvellous.

The confidence of his broad brush-strokes is exhilarating, the light and shade on the right-hand woman’s dress, or the decorative squiggles on the left-hand dress – how cool and confident!

2. Marc’s short career allows in-depth analysis

Marc’s friend and mentor Wassily Kandinsky lived to the age of 78 and so the 90-page book I’ve just read about him had to pace itself and skim over various periods.

The exact opposite is true of this account of Marc. Because he really flourished for just four intense years the book can go into much more detail about this period, following the month-by-month changes in his art and ideas, quoting extensively from his letters, diaries and published writings, and from his friends’ and wife’s accounts, in order to drill deep down into these precious years.

For example, there is space to devote several pages to explaining Marc’s use of a prism to ascertain the purity of colour he used in the portrait of his dog in the snow (above), and to relate this to his evolving theories of colour. (Briefly, Marc believed that blue was the colour of masculine dominance and spirituality, yellow was the colour of feminine comfort, gentle and sensuous, red was the colour of brutal earth, and so on.)

Like so many of the rest of the avant-garde right across Europe (from his friend Kandinsky to Matisse) he was thinking and theorising about colour and its role in painting in a completely new way.

For Marc, as for many artists of his generation, the subject of a painting was becoming almost irrelevant – colour itself was to be the subject and most important element in a painting.

That said, and interesting to read though this kind of thing is, you can’t help noticing the number of times he ignored his own ‘theories’ and painted what looked best. Seen in this pragmatic light, it’s possible to think of the writings as more like transient offshoots of whatever look and style he was experimenting with during his brief, intense heyday, rather than cast iron rule.

Thus his schematic colour scheme doesn’t seem to apply at all to:

where the blue mane, red horse, and yellow field are quite obviously painted to achieve a vibrant dynamic affect rather than for any symbolic purpose.

3. The animal paintings

His animal style probably peaked in the depictions of blue horses around 1911, and it’s certainly this period of work which became hugely popular after the Great War and carried on being a bestseller in poster form (a picture of horses in a field fetched £12 million at Sothebys in 1908 – God knows what they’d fetch in today’s over-inflated market).

In her chapter on the animal paintings, Partsch quotes at length Marc’s views on how we need to stop painting animals from the outside, from a strictly instrumental human perspective, but imagine the world from the animal’s point of view.

How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a deer or a dog? How impoverished and soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape familiar to our own eyes rather than transporting ourselves into the soul of an animal in order to divine its visual world. (quoted page 38)

There’s much more like this. His friend and mentor, Kandinsky, was deeply immersed in the esoteric and spiritualist teachings of his age, becoming a Theosophist and studying Joachim of Fiore but to the modern reader, Marc comes over as by far the deeper and more instinctive visionary – the experience of reading the book right the way through is to experience the almost hallucinatory intensity of his intuition.

The Kandinsky book is interesting and delightful, but this book on Marc is genuinely powerful.

What does the deer have in common with the world we see? Does it make any reasonable or even artistic sense to paint the deer as it appears on our retina, or in the manner of the Cubists because we feel the world should be cubistic? Who says the deer feels the world to be cubistic? It feels as a deer, and thus the landscape must also be deer. (quoted page 39)

Hence:

And we feel the world to be deer with him.

And it wasn’t just deer: the book includes fabulous colour reproductions of paintings of horses, cats, dogs, bulls, cows, donkeys, foxes, monkeys, tigers, birds, mandrills, wild pigs and many more. Animal planet.

4. Prismatic – cubist – futurist

Many fans and buyers stop at Marc’s colourful animal phase in 1911, the poster-popular period.

But the really interesting thing about Marc is that he didn’t stop developing, in fact he sped up. the final chapter shows him developing an increasingly intense cubo-futurist style and actually making the breakthrough into utterly abstract works when — the Great War breaks out.

Thus only a few months after some of the prettiest animal pictures, he is creating paintings which suddenly take on board the full impact of the Futurists’ characteristic diagonal ‘lines of force’.

Not only animals but people are present in these paintings but in a completely new visual style, dominated by the fragmentation of the object.

Many critics then and now claimed this was due to the influence of Cubism, still a stunning new way of seeing in 1912. Maybe so. But as I flicked through these final paintings I couldn’t help remembering his reference to the prism, and I thought of those toys you buy children, circles of clear plastic (or glass, in the expensive version) which have been shaped to have multiple facets across the surface, like big diamonds which have been cut with as many faces as possible. The idea is to hold the prism close to the eye and see the world divided up into a bewildering variety of facets; to rotate it, move it up and down, whatever takes your fancy, in order to see ‘reality’ as a jagged mosaic of ever-changing angular facets.

Suddenly, in 1913, that’s what all Marc’s paintings look like, all shards and fragments:

Compare and contrast with the extreme simplicity and clarity of the dog or deer in the snow from only two years before! We are in a different, and much more complex, visual world, one which is more dynamic, fractured along strong striating lines, intensely scissored and segmented.

My favourite of these last works is Deer in the woods II, in essence an almost child-like portrait of a family of deer, but fractured by strong lines into cubes, squares, circles.

And it is these lines – rather than the actual anatomy of the deer, their ‘real’ appearance – which determines the colour scheme so that colours spill across the bodies of the deer rather than being contained by them.

5. The break through into abstraction

Right at the end of 1913 Marc began painting the first of a series of small compositions which were utterly abstract in form, with no subject.

Over the next eight months he painted more of these small compositions as well as a series titled Happy forms, Playing forms, Fighting forms and Broken forms.

In some of these works animals might just about be discerned, and he continued creating some dense Futurist animal paintings at the same time. But it is absolutely clear that in the other works he had stepped over a line into pure abstraction, just a few years after his friend and mentor Kandinsky.

Marc was working on these abstracts, as well as making plans to edit a second Blue Rider almanac, as well as painting a series of murals and writing more essays about colour and form – when the Great War broke out on 1 August 1914 and he was called up. What would have happened next?

He continued to sketch and sent copious letters to his wife in which he continued to develop his ideas about colour and form, but there was no time to paint in the army. On 4 March 1916 Franz Marc was killed by shellfire while carrying out a reconnaissance mission in a French village.

What a beautiful body of work. What an intense and fascinating trajectory he travelled in those four brief years. What a terrible, terrible waste.

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by Simon on January 10, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 10, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/marc-susanna-partsch/

Kandinsky by Hajo Düchting (1993)

The German publisher Taschen launched its inexpensive ‘Basic Art’ series back in 1985 with a volume on Picasso. 33 years later, it has nearly 200 titles in the series and recently relaunched them as tall, slim hardbacks at a standard price of £10. Decades ago I picked up a clutch of titles about the Expressionist painters when they were in their cheaper, paperback incarnation.

This one, about the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, is 96 pages long. It has about 80 illustrations, mostly in full colour, which give you an excellent overview of Kandinsky’s development from late-Victorian figurative work, through the Expressionist years – which saw his accelerated movement into abstraction around 1910 – his 7-year spell back in Moscow, before he moved back to Germany to teaching at the famous Bauhaus school of art and design, before his final years in exile in Paris.

Colourful Life by Wassily Kandinsky (1907)

Colourful Life by Wassily Kandinsky (1907)

Kandinsky’s life in six chapters

The chapter titles give a good overview:

  • Mother Moscow 1866-1896
  • Kandinsky in Munich 1896-1911
  • Breakthrough to the abstract: Der Blaue Reiter 1911-1914
  • Russian Intermezzo 1914-1921
  • Point and Line to Plane: Kandinsky at the Bauhaus 1922-1933
  • Biomorphic abstraction: Kandinsky in Paris 1933-1944

The pioneer of abstract painting

A picture paints a thousand words, so here’s an overview of his evolving style:

Moscow

Born and educated in Moscow, Kandinsky’s parents divorced when he was young and he was brought up by his aunt who gave him a lifelong love of Russian legend and fairy tales. He studied law, and had a sideline in anthropology – in fact he was made a member of the Society for Anthropology and Ethnography for a study he made of rural peasant culture. But by the mid-1890s Kandinsky’s thinking had moved on. He had decided he wanted to be an artist. Recently married, in 1896 he persuaded his new wife that he was going to abandon his law studies and that they should move to Munich.

Munich

Munich had already experienced a ‘secession’ of progressive young artists from the official art school in 1892 and, as Kandinsky arrived, was just becoming the German centre of Art Nouveau (in Germany dubbed the Jugendstil) which advocated the rejection of Victorian mass-produced clutter, and a return to clarity of line and design.

Kandinsky applied to various art schools, took life and painting classes but he also proved to be a good organiser. In 1901 he was instrumental in setting up the ‘Phalanx’ group of painters and organising a series of exhibitions. For the next 14 years he was a leading light in a whole succession of movements and organisations in southern Germany.

In 1908 Kandinsky settled in the small Bavarian town of Murnau, where he lived and worked with his second wife-to-be, the painter Gabriele Münter. He joined the Theosophical Society, a promoter of arcane spiritual knowledge. We know from his letters that he was studying the abstruse teachings of the 13th century writer, Joachim of Fiore. In other words, Kandinsky was soaked in arcane and hermetic spiritualist teachings, convinced that the world stood on the brink of a new era and that his painting would help to usher it in.

In 1909 he began to divide his works into three categories:

  • Impressions which still have elements of naturalistic representation
  • Improvisations designed to convey spontaneous emotional reactions
  • Compositions the most serious category, only created after substantial preliminary work

Note how all three names are taken from the language of music, indicative of the era’s interest in ‘synaesthesia’, in the combination of music and art which had been fashionable since Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ and ‘compositions’ of the 1870s.

The Blue Rider

In 1911 Kandinsky formed the Blue Rider group, which he led with Franz Marc. Both men wrote extensively on the importance of the ‘spiritual’ in the new art, indeed that’s the title of Kandinsky’s major theoretical work, On the Spiritual in Art (1913).

Together he and Marc compiled the ‘Blue Rider almanac’, designed to include a wealth of illustrations, not only of contemporary art but primitive, folk, and children’s art, with pieces from the South Pacific and Africa, Japanese drawings, medieval German woodcuts and sculpture, Egyptian puppets, Russian folk art, and Bavarian religious art painted on glass. It included nine major essays, not only about art but on contemporary music and included the scores of pieces by the new group of ‘Second Vienna’ composers, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.

In both the selection of essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, The Blaue Reiter Almanac remains one of our most critically important works of literature on the art theory and culture of the twentieth century.

The almanac was a call for spiritual renewal across all the arts, which would unite, in particular, music and painting, an idea which remained an inspiration for Kandinsky all his life.

Very quickly he now moved through increasingly abstract depictions of the subject to his first utterly abstract work, painted in 1910 (when he was 50 years old). Kandinsky spent the next four years experimenting with the new idea of ‘subjectless’ painting and was still exploring this new approach when war broke out in 1914 and he was forced to flee Germany to Switzerland. In 1915 he moved back to Mother Russia.

Back in Moscow

Düchting explains how Kandinsky the organiser and networker had also developed quite a career as an art journalist and critic. He had been working for Russian art journals throughout the 1900s, reporting on developments in Germany’s avant-garde. Through his contacts with Russian art journals he had been associated with successive post-Symbolist art movements in Russia such as ‘the World of Art’, ‘the Blue Rose’ and the ‘Karo Bube’ groups – so Kandinsky had plenty of contacts to look up when he reappeared in Moscow in 1915.

But he was to be disappointed. Kandinsky found his extreme spiritual attitudes and wispy abstraction out of tune with the times. The 1912 Futurist manifesto, ‘A slap in the fact to public taste’, had been popular with the new generation of iconoclasts in Russia. Constructivism had been founded in 1913, Suprematism in 1915 – and both were fiercely anti-spiritual, interested in very hard edges and geometric abstraction.

The coming young artists were Rodchenko, Malevich and El Lissitzky, artists who were to flourish in the extreme avant-garde environment created by the Bolshevik revolution, a world away from the nature worship and spiritual ideals of his colleagues in Germany.

Nonetheless, Moscow was a big city, with many artistic strands, and so Kandinsky found employment. He helped to organise a series of exhibitions, found teaching and journalism work – but felt unwanted. He managed to navigate the chaos of the early years of the Russian Revolution. He even found work in the early versions of a State Cultural Institute. It wasn’t Soviet pressure that led him to feel increasingly alienated as the 1920s dawned – it was the opposition of the leading figures in new Russian art. The times were changing.

The Bauhaus 1922-33

In 1921 he returned to Germany – wise move as it turned out. His key compadres in the Blue Rider (Marc, Macke) had been killed in the war and Berlin was now dominated by the bitterly satirical mode soon to be named ‘the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’).

So Kandinsky was relieved to be invited to join the new Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar, where some of his former colleagues – Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger – were already working. It looked to be a more congenial environment.

Kandinsky began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922. He taught students in the new Introductory Course where he could involve them in his ongoing investigations of pictorial elements. A few years later he published a summary of his discoveries in ‘Point and Line to Plane’ (1926).

Kandinsky’s teaching was highly schematic, with courses on the meaning and nature of the different colours, their relative positions on colour wheels, their warmth or coldness etc – as well as technical teaching about the effectiveness of different binding media for painting canvas, glass, walls and murals. Paralleling these were lessons on lines, curves, circles and other shapes, exploring their effect on the eye and mind.

(It all sounds technical and impressive, but it’s important to emphasise that all these teachings, thorough and systematic though they were, were essentially subjective, based on his own knowledge of colour and line. If you’re looking for a truly scientific understanding of the impact of colour and line, you have to look elsewhere.)

In 1923 the Bauhaus underwent a reorganisation, with the departure of Johannes Itten, a precursor of the hippies, who valued intuition, held meditation and controlled breathing classes, and was a follower of the obscure fire-breathing cult of Mazdaznan – and his replacement with the Hungarian polymath, committed communist and devotee of industrial design and functionalism, László Moholy-Nagy.

Under the influence of the Bauhaus new emphasis on unifying the arts in the practical cause of building affordable houses for the masses, Kandinsky’s art entered a new, ‘cool’ phase, exploring the interplay of much more clearly defined, geometric shapes.

The Bauhaus went through a number of iterations, the original Weimar incarnation closing in 1925 and moving to purpose-built buildings at Dessau. By the end of the 1930s the leadership and some of the students were becoming politicised by the deteriorating situation in Germany. Hannes Meyer, director from 1928 to 1930, was a communist and encouraged students to criticise Klee and Kandinsky’s ‘ivory tower painting’.

It’s worth stopping and pondering the enormous social and cultural changes Kandinsky had seen since he arrived in Germany in 1901.

The Bauhaus was harassed by the Nazis before they even came to power and once Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 the intimidation intensified. Its final director, the architect Mies van der Rohe declared it officially closed in August 1933. By that time many of the faculty had left the country. Once more Kandinsky had to flee, this time heading west to France.

Paris 1933-1944

Kandinsky’s output from this last decade in Paris is characterised by wonderfully light, even humorous, zoomorphic and biomorphic abstractions. They often look like a fantasy of bacteria seen under a microscope.

He was, as always, involved in the politics of the art world, finding himself rejected by the dominant school of Constructivist artists as well as remaining traditionalists. Believe it or not, he flirted with the Surrealists and met their leader, André Breton who in the 1920s bought some paintings off him. But by the mid-1930s Breton had hardened his approach, politically and aesthetically: for the Surrealists the unconscious was everything, but Kandinsky’s post-war output had been the opposite – extremely carefully planned and organised using his elaborate theories about colour and shape – the opposite of ‘automatic painting’.

Most interesting to me is that, although they all came from different roots, and from different countries, Kandinsky’s art ranks alongside that of Klee, Miro and Arp in a generation which fully established abstract art as a profound and varied visual universe. It’s an odd social phenomenon, the convergence of so many artists on such a similar approach.

And with regard to Kandinsky in particular, it is lovely to finish the book and discover that, even as the world situation deteriorated through the later 1930s, and even as a new World War broke out, he continued to produce work of unparalleled calm, clarity and beauty.

What a colourful journey! What a wonderful life!

Around the Circle by Wassily Kandinsky (1940)

Around the Circle by Wassily Kandinsky (1940)

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by Simon on January 9, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Biography, Books
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Posted by Simon on January 9, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/kandinsky-hajo-duchting/