Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866. He studied economics and law at the University of Moscow before becoming a professor.

He was 30 before he went to Munich, Germany and began to truly study art. He focused, at first, on creating sketches and studies of human bodies.

He settled in Germany after World War I where he taught art at the Bauhaus school and painted until the Nazis came into power. At that point (1933), he went back to France where he remained for the rest of his life.

On a somewhat-side note, the Nazis took some of Kandinsky’s paintings, displayed them in a collection of art they deemed inappropriate and unworthy, and then destroyed the paintings. The exhibition was called “Degenerate Art.” I will post more about this tomorrow.

Kandinsky’s earliest paintings were quite realistic. Then he moved into a style similar to that of the Impressionists before he began creating completely abstract paintings. Yesterday I used Monet’s Water Lilies to show this movement toward the abstract. Today, you can see that Kandinsky developed the same way except that Kandinsky became a truly abstract artist in the end. Check out Olga’s Kandinsky Gallery for pictures. All (or at least most) of his works are posted there in order. As you click through the pages, you can clearly see Kandinsky’s work become more and more abstract.

Kandinsky was especially interested in color, even as a child. Beginning in his earlier, more realistic paintings, Kandinsky used color to show emotion rather than to make objects look real. As he grew as an artist, Kandinsky became more concerned with the power of color in describing what he was feeling. He wanted to use color to make his viewers feel emotion, too.

Gradually, Kandinsky became more abstract. He began to paint objects as patches of color instead of painting perfect details such as facial features or individual leaves on trees. Remember that Kandinsky studied the human body and knew how to paint people well. He liked the abstract more than the realistic. As he grew as an artist, his figures became less realistic until the viewer could no longer identify known objects in his paintings.

Kandinsky was trying to create the same effect on a viewer of his paintings as a beautiful piece of music has on a listener. When you listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for example, you don’t see snow or swirling fall leaves, or a muddy spring garden after a rain storm. You feel the seasons happening but you don’t actually see them. This is what Kandinsky was trying to do in his paintings.

Kandinsky’s ideas about art are possibly more important than even the paintings he created. He wrote three books about his ideas.

There are two Kandinsky projects posted at Art Projects for Kids. They both look pretty good but I’ve only tried this one, not this one. If you do either of the projects, please comment about your experience. I would love to hear about it and other readers would benefit from your comments as well. Happy creating!

EDITED TO ADD: Practice Geometry Using Kandinky's Art

Return to main page.

Abstract Art

Beginning with the Impressionists at the end of the 1800s, art began to shift from realistic images to abstract images. In other words, artists became less concerned with painting a landscape and more concerned with the emotions a painting could stir in the viewer.

An excellent example of this development is Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series. In his first paintings of water lilies, Monet takes care to create realistic, recognizable lilies floating on a pond. By the end of his life, the lilies are hardly more than green smudges on a blue background, but the effect of the paintings (in my opinion) remains powerful. The first image is an early painting and the second is a late example of Monet's Water Lilies

I would not claim that Monet was an abstract artist. This is just meant to illustrate the process of moving from art that shows recognizable subjects to art that does not.

An abstract artist whom you’ve read about already was Jackson Pollock. There are no fruit bowls in his splatter paintings. No stiffly posed women or shimmering ponds. He meant to do something more than record scenes. He meant to record emotion. Pollock looked inward at the chaos in his mind and laid it out on massive canvases so that we could feel what he felt.

In the next few days I’ll post about some other abstract artists. For now though, look back on my posts about Piet Mondrian and Pablo Picasso.

Please note that the term “abstract art” is very general. Cubism is a form of abstract art, as is neoplasticism (the movement Mondrian painted in), and many others.

Return to main page.

Art Theft: E.G. Buehrle Gallery

My final installment on art theft is a particularly interesting one, I think, and the crime occurred extremely recently. Click to read installments one, two, three, and four.

During the Holocaust and WWII, Nazis stole a lot of art. Much of it was taken from private collectors, especially Jewish collectors, before they were sent to concentration camps or were met with other unspeakable fates. Some of the art was returned to the rightful owners or the families of the rightful owners. Some was hidden away and has yet to be recovered. Some of the art remained the property of the thieves or entered public collections.

I could easily write a week’s worth of posts on this but in the interest of getting on to the point of today’s article, Emil George Buehrle was a Nazi supporter who created weapons for Hitler’s army during WWII. During this time, he amassed a great collection of art. We know that some of it was looted during the Holocaust because he had to return some of the paintings to the owners. It’s impossible to know where every piece came from but I think it’s safe to assume that at least a few of the paintings remaining in his collection were stolen to begin with.

Buehrle’s collection, housed in a townhome in Zurich, Switzerland, is open to the public for three hours on Sundays. Apparently, that is all the time thieves needed earlier this month to steal four masterworks by Cezanne, van Gogh, Monet, and Degas, valued at about $164 million.

Museums are not often targets of armed robbery which makes this an unusual case. While the gallery was still open to the public, masked gunmen entered, forced museum staff and the few remaining guests to lie on the floor, and took the paintings from the walls. Like in a TV bank robbery.

The paintings were probably ordered by a collector before the robbery but it’s possible the thieves are holding the paintings for ransom. Two of the works have been recovered (the Monet and the van Gogh), safe and still in their frames. The others are still missing. We’ll have to wait and see if the thieves make any demands.

And there you have it. Today you got two thefts in one story (that of the Nazis and that of the recent gallery robbers). That wraps up this series but I’ll come up with something interesting for next week.

Return to main page.

Art Theft: Sao Paulo Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso created a lot of artwork. I mean thousands of paintings and sketches. Because of this, and because of the value of the paintings, Picasso’s work is among the most often stolen. I had a difficult time choosing just one Picasso theft but I think it’s an interesting one. Tomorrow’s post may also be about a Picasso theft. I’m not sure yet.

In December of 2007, thieves broke into the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil. The thieves wrenched open the door with a hydraulic jack. They broke the glass on the interior door and slipped in. It took them just three minutes to pull a Picasso (Portrait of Suzanne Bloch) and a Candido Portinari (a premier Brazilian artist) off the museum walls.

Once again, it is unclear what the thieves hoped to gain from the theft. They passed many other very valuable pieces so it seems likely that they were commissioned by a private collector to steal the artwork on his or her behalf.

Perhaps the most important thing about this theft is that it brought to light the security problems the museum had. Sao Paulo Museum of Art had been struggling with money and had not been able to keep up with needed security improvements. Who knows if this will bring about a change? Hopefully the government of Brazil or some generous art lover will donate money to help out this important Brazilian museum.

Don’t forget to check out installments one, two, and three of this series on art theft.

Return to main page.

Art Theft: The Gardner Museum, Boston

In case you were getting the impression that these art thefts always had happy endings, here’s installment three. You can read the first here and the second here.

In March of 1990 two guards were on duty late at night at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Two thieves came in, dressed like police officers, and tricked the guards into trusting them. The thieves tied up the guards and locked them in the basement before spending over an hour taking paintings from the walls. Then they took the security tape.

It’s not clear why the thieves stole the painting. Some think they had a list of works they were stealing for a collector because they took a wide variety of items from throughout the museum: 3 Rembrandt paintings, a painting by Vermeer, some sketches by Monet, a vase, and few other paintings and objects. The thieves cut the paintings out of the frames though, which damages the artwork. This is not something a collector would want. In fact, a collector would probably insist against it.

The total value of the works stolen was $300 million so the reward issued by the museum for the safe return, $1 million, was not as huge as it seems. In any event it didn’t bring the artwork back. The police had two suspect but both died before they could be tracked down. Later, the Gardner Museum upped the reward to $5 million.

So far, 18 years later, the art is still missing.

Return to main page.