The Shy Museum Goer, Diane Tucker, has a new post about the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer in abstract painting. The included pictures are all quite different and surprising. I fell in love with the painting Riding Couple which is very different from the pictures that Kandinsky is best known for. I fell in love with a few of those as well.
Kandinsky started drawing officially, publicly, when he was thirty years old. He left Russia in 1896 and moved to Munich where he started taking art classes. In short order he was teaching them. The mental journey from the glorious Riding Couple (1906-07) to Yellow-Red-Blue (1925) at the end of the article is a little staggering to contemplate.
Kandinsky lived another twenty years. Here is an online presentation of a picture from 1941 (which as far as I can tell is not public domain though there were moments when it seemed as if it were). It is worth looking at, in the progression of Kandinsky’s art. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/1991 Kandinsky died in 1944.
Kandinsky was incredibly prolific once he got started. I was overwhelmed when I finished Diane’s article, and started looking through the internet. So many pictures! Further, as the original article points out, Kandinsky went through many different styles, and had ideas about what he was doing at each moment, which he carefully wrote down.
He titled his pictures with great intention, and they provide clues to what is going on. The Tate gallery in London has a painting titled Cossacks. It was painted around 1911 and is a big tourist attraction. Take a look. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kandinsky-cossacks-n04948 You can see the Cossacks in the lower right of the picture. But I didn’t see them until I read the title.
I also checked out the National Gallery of Art in DC, wondering what they had on Kandinsky online. They seem to have 29 acquisitions, most of which are not on display at the museum, (internet for the win) and are not in the public domain even though they are over 100 years old. https://www.nga.gov/artists/1431-wassily-kandinsky
The link takes you to a list with small images of 29 pictures.
~~I want to note here that obviously you scroll down to see the pictures. BUT… when you reach the bottom of the page and hit 2 to see … page two … you will end up at the bottom of page two and must scroll UP to see the images.~~
That said, page one has a whole set of pictures entitle Small Worlds ##. That is, Small Worlds II, Small Worlds IX, Small Worlds IV, and one titled Blue Lithograph which is clearly part of the same idea. They were all done in 1922. What I realized is that if I started with, let’s say, Small Worlds IX, X, XI or XII, I would not necessarily get what Kandinsky was after. But Small Worlds II shows an ocean and a ‘boat’ across it. Then Small World IV shows a round ball with seeming inventions springing out of it. After a while the ‘chaos’ in the later pictures makes perfect sense. The same elements are present over and over so that it becomes easier to guess at what is being presented. … Which as I see as — the world becoming smaller because of inventions. But as Diane says, someone else could come to a different conclusion, especially since Kandinsky famously did not like a lot of ‘stuff’.
Page 2 of the National Gallery’s list shows a series of woodcuts with folk elements. It also has three duplicate entries and a picture entitled Landscape with Figures and a Crucifix. I thought of Saint Francis Xavier but — who knows.
Page 3 has a photograph of a woodcut. The picture is called Reiter Weg and was incredibly mysterious to me. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/55417-reiterweg I thought it showed a giraffe or a sunken ship or who knows what. Finally I went and looked up ‘reiter weg’. It’s German for ‘rider’s way’. I went back and looked at the picture. Right in the middle of the picture, much tinier than the ‘giraffe’ on the side there is a double line of horseman riding along. The horses’ back sides are clear to be seen. There’s also a mysterious character on the lower right. Titles!
My conclusion is that Kandinsky was a true genius. It’s nice to know I’m catching up with the art world of one hundred years ago.
RABBIT HOLE: Kandinsky formed a relationship with one of his classmates and subsequent student, Gabriele Munter. Diane has a link to a fascinating YouTube video about Munter’s work from the Guggenheim museum, which has an exhibit of Munter’s art until April, 2026. The exhibit and video include photographs Munter took when she visited the United States in 1898. Munter’s shadow appears in several of her photographs which is something I do all the time. Except that when I do it it’s a messy mistake. She is clearly incorporating her shadow as an element in the pictures. Astonishing!
I found two articles about Munter that I really enjoyed. The National Museum for Women in the Arts has a gorgeous picture of Munter here. https://nmwa.org/art/artists/gabriele-munter/ I also found an article about Munter based on an exhibit in Cologne several years ago. The article includes paintings (by Munter) of the house that she shared with Kandinsky, and a lake they probably boated on. https://www.studiointernational.com/gabriele-munter-painting-to-the-point-review-museum-ludwig-cologne
All the same, though I enjoyed her pictures, Munter is not the genius that Kandinsky is.
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