Wassily Kandinsky ()

Wassily Kandinsky (b. 1866 in Moscow, died 1944 in Neuilly-sur-Seine) pursued painting, graphic arts, and art theory. An inspirational figure, one of the pioneers of Abstractionism (the author of the first abstract composition painted in 1910) and a distinguished member of the Bauhaus, he is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the twentieth century. His two seminal books, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Point and Line to Plane (translated into Polish by distinguished Abstractionist painter Stanisław Fijałkowski) have exerted a formative influence upon modern art.

He studied law (doctorate in 1892), ethnography, and economics. He was thirty when he decided to study painting after seeing the exhibition of the Impressionists in Moscow in 1896. Having moved to Munich, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under Franz von Stuck. He quickly became an autonomous artist and active member of the artistic avant-garde.

To the Munich period dates Kandinsky’s Evening (1902-1903), his only oil painting in Polish public collections. It was painted during the artist’s stay at Kochel-am-See in Bavaria. At the time, Kandinsky was influenced by Symbolism and proto-Expressionism with Post-Impressionist inspirations still present. The painter himself put this moody, melancholic, still figurative scene, painted with tactile brushwork, in the category of “romantic landscapes and compositions.” Kandinsky’s personal experience of synesthesia inspired him to explore analogies between sounds and colours and the effects of colour upon the human psyche: the approach also informs this early work.

Very interesting albeit less known, The Evening is not the only Kandinsky’s work in the collection of the National Museum in Wrocław which also has seven black-and-white woodcuts from the Xylographs portfolio (1909) inspired by Old Russian folklore and the artist’s interest in ethnography and music. The figurative compositions – Horsemen, Birds, Birches, Women in the Forest, Flame – are gems of the Museum’s Collection of European Art.
[Anna Chmielarz, Justyna Chojnacka]

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