Description

Wassily Kandinsky 1940 color litho ‘Untitled’

Based on the ‘watercolor on white’ oil on canvas painting

Litho is part of a strictly Limited Edition portfolio

Limited Edition 1965 by Publishers Braun & Cie

Only 25 pieces have been edited

Original work owned by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Litho size : 29,5 x 25,5 cm

Folio size : 31 x 28,5 cm

Quote:

“The graphically austere image creation in his paintings gave way to baroque plenitude motifs that looked as if they had already lost any connection with the structure which had been underlying the surface for a long time being known to no one else but the artist, and it was only due to a creative act that it became visible to others… Weird figures emerged which you long to call creatures. The artist did not do anything to mitigate the fanciful and grotesque effect. Just the other way, the more absurd figures in the paintings, the more obvious is his determination to elaborate them to the very finest detail; the more sophisticated the shapes, the brighter the colors. Figures that had never been seen before but are still somehow familiar appear in two different configurations: it is either a composition closed in itself, or a disorderly heap of most discrepant shapes, scattered all over the canvas. The implementation is however so clear that there can be no incidental feature: a combination of precision and imagination!” Michel Conil Lacoste

Info on Wassily Kandinsky:

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art, possibly after Hilma af Klint. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession – he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat (today Tartu, Estonia) – Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

In 1896, Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe’s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky “became an insider in the cultural administration of Anatoly Lunacharsky and helped establish the Museum of the Culture of Painting. However, by then “his spiritual outlook… was foreign to the argumentative materialism of Soviet society”, and opportunities beckoned in Germany, to which he returned in 1920. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France, where he lived for the rest of his life, becoming a French citizen in 1939 and producing some of his most prominent art. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944, three days prior to his 78th birthday.

Kandinsky’s creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervor of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art. Some art historians suggest that Kandinsky’s passion for Abstract art began when one day, coming back home, he found one of his own paintings hanging upside down in his studio, and he stared at it for a while before realizing it was his own work suggesting him the potential power of abstraction.

Kandinsky’s paintings from this period are large, expressive colored masses evaluated independently from forms and lines; these serve no longer to delimit them, but overlap freely to form paintings of extraordinary force. Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature – it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Kandinsky sometimes used musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings “improvisations” and described more elaborate works as “compositions.”

Wassily Kandinsky’s art has a confluence of music and spirituality. With his appreciation for music of his times and kinesthetic disposition, Kandinsky’s artworks have a marked style of expressionism in his early years. But he embraced all types of artistic styles of his times and his predecessors i.e. Art Nouveau (sinuous organic forms), Fauvism and Blaue Reiter (shocking colors), Surrealism (mystery) and Bauhaus (constructivism) only to move towards abstractionism as he explored spirituality in art. His object-free paintings display spiritual abstraction suggested by sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.