Kandinsky: A Spiritual Experience…

Wassily Kandinsky - Flood Improvisation - 1913, oil on canvas, Lenbachhaus, Munich (click photo for larger image)Russian born painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) “sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.”

One of the pioneers of abstraction—Kandinsky wanted to translate music—which he believed to be the purest form of art—into a visual language. He is most closely associated with German Expressionism. The second phase of that movement—Der Blau Reiter (the Blue Rider) was, in fact, named after a painting of the same name by Kandinsky. Other artists associated with the group included Auguste Macke, Gabriele Münter, and Alexei Jawlensky.

Kandinsky most certainly had very high self-esteem. Indeed, he truly saw himself as a “prophet” whose mission was to share the ideal of abstraction with the world, for the betterment of society. He dubbed himself the first abstract artist. However, we now know that his earliest abstract work—after being tested through various methods—was actually created several years later than Kandinsky claimed it had been. In fact, there were a number of other artists creating abstract works at the same time the Kandinsky was working. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant artist and his work did lay the foundation for many of the modern and postmodern movements that would follow—among them Abstract Expressionism.

"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.” - Wassily Kandinsky

Elizabeth Catlett: An Icon of Expressionism

Elizabeth Catlett - Woman Fixing Her Hair - 1993 - Magogany and opals - 27 x 18 x 13 in. (68.6 x 45.7 x 33 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York African-American born sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is best known for the sculptures and prints she produced during the 1960s and 1970s—which are seen as politically charged. Her works often focus on the female experience.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Catlett graduated from Howard University in 1935. She later received a master’s degree from the State University of Iowa.  During the 1940s, Catlett taught art at a number of schools and began to exhibit with other African American artists who would go on to equally illustrative careers, including Robert Blackburn, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Archibald Motley, and Charles White. She became the “promotion director” for the George Washington Carver School in Harlem. In 1946, she received a Rosenwald Fun Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico, where she studied wood carving and ceramic sculpture at the Escuela de Pintura y Esculture, in Esmeralda. She later moved to Mexico, married, and became a Mexican citizen.

Her work is a mixture of the abstract and the figurative, in the Modernist tradition, with clear influences from African and Mexican artistic traditions, as well. According to the Catlett, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics. While not very well known to the general public, her work is heavily studied by art students looking to depict race, gender and class issues.

Woman Fixing Her Hair is a late sculpture that embodies the characteristics of her best work. Its subject, a nude woman caught in the act of her daily toiletry, is familiar and empathetic. Melding human form and furniture into a seamless whole, the artist navigates a line between abstraction and realism, cubism and biomorphism. Her exquisite handling of natural material-the smoothly polished mahogany and luminous opals-conveys the beauty that she sees in her subject matter.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)

Heinrich Campendonk: Folk Infused Imagery

Heinrich Campendonk - Mystical Crucifixion - 1926-28 - Oil on glass - 17 1/2 x 15" (44.5 x 38.1 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (click photo for larger image)Heinrich Campendonk (1889-1957) is best known as a German Expressionist painter. However he was also an accomplished designer, stained glass artist, and printmaker.

Campendonk was invited by artists Franz Marc (1880-1916) and Wassily Kandinsky to become a member of the Munich artist’s group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911. Later that year he took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, and his paintings were illustrated in the Blaue Reiter almanac. His first prints were published in Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm in 1912. Campendonk was an admirer of primitive art and folklore, and animals often figure in his work. His paintings of animals in nature, often mystical in tone, were influenced by the example of Marc, although, unlike Marc, Campendonk often included figures in his compositions. 

After the First World War and the deaths of Marc and August Macke (1887-1914), Campendonk’s style changed. He destroyed much of his earlier work, and began to paint in a manner indebted to the dreamlike and folk-infused imagery of Marc Chagall, whom he had met in 1914. In the early 1920s, he took up the practice of stained glass design, and in 1925 had his first one-man show in New York. He received numerous commissions for large-scale stained glass decorations, and this public form of art was to occupy him for much of his later career.

Paul Klee: “One Eye Sees…The Other Feels”

Paul Klee - Senecio - 1922. Oil on gauze - 40.5 x 38 cm. - Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland (click photo for larger image)Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) was one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century. Although he never belonged to any particular movement, he’s often associated with Expressionism. 

“Using both representational and abstract approaches, he produced an immense oeuvre of some 9,000 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in a great variety of styles. His works tend to be small in scale and are remarkable for their delicate nuances of line, color, and tonality. In Klee’s highly sophisticated art, irony and a sense of the absurd are joined to an intense evocation of the mystery and beauty of nature.”

The work featured here, Senecio, embodies Klee’s interest in African art, such as masks—and also embodies the artist’s sense of humor. The painting is actually a portrait of an artist performer, and “can be seen as a symbol of the shifting relationship between art, illusion and the world of drama.”

August Macke: Feelings and Moods

August Macke - Lady in a Park - 1914 - Oil on canvas - 38 1/2 x 23 1/4" (97.8 x 58.9 cm) - MoMA, New York (click photo for larger image)German Expressionist painter August Macke (1887-1914) was a member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) organization of artists, based in Germany, that contributed greatly to the development of abstract art. He lived most of his creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, the Netherlands and Tunisia. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and he later went through a Fauve period, which greatly influenced him throughout his life. In 1909, through fellow artist Franz Marc, he met Wassily Kandinsky—both featured elsewhere on this site. For a time, Macke shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter.

Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay (also discussed on this site) in Paris in 1912 was something of an epiphany for him. Delaunay's chromatic Cubism (labeled Orphism) influenced Macke's art from that point forward. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in April 1914 was also fundamental to the luminist approach of Macke’s final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces. His later works focus primarily on representing emotions and moods, in part through a distortion of color and form. The influence of Fauvism remains evident throughout his oeuvre—as you will observe in the work featured here. 

Sadly, Macke died at the front during WWI—an artist lost far too soon.