Google Doodle Honors Kandinsky
Mountain View, California -- Google today pays homage to Wassily Kandinsky with a new Doodle, celebrating his 148th birthday.
Kandinsky 1866-1944 was a Russian-born painter, wood-engraver, lithographer.
Art collectors of Art Kabinett social media network appreciate this important honor bestowed upon one of the world's greatest artists.
Kandinsky was a leading teacher and theorist; pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, he studied law and economics at Moscow University. He declined in 1896 the offer of a chair at the University of Dorpat, and moved to Munich to study painting.
The artist spent two years at the Azbé School, afterwards attending the Academy under Stuck. He enjoyed a close friendship with Gabriele Münter 1902-14. His travels included visiting Russia, Italy, Holland, Tunisia, Switzerland and spent a year 1906-7 near Paris.
Kandinsky first created paintings and woodcuts inspired by Russian folk art and fairy tales, and also landscape studies painted directly from nature. He returned to Munich 1908.
He developed rich, Fauve-like contrasts of color, then began to eliminate the representational element from his paintings and compose with abstract colors and shapes.
He wrote 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' in 1910, and founded the Blue Rider group with Franz Marc 1911.
Kandinsky's paintings from this period are large, expressively colored masses evaluated independently from forms and lines, which 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."
His First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Hans Goltz, Neue Kunst in Munich 1912. Spent 1914-21 in Russia, where he held various important cultural appointments, then returned in 1921 to Berlin. He was appointed professor at the Bauhaus, Weimar, in 1922, moving with the Bauhaus to Dessau 1925.
He began to work with precise, geometrical forms and published in 1926 Point and Line to Plane. After the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, he spent his last years from 1933 until 1944 in Paris.
Today's homepage Featured Art Video offers great insight into this amazing Google Doodle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_UX_wgx5e0&sns=em