by Wassily Kandinsky (1940; oil and enamel on canvas. 96.8 x 146 cm Guggenheim, New York)
Archive for Wassily Kandinsky
Around the Circle – Wassily Kandinsky
Posted in Art with tags Around the Circle, Art, Wassily Kandinsky on December 10, 2025 by telescoperRed Wall Destiny – Wassily Kandinsky
Posted in Art with tags Red Wall Destiny, Wassily Kandinsky on May 7, 2024 by telescoper
by Wassily Kandinsky (1909; oil on canvas, 83 x 116 cm; Astrakhan, Dogadin State Art Gallery)
Kandinsky at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Posted in Art with tags A Summer Morning, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bauhaus, Rupert Bunny, Wassily Kandinsky on February 28, 2024 by telescoperSince my time in Sydney is rapidly running out, this afternoon I paid a visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The main objective of this was to see the Kandinsky Exhibition I blogged about here, but there are many other fine things to see in the permanent so I went round that too.
First here are some works by Wassily Kandinsky. You can see the evolution of his art from the expressionist landscapes of the early 20th Century to the highly influential abstracts from the Bauhaus period. I particularly love these compositions of simple geometric shapes – lines, circles, squares and arcs – with bold colours. They are fully abstract but also manage to suggest form and perspective and even movement in a way that fascinates me. After the Bauhaus period, Kandinsky seems to have used more organic shapes and softened the colour palette in a way that suggests a partial return to his artistic origins.
Anyway, as you can see from the last picture in the gallery, I liked the exhibition so much I bought the book!
The permanent collection is also very fine, with European art from many different periods (early Renaissance to Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist and beyond). There are also many works by Australian artists, some of whom painted landscapes in a very conventional style reminiscent of the Royal Academy, as if they had stepped out of Burlington House into the full glare of the Australian Sun and struggled to cope with the light.
One painting that struck me is this lovely composition by a painter called Rupert Bunny:
It doesn’t really show up well in the quick snap I took but I think the depiction of light and shade in this picture – called A Summer Morning and painted in 1908, around the same time as Kandinsky’s early painting above – is very striking. Bunny was born in Melbourne but moved to Paris in the 1880s and was much celebrated there as a salon painter. Although the style of this composition is rather conservative, he seems to have been a very versatile artist.
The permanent collection is free to visit and is well worth a visit or several. In fact, I might go back once more before I leave…
Kandinsky: an introduction
Posted in Art with tags Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Wassily Kandinsky on February 15, 2024 by telescoperI mentioned in my last post that I plan to visit the ongoing Kandinsky Exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales so I thought I’d share this little video introducing the artist and the exhibition:
Delicate Tension – Wassily Kandinsky
Posted in Art with tags Delicate Tension No. 85, Wassily Kandinsky, Zarte Spannung on December 26, 2023 by telescoper
by Wassily Kandinsky (1923, watercolor and ink on paper, 35.5 x 25.2 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
Breaking Free
Posted in Art, Music with tags 2nd Viennese School, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, BBC Radio 3, Breaking Free, Wassily Kandinsky on January 6, 2017 by telescoperI’ve been enjoy a series of fascinating programmes about music from the Second Viennese School (chiefly Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern) on BBC Radio 3 this week gathered under the umbrella title of Breaking Free. In the period from roughly 1903 to 1925 these composers finally abandoned the traditional forms of tonality that late Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler had struggled with in their later work. Aside from its obvious emotional intensity, one of the reasons I find music from this period absolutely absorbing because it was written in a period of highly turbulent transition; you get such a strong sense of new possibilities being opened up when you listen to some of the pioneering works. Some of them are also extremely beautiful. I often hear people say that they they think atonal music sounds ugly, but I disagree. The same people would probably agree that birdsong is beautiful, and most of that is entirely atonal..
The only problem is that I’ve now got a very long list of recordings to buy, as I don’t have any CDs or downloads of some very important pieces. I’m going to be a but poorer financially as a consequence of this educational experience, but hopefully enriched in a cultural sense.
The “breaking free” in this period wasn’t confined to music – revolutionary change was underway in other artistic fields, including painting. Last night I was listening to one of the programmes in the Breaking Free series and it inspired me to have a look in some of my art books for something appropriate to post from the time (if not the location) of the 2nd Viennese School. I decided on this, wan abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky called Composition VII which was painted in 1913.
Comets, by Kandinsky
Posted in Art with tags Comets, Wassily Kandinsky on January 29, 2016 by telescoper
The last time I posted a work of astronomically-themed art by Wassily Kandinsky it proved unexpectedly popular so here’s another one, called Comets. This is also a lithograph and also dates from around 1938.
“Stars” by Kandinsky
Posted in Art with tags stars, Wassily Kandinsky on January 17, 2016 by telescoperNo time for a proper post so I thought I’d fill a bit of space with Stars, or at least with a picture of the lithograph of that title by Wassily Kandinsky made, I think, in 1938. It is certainly a different kind of image from that produced by astronomers, but it does put me in mind of star-forming regions such as the Orion Nebula..
In the Dark 