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Modernisms 1900-1980
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 2
Lesson 2: Expressionism- Expressionism, an introduction
- Expressionism as Nordic?
- Der Blaue Reiter
- Kirchner, Street, Dresden
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Street, Berlin"
- Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait Nude with Amber Necklace, Half-Length I
- Emil Nolde, "Young Couple," 1913
- Jawlensky, Young Girl in a Flowered Hat
- Schiele, Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait)
- Nazi looting: Egon Schiele's Portrait of Wally
- Schiele, Hermits
- Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Vasily Kandinsky, "Klänge (Sounds)"
- Franz Marc and the animalization of art
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Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912, oil on canvas, 111.4 x 162.1 cm (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Linking music and this piece, someone was practicing cello behind me as I looked at this and I couldn't help but see the lines as stroke of the bow, even though the pictures of shown of war with the guns and fence pieces did have similarities to these lines. Hunting around, it seems Kandinsky did actually play the cello. Does anyone else interpret these brush strokes in this way?(9 votes)
- In anyones opinoin, this piece is interperated in many ways. It could be just about war, or a religious story (bible stories), or you could be correct hat this might just be cello markings. But he was a instructor of a band, so he had to learn all the instruments.(3 votes)
- In which city did Vasily Kandinsky actually work as an artist?(6 votes)
- Kandinsky worked in many cities. If memory serves he worked in Moscow, Munich, Dessau, etc.(4 votes)
- It was mentioned that this painting is an abstracted painting not an abstract painting because we are able to recognize some elements of the natural world in it. But then, why are works like Guernica by Picasso considered abstract? Since we can recognize people, horses, and other figures there, shouldn't they be considered as abstracted paintings?(3 votes)
- From the author:Correct. Picasso abstracts from nature. His art is not purely abstract. Of course this is a strict definition, people will commonly use abstract and abstracted interchangeably.(3 votes)
- Did Kandinsky write about these specific elements on his paintings somewhere?(3 votes)
- Yes! You can find some excerpts on the following page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky#Theoretical_writings_on_art
Here's a list with all the books written by him:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/155176.Wassily_Kandinsky
His most popular one (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) explains his philosophy of paining.(1 vote)
- This is action art right? and if so, do you think that listening to different kinds of music would change the outcome of the painting?(1 vote)
- The style is often referred to as Expressionism (not action art).(1 vote)
- I don’t get it. Is this painting expressionist ? I’d say it belongs more to abstract art If I had to label it.(1 vote)
- did anyone else interpret faces?(1 vote)
- there is no music/sound might want to fix that(0 votes)
Video transcript
(gentle piano music) - [Steven] We're at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, we're
looking at a painting by Vasily Kandinsky. This is Improvisation
number 28 second version. It's interesting to start
off by thinking about the title because it's
not the title of something that's being represented, it's the kind of notation
that a composer uses. - [Beth] Right normally in art history, we have paintings with titles of stories from the bible or from
history or from mythology or landscapes that have
the name of a place, but here we have Improvisation
which is the name of a kind of musical composition. So the immediate question is
why is Kandinsky doing that? - [Steven] Well because
he's composing here. He's composing with form
but this is still rooted in stories of the bible and of his particular historical moment. - [Beth] But he's clearly trying to associate painting with music, to suggest that like music,
painting can signify, it can mean things it can take us places, without representing anything concrete. - [Steven] Actually he would
go further than that and say that you could hear color,
that you could see music, this idea which is called
Synesthesia is something that Kandinsky was very interested in. The idea that there could
be a kind of crossing of the senses. - [Beth] So looking at
this he may have wanted us to actually hear something. And in fact we know that
Kandinsky was very influenced by Arnold Schonberg, a turn
of the century composer, who was jettisoning the
familiar Western harmonies, to create a new kind of
difficult atonal music for the beginning of
the twentieth century. And I see something atonal, I see something difficult here. - [Steven] What would
this painting sound like, for me it would sound like a cacophony, it would sound like chaos, it would sound like a
very dangerous but also brilliant moment. - [Beth] We have brilliant
color, a kind of hazy atmosphere through which that color pops. We have these black diagonal
lines that criss-cross with each other, that
almost feel like weapons moving through space. - [Steven] And it's
appropriate that the analogy that you're drawing is one of war. This is 1912 it's just two
years before the first world war begins and early twentieth
century Russian history is filled with political chaos. - [Beth] We're clearly on
the verge of abstraction and in fact when we first
look at this painting it looks entirely abstract. That is, we don't immediately recognize, the things of the world. But this isn't what we
would call a completely abstract painting. - [Steven] Right so one
might not call this painting an abstract painting, but call it an abstracted painting. - [Beth] So therefore we should
still be able to recognize some elements of the natural world. - [Steven] Kandinsky was concerned that if we could recognize things too clearly that
our conscious minds would take over the interpretation and we would close off
our emotional ability to respond to the pure color and form. - [Beth] In the upper right
I seem to see a mountain with some buildings on it,
maybe with chimneys sacks, or perhaps a church on a hill, an ideal city, a kind
of heavenly Jerusalem. - [Steven] Kandinsky was deeply influenced by biblical imagery, and so even though this is a
tremendously modern painting, it is still rooted in
this ancient tradition of representing Christian stories. - [Beth] So it makes sense
that we have a battle field, forces at war. - [Steven] In fact art historians have looked at these paintings as a kind of representation
of an apocalypse, of a moment when the sins
of the world are gonna be washed away. In the lower left, you have a great flood, you have a wave this
idea of the way in which God in the old testament
had wiped man from the earth except for Noah and his family. - [Beth] Just above that
wave canons are being fired. The atmospheric effect
almost reads like the, the smoke on a battle field. - [Steven] Down at the bottom art historians sometimes recognize the manes and the arcs
of the necks of horses and we know that Kandinsky
was really interested throughout his career in the idea of the horse and rider. Symbolizing a number of different things, having the overlapping meanings, referencing the four
horsemen of the apocalypse, but also the idea of redemption. This was also a utopia. The idea that we could
wash away the old world, a world that was about to be destroyed not only by the Russian revolution, but also by The First World War. Kandinsky at this moment was convinced that he could help lead that, at least in the visual realm. - [Beth] Many artists at this time, the early twentieth century, had a sense that the artist could play an important role in the new civilization that was going to emerge
in the twentieth century. - [Steven] Here we have a painting that is using color in a radically new way. This is color for it's own sake, not to mimic, not to describe, we have a line that is
being used for its own sake, lines that is abstractly
moving across the surface to create a sense of rhythm,
to create a sense of staccato. Musicality in this painting
was absolutely new. (gentle piano music)