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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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Vasily Kandinsky, "Klänge (Sounds)"
To learn about other great moments in modern art, take our online course, Modern Art, 1880-1945 or Pigment to Pixel: Color in Modern and Contemporary Art.. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.
Want to join the conversation?
- Was Kandinsky's goal a Gesamtkunstwerk-type piece, a la Wagner?(8 votes)
- Great question. Near the end of the video (about1:45onwards) the woman begins to discuss Kandinsky's aesthetics of simplifying the woodcuts and abstracting them as he progresses in his work. This is a clue that serves to steer us away from considering Wagner (and other composers such as R. Strauss and Mahler, who were all concerned with the gigantic and programmatic), and instead faces us towards the likes of Berg, Schoenberg, and especially Webern, who all embraced a pared-down style of composing, and very abstract, brilliant sound qualities. Bartok, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky could also be added into the aesthetic conglomeration that includes Kandinsky and the afor-mentioned composers.(6 votes)
- Did Kandinsky's synesthesia condition play a role in creation of the work (--i.e. did he hear the paintings) and does the work serve as resource for helping interpret his later paintings (i.e. do later paintings have pictorial elements from this book that tie with sounds/poems to help interpret later paintings)?(5 votes)
- What language did he write in?(3 votes)
- German. Although Kandinsky was Russian by birth, by this point in his career he was living in Germany.(5 votes)
- how old was he when he created that and why are some pictures only in some museums(2 votes)
- He created the woodcuts between 1907 and 1912, when he was approximately age 41-46. Some pictures are in museums so that they remain in good condition, but also so that the public may come and see famous works of art.(3 votes)
- I wonder why he wasn't as popular as some other artists. He has the same gifts and style as may other famous artists(2 votes)
- Some people are just in the right place at the right time(3 votes)
- What are Vasily Kandinsky's other famous works of art aside from "Klänge (Sounds)"?(2 votes)
- Here is a video of what is probably Kandinsky's best-known work, and what he personally considered to be his most complicated: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/art-history-1907-1960-age-of-global-conflict/expressionism/v/wassily-kandinsky--composition-vii--1913(3 votes)
- She says at1:12that Kandinsky designed the typeface used in the book — is that true? To me the typeface looks like an early version of Akzidenz Grotesk or Schelter Grotesk, and I didn't realize that Kandinsky had designed any typefaces, especially one this refined. Does anyone know what typeface this is and if Kandinsky actually designed it?(3 votes)
- i thought that Kandinsky was Russian. Why did he make a german book?(1 vote)
- He started out in law and economics as a career, and was very successful, earning a professorship. However, color had always been important to him, so he seems to have started painting when he was around 30 years old. He moved to Germany, then, to try to get into Munich Academy, where he studied art. About 20 years later, just after publishing this book, he returned to Russia, but basically did not like the communist views on art and art theories, so after about 7 years, he returned to Germany to teach art and architecture. So, he lived many, many years in Germany and must have valued the German-speaking audience for his creations above the Russian communist culture that he had rejected. After the Nazis took over Germany and closed his school, he moved to France and became a French citizen.(2 votes)
- how did he get so famous ?(1 vote)
- I loved hiw the wood art kind if helped him with his abstract paintings.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(tranquil music) - This beautiful book is
titled "Klänge," or "Sounds." It's by Vasily Kandinsky, who
was a very important painter. He also made a number of illustrated books in the early 1910s. It was published in 1913,
but he actually created the 56 woodcuts that illustrate the book between 1907 and 1912. Some are black and white, some are in beautiful jewel-like color. Some of the images are representational. They seem to illustrate a scene. The motif of the rider on
horseback runs through this book. Here we have a much more
abstract image of three riders. Kandinsky wrote the poems for this book, and they have a very musical, sonorous, onomatopoetic quality. The title is "Warum." The text is in German, it means "Why." "Warum? "Keiner ist da herausgekommen. "Keiner? "Keiner. "Einer? "Nein." Kandinsky also designed the book, the type face, the page
size, and the binding. So for him it was really
a total work of art. It was a very influential book. It became a touchstone
for a whole generation. There were artists who were
part of the Dada movement in Switzerland, and artists who were part of the Russian avant-garde in Russia who would actually recite his
poems at their gatherings. Kandinsky is best known as a painter, but during these early years of his career he was very involved with
the woodcut technique. He talked about how
important it was for him in simplifying his art, his style, because woodcut is a very flat technique and it has broad areas of form. In that process, his imagery
got increasingly abstract. So it was the woodcut
technique that actually helped him develop as an abstract artist. (tranquil music)