Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Eight: An Inspiring Artist.

   An Inspiring Artist by Dave Jaffe. Part One.




    Do you like abstract art? Many people don't and some people say when confronted with this type of painting , "Why my five year old son or daughter could do this sort of thing."  Yet the life of one of the world's first modern abstract painters, Vassily Kandinsky, can teach us lessons about how to survive and create beautiful things in really tough times. Kandinsky's art by the way,could never have been painted by any five year old or most human beings for that matter.
    On one afternoon in Germany in 1911, a tall 45 year-old Russian man came back to his artists's studio. A painting of his leaned against a wall. This painting seemed to Vassily Kandinsky to be the most beautiful painting he'd ever seen. He saw no objects in it. It was totally abstract.
    Then suddenly he realized that it was his painting that he was looking at. He'd painted a picture of some objects. Yet the painting was tilted on its  side and so looked like an abstract painting. Amazed by this experience, Kandinsky became one of the first modern abstract artists. He stopped painting landscapes and other subjects. From then on, he painted nothing but abstract art.
     At this date of 1911, the world was changing more than it ever had before. "All is possible," wrote the French poet Andre Salmon. "Everything is realizable, everywhere and with everything." Pablo Picasso and George Braque were painting cubist pictures, James Joyce was writing his path breaking novel called 'Ulysses' and  musical composers were inventing atonal music. Yet it was technology that was re-arranging the world. The car, the phonograph, film, the radio and the airplane had been invented around 1900 or a little later. Human beings now lived in a technological world.
    Vassily Kandinsky's life was to be chockfull of upheavals due to technology and politics. Yet he survived these shocks and created beautiful art. Kandinsky was born in Russia in 1866. His family belonged to the richest 1 per cent of the population. By the age of 27 he was a professor of law. Then he saw a painting of a haystack by the great French impressionist artist Claude Monet. It was indeed called 'Haystacks' though Kandinsky had never seen a painting of haystacks like this. Suddenly Kandinsky stopped teaching law and became a painter.
    After a few years he moved to Munich in southern Germany. Here he painted, wrote books and left his first wife. He became lovers with the painter, weaver and tapestry maker Gabrielle Munter. "If we were to begin to destroy completely the bonds that ties to nature," Kandinsky said in 1896, "we would create works that would look like a geometric ornament." In the end that's what nearly happened to Kandinsky and his painting. Yet in 1914, world politics erupted into his life. The First World War started. Germany, the Turkish Empire and the empire of Austria Hungary squared off against Britain, France, Russia and their allies. Three years later the United States joined the war on Britain's side. Kandinsky fled Germany which was now an enemy of Russia and moved back to his homeland.