Kandinskys What If

Metropolis
By Mailin Berg

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky
Kandinsky (1866, Moscow - 1944, Paris) was a pioneer of the abstract. He used mainly oil on canvas, paint on glass, watercolours
and woodcuts to express his art. Even though he was born in Russia he spend most of his life in Germany, but also lived in Russia
and France.

His auntie made him take music and art lessons from a young age and he studied Law and Economy at university and later
painting. His artistic beginnings were mainly landscapes where he looked closely at nature and Germanic- Slavic folk art and
fairy tales which inspired him to his woodcuts. Being born in Moscow, many elements of his inspiration still stem from Russia and
are carried into his works.
His road down to the abstract is a slow and consistent one as Kandinsky starts with studies of how nature looks like but he never
seems to want to actually replicate it, he takes the shapes and colours and forms them into a painting which resembles nature in
some ways, but doesnt look like it. Over the run of the years his paintings move further away from the original scenes and he
takes the shapes but puts them together in a completely different order, adds colour a bit more sparingly and lets the
background colour of the canvas shine through a lot.
When he joins the Bauhaus, which mainly concentrates on architecture and objects that have multiple uses or at least have their
usefulness maximised, he pushes his style further towards rigid forms with colours assigned to forms, and they hardly ever mix or
go over the lines.
A theme that is presented throughout his life is his desire to draw music, which he achieves by using wavy and smooth lines for
calm music and rigid straight lines with pointy corners for blasty, loud and sudden parts of a piece.

In 1911 he founds a group called Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc and he is the first artist to have a one man exhibition which
takes place in Munich. He is a professor at the Bauhaus (the higher school of construction and art designing) in Berlin and later
Dessau after it has to move because of the Nazi movement.

Wassily Kandinsky
Being a theorist as well as professor and artist he writes the pieces Concerning the Spiritual in Art (ber das Geistige in der
Kunst, 1910) and Point and Lane to Plane (Punkt und Linie zu Flaeche, 1926), both originals are written in German.

His late works mostly consist of precise, geometrical forms inspired by Bauhaus and in 1933 he moves to Paris, where he lives until
his death in 1944.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/wassily-kandinsky-1382 (3/11/2014)
http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/ (3/11/2014)

Travelogue for the City of Kandinsky

After walking east through the hills for two days you come upon the city of Kandinsky whose big gates bid you a warm welcome.
The first thing you notice are the bright colours that are ever so present in every direction and can hardly be contained by the
shapes. You notice all the citizens wearing lush and expensive garments with none like the other and feel invisible in your grey
traveling clothes, even though everyone is staring at you. Right at you, the stranger, who doesnt even have the funds for lavish,
individual gowns.
Ignoring the crowd, you walk forward unsteadily, feeling a bit more suffocated with every step you take, with all the colour
pressing into your head, but slowly you start to notice the buildings around you. The houses all have round and wonky shapes that
are askew into all possible directions with some just looking like big rocks with doors for mouths and windows for eyes. Everything
you see has soft and round edges, even the street lights dont seem to have a real outline they just kind of exist with no one caring
enough to define their shape, as long as they spend light in the dark hours.
You keep walking over the colourful cobble stones, not two of the same shape, and keep turning around yourself slowly to make
sure you didnt miss anything that might yet again astound you and after a long walk you realise that the buildings become more
pointy and defined and lose their almost cute roundness to make place for harder forms. It seems to be a marketplace or
something similar and is buzzing with people shouting out over the latest, juiciest fruits and the most beautiful garments and buyers
haggling over kitchen appliances while demonstrating their own clothing combinations to whoever is watching.

Everyone seems to keep a certain distance to you so you quickly hurry along into a street that promises to be quieter and for a
while you just keep on walking, enjoying the silence and absorbing the colours and shapes that open up before you. You are a bit
unsettled as you are looking desperately for a place to stay over for the night, but nothing seems to advertise beds of any sort, so
you keep walking until the houses become taller with stranger structures, some of them have the top leaning over while others are
stretched across over the street in an arc, which leaves space to walk underneath. Some of the buildings had three or more stories
with the first or second floor sticking out to the side, allowing more space on the inside while others seemed to give in at the side to
leave space for what seems to be balconies.
Some of the houses have signs now, you see Odessas Fancy Womens Tailor and Vologdas Groceries, Kochels Bank and
finally, Rapallos Public House & Inn! A bell tinkles as you walk through the door and the main room becomes quiet as you step
in, but you are too focused on taking in the foreign looking furniture: benches that give the impression that they are straight but
are actually not and the cushions are arranged to give the impression that the benches have faces; the lampshades are like
mushrooms growing upside down, emitting the light through triangular slits which give the whole room a soft atmosphere.
Can I help you? Startled you turn towards the speaker, from her stance you can tell that she has authority here and must be the
innkeeper. You try not to look too obviously awed by her silky clothes that swirl in all colours you could think of and are tucked into
a belt but you have a faint feeling that she just asked if you wanted a room for the night. Slowly, you nod and she bids you to
follow her and vanishes behind a curtain in the wall that you had assumed solid. After climbing swirly stairs she opens a door to her
left and lets you walk into a perfectly round room. The first thing you see is the bed shaped like a monkey nut, but in a soft, good
way, not hard unforgiving at all. Slowly you walk into the room, trying to soak everything in. There are paintings on the walls which
hardly distinguish from the walls themselves and you keep finding circular shapes and wondering if they have a deeper meaning

You walk over to the window, which is round as well and gasp as you can see more of the city then you could before, you see the
harmony in the colours and how the shapes of the houses go from round and soft to crisp and spiky and back to a different shape,
that you cant quite see in the distance but you make a note in your head that you should study them tomorrow. Behind you, you
hear a soft clicking of the door and as you whirl around you can see the most colourful meal you ever had laid out on a tray, with a
jug and an empty glass right beside it. Looking around the room, you see half a sphere on the floor with cushions placed around it,
inviting you for you longed for dinner. Without hesitation, and pour the liquid into the glass. It seems to be more misty than
drinkable, with reds and purples swirling into each other but never leaving the glass once entered. And the smell, oh, the smell!
Absolutely delighted you take a gulp and start eating.
Come the next morning, you explore the inside of the house a little as you find it very hard to find the right door (or any door, for
that matter) and as you leave Rapallos Inn, you set off to go and see the rest of the city. After a few miles you come upon houses
that are completely on stilts with most of them having half a sphere shape as the habitable part, with some of the triangular or
rectangular, one very bizarre building even has a rectangular and a sphere shape slotted together with triangular windows and
one big pillar reaching down to the ground with the door at the bottom indicating that there has to be a spiral staircase going up.
Walking along, you notice that the stilts become shorter and instead of staircases, you can see rope or wooden ladders leaning or
hanging from the doors, and eventually the houses touch the ground again and have assumed the very circular shapes that you
have already noticed in your room in the Inn. As you step into the biggest sphere around you, you notice a kind of comforting aura
inside and a person whose clothes are puffed up in an attempt to create a spherical look comes towards you. He takes you by the
arm and starts explaining the meaning of the circles to you: At the beginning, there was this perfectly round rock and the first
citizens of Kandinsky carved a living space out of it, but the more people moved in the clearer it became that they needed more
than one building so over the run of many generations the city was built with the old ones always insisting on keeping the rock
shape present but the youngsters trying to find different ways to express themselves, which leads to all those spiky and rectangular
houses. But the circle was and always will be the centre of all the citizens, it keeps them together in tough times and reminds them
of their origin.

Happy to have learnt something about the origins you leave the centre and walk outwards, until you come before a strong river,
which splits the city so you keep on walking along the side until the next bridge. On your way, you see lots of stalls advertising their
ware and as you have mostly experienced kindness in this city, you step forward to have a chat with a cloth seller, but in front of
the mirror you freeze and cant take your eyes off the person you know must be you. All the clothes that were still grey this morning
when you put them on were shining in deep, beautiful colours, your hair was in wild locks of a violet shade no, was it purple? Or
maybe even pink? You could not decide and instead marvelled at your rosy cheeks and fluffy clothes that seemed to have changed
form and material without you noticing. Half shocked, your turn around to the vendor who just grins in a knowing way and you
stay forever.

Wordcount: 1442 words.

The City of Kandinsky: Influence Map

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