Abstraction

Term 1 Art Assignment - Abstraction.

The artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian are both abstract artists. They painted around the same time but were in different art movements because they had different ideas about their work. There is a lot of differences in their artworks there are some similarities too, especially as they were both not realistic artists but abstract artists, meaning their work either had nothing realistic in it or their work only had a reference to something real but wasn't being presented as real and both artists liked to use straight lines to help make their work more abstract.

Wassily Kandinsky painted one of the first abstract paintings about 1911. He was a Russian artist but painted with the Blue Rider group of the German Expressionists, a small group of artists who were influenced by the Expressionists. The Expressionists wanted to express feelings in their work and did this through their art work and it's subject. The Blue Riders wanted to express feelings too but they didn't want to do it through the art work of distorted or depressed people like the Expressionists did for example Ð''The Scream', but they wanted to do it through colour. They used colour, shapes and lines to create feelings. In Kandinsky's painting "Murnau with Church II" painted in 1910, Kandinsky shows great emotion without using the subject matter as it doesn't seem to be important like the colours and the lines and the brushwork are in his work.

Murnau with Church II

The painting is very colourful with lots of buildings set amongst the hills in a huge landscape setting with trees at the front. It is not realistic although real subjects are in the work and colours are brightly mixed up and not realistic either. The brushwork is thick and looks like it was quickly done giving it a flowing feeling of liveliness and lightness. Kandinsky wanted his audience to look at more than the picture to get a feeling about his work. Rather than just a realistic picture that copied a scene he wanted to show emotion through the colours. Kandinsky said Ð''what the spectator lives or feels while under the effect of the form and colour combinations of the picture,' was what the painting was all about, not the subject matter. Kandinsky inspired other artists to do the same by moving from just images to using colour and brushstrokes to