Elements and Principles at Play Wassily Kandinsky Russian

Elements and Principles at Play!

Wassily Kandinsky • Russian Expressionist • Deeply felt music connected to painting • Had synaesthesia - the capacity to see sound and hear colour – translated this into painting • Credited with creating the first purely abstract painting • Taught at the Bauhaus school of art • Three of his great paintings were seized and destroyed by the Nazis “Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. "

• -Dutch painter • part of De Stijl movement • advocated pure abstraction and a pared down palette in order to express a utopian ideal of universal harmony in all of the arts. • Called his style of are ‘neoplasticism’ • white background, painted with a grid of black lines and filled with the primary colors. Piet Mondrian “…I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation … of things…” I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty … can become a work of art, as strong as it is true