Description
Kandinsky – Catalogue Raisonne Of The Oil Paintings 1900-1944. – 2 Vol. Set Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born painter who took to painting quite late in life, after a career as a lawyer and an economist. It is said that Kandinsky was offered a promising chair as a Professor in Roman Law at the University of Dorpat, but, turned it down in favor of pursuing a self-taught art career. His sudden spiritual metamorphosis he attributed to seeing a gallery exhibition of Claude Monet’s work, and particularly his painting Haystacks, which ‘awakened him to color’.Wassily Kandinsky eventually studied at art school and started developing his own surreal, impressionistic style soon. Over a ten year period he transformed from an impressionistic painter (see his piece, The Port of Odessa) to what is now regarded as the first Abstract artist. Throughout his life, Kandinsky’s unique style of painting lent itself to reproduction – and so it has now become relatively easy for a collector to engage with the abstract painter’s work. This is due to his practice of treating painting in terms of musical compositions – they were no longer formal ‘sessions’ wherein an end result was desired (as with portrait or landscape paintings) but instead explorations of themes, emotions, and above all experience.
