Abstract Art Mirrors a Frightened World

I accepted the "art challenge" from Margherta Lahrman to help fill Facebook pages with art instead of fractured facts and ugly politics. My post included a photo of one of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings.

“I applied streaks and blobs of color onto the canvas with a palette knife and I made them sing with all the intensity I could...”
--Wassily Kandinsky
My favorite classes in college were art history classes. No surprise, since I hoped to major in art and design. Art history classes back then involved projecting loads of slides on a screen for the students to ponder while being enlightened by the professor expounding on the artists, the themes of the paintings, the techniques, and the conceptual meaning below the surface.

When it came time to write my final paper, I chose Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian artist from the early half of the 20th century. In particular, I focused my thesis on one of the paintings in the Composition series, which he painted over between 1910 and 1934. I’ve forgotten exactly which one, so I’ve selected VI for my example of his work. He had no formal objects; he led the thinking for abstract art of his day; he used color and line and space in ways that made most people say, “What is THAT?”

And I loved it all. Still do.

I have no idea how I figured out what to write in the paper. It was the first paper I had written outside of an English composition class. This paper involved hours of research. My small condo, shared with three other women, filled up with art books. I fell in love with writing about art, I relished every minute studying the artist, and realized I had more of a knack for writing about art than expressing myself on the canvas.

Kandinsky challenged me to explore and discover the meaning in abstract images. I was led, of course, by the hundreds of art critiques and historians who followed his lead in interpreting the meaning based on the emotions arising from the dramatic color and strong lines.

He remains today my favorite artist. I have met his paintings face to face in museums wherever I have traveled. I spent a week in Moscow walking the city from museum to museum determined to see them all. His Winter Landscape can be viewed at the St. Louis Art Museum, and I visit frequently.
“The more frightening the world becomes ... the more art becomes abstract. ”
- -Wassily Kandinsky

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