Art in Revolution 3 - newleafdesign.me.uk

Inkhuk programme back in Russia. He subsequently incorporated parts of thisinto the Bauhaus teaching programme including his analytic studies of formand colour.He linked up with his old colleague Klee and together they successfullytempered the influence of Itten. Kandinsky’s paintings had gone through atransformation in the last few years. He no longer wavered between realityand abstraction, moving closer to the pure abstraction of Suprematism andRussian Constructivism while with his aura of mysticism still remainingideologically separated from them. His post-war work shows a hard-edgedabstract style made from a multitude of coloured geometric shapes, often inthe same work, somewhat reminiscent of the diassembled parts of a colourfulSwiss watch. During the Bauhaus period he steadily reduced the number ofthe elements and simplified the compositions. Perfect circles became adominant motif in his work and these are presented in a variety of ways,shaded like a three-dimensional representation of the moon or surrounded bya series of haloe-like forms made from compass-drawn circles.Compared with Klee the students found him dogmatic and slightly aloof.Nevertheless his reputation meant that he was a star appointment althoughlittle could be made of this for fear of upsetting the authorities who would besuspicious of any Russian influence. Ironically he would have agreed with theirattitude as he remained vehemently apolitical feeling that a mix of politics andart ‘was one of the greatest enemies of art’. His assigned craft was the muralworkshop, where he translated his abstract paintings to large-scale murals; hisvisual style would affect the appearance of Bauhaus design for the next fewyears. Independent of the Bauhaus, Kandinsky joined forces with Klee,Feininger and Alexei von Jawlensky to form Blaue Vier (the Blue Four) topromote their work collectively abroad and especially in the US where theyhad their first exhibition in March 1925.A DESIGN FOR A BETTER WORLD 189